“Yes indeed, I was playing peacock and I let you take me by surprise.”
She laughed and said, by way of explanation, “Your concierge didn’t seem to be there, and since I know you’re always alone at this time of day, I walked in without being announced.”
He was staring at her. “God, how lovely you are. What chic!”
“Well, it’s a new dress. Did I make a good choice?”
“Charming, very harmonious in fact. We live in an artful age.” He walked around her, stroking the gown’s material, his fingertips rearranging certain pleats like an unerring couturier, employing his artist’s tastes and his athlete’s muscles so that an eventual handful of slender brushes could reveal the changing styles of feminine grace within an armor of velvet or a snowy flurry of lace. A moment later he declared, “Really, my dear, it’s a great success. It suits you perfectly.”
She let him admire her, pleased that she was stylish and that her style pleased him. No longer young but still lovely, a trifle heavy for her height, yet fresh with the vividness that gives forty-year-old flesh the savor of ripeness, like one of those rosebushes that keep blooming all season until, in an hour, they fall to pieces.
Under her careful blond curls she sustained the alert grace of certain ageless Parisiennes who bear within their bodies a surprising life force, an inexhaustible resistance, remaining the same for twenty years, indestructible and triumphant, ever solicitous of their bodies and heedful of their health.
She raised her veil, murmuring, “And you don’t even kiss me!”
“I’ve been smoking.”
“Disgusting!” she grumbled and pursed her lips. “Even so. . . .”
And their mouths met. Then he took her umbrella and helped her out of her new spring jacket, his movements prompt and certain, accustomed to these familiar gestures. As she sat down on the couch, he asked with some interest, “Is your husband well?”
“Fine, fine. He’s probably addressing the chamber at this very moment.”
“And the subject of his address?”
“Sugar beets, or perhaps rapeseed oil. Surely one or the other.” Her husband, Count de Guilleroy, the deputy for the department of Eure, had made a specialty of agricultural questions (and answers) throughout his successful parliamentary career.
But having noticed an unfamiliar sketch as she crossed the studio, she asked, “What’s all that?”
“All that? All that’s a pastel I’ve just begun—a portrait of Princess de Pontève.”
“You know,” she said seriously, “if you go back to doing women’s portraits, I’ll close your studio. We both know all too well where that kind of work takes us.”
“Oh,” he said, “no one does a portrait of our Any twice.”
“I should hope not.” She studied the unfinished pastel like a woman who knows all the answers to a work of art, or at least all the questions, first stepping back, then coming even closer, covering her left eye with one hand, then glancing around the studio to find the best light for examining the sketch, and finally declaring herself satisfied. “It’s lovely—you handle pastel so nicely.”
“You really think so?” he murmured, evidently flattered.
“Of course I do. It’s a delicate art that requires a lot of skill. Not meant for amateurs.”
For twelve years she had promoted his interest in this delicate art, opposing his backslides to a simpler reality and by considerations of fashionable elegance tenderly inclining him toward a more mannered, somewhat factitious ideal of grace.
Suddenly she asked, “What does the princess look like?”
He was obliged to offer her exact details, the minute particulars that reward a woman’s jealous curiosity, ranging from cosmetic disparagements to incredulous speculations as to intellectual achievement.
And again, suddenly: “Does she flirt with you?”
He laughed and swore no such thing had ever occurred.
Then, resting her hands on the painter’s shoulders, she fixed her eyes on his. The intensity of her questions had stippled the pupils at the center of each blue iris with tiny black specks. Again she murmured, “Tell me the truth—she does flirt with you, doesn’t she?”
“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—no!”
With both hands she seized the tips of his mustache, adding, “Oh, I’m not worried about all that. From now on you’ll love no one but me. It’s over and done with for all the rest of them. Too late, my poor darling, too late.”
He was conscious of the painful spasm that affects a middle-aged man’s heart when his age is being discussed, and he murmured, “Today, tomorrow, the same as yesterday—there’ll be no one in my life but you, my dear.”
She took his arm then, and returning together to the couch, she made him sit close beside her. “What’s been on your mind, my darling?”
“I’m looking for a picture—a subject for a picture.”
“What’s it to be?”
“I don’t know, that’s why I’m looking.”
“What do you do with yourself these days?” And she made him tell her about his visitors, about the dinners he’d been invited to, the parties, the conversations, the gossip. These were easy subjects for both of them, absorbed as they were in the futile and familiar events of mundane existence. The petty rivalries, the latest or at least the suspected affairs, the stale ones discussed and repeated a thousand times: the same events and the same opinions seized and engulfed their attentions in that turbid and restless undertow known as la vie parisienne. Both of them knowing everyone in every circle—he the artist for whom all doors were open, she the elegant wife of a conservative politician—both well exercised in that favorite French sport of conversation: sharp yet timeworn, amiably malevolent, pointlessly witty, perfunctorily distingué, anything that bestows a special and much envied reputation upon those whose discourse is carefully trained to float in such vilifying babble.
“When are you coming to dinner?” she asked quite suddenly.
“Whenever you want me. Name the day.”
“Friday. I’ve invited the Duchess de Mortemain, the Corbelles, and Musadieu to celebrate my little girl’s return—she’ll be in Paris tonight. But don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.”
“Of course. I’ll be there . . . Friday, for sure. I’m eager to see Annette again. I haven’t laid eyes on her for . . . can it be three years?”
“That’s exactly right, three years.”
Initially raised in her parents’ Paris establishment, Annette had become the last and most impassioned attachment of her nearly blind grandmother, Madame Paradin, who now lived year-round on her son-in-law’s estate, the Château de Roncières in the Eure valley. The old lady had gradually kept the youngster with her for longer and longer periods, and since the Guilleroys spent nearly half their lives on the estate to which they were continually summoned by various agricultural and electoral responsibilities, they ended by bringing their little girl to Paris on only the rarest of occasions, for wasn’t it obvious the child preferred the freedom and activity of country life to a cloistered city existence.
For the last three years Annette had not visited Paris even once, her mother preferring to keep her in bucolic seclusion so as not to awaken new sensibilities before the appointed day of her first appearance in society. Of course Madame de Guilleroy had provided her countrified daughter with a pair of tutors abundantly equipped with diplomas, as well as multiplying her own visits to both her mother and her daughter. Moreover Annette’s sojourn at the château had been rendered virtually necessary by the old woman’s presence.
Until comparatively recently, Olivier Bertin would also spend six weeks or two months of each summer at Roncières, but for the past three years rheumatic attacks had obliged him to patronize watering places that so revived his love for Paris that he refused to leave the city once he was in it again.
Ordinarily Annette would not have returned till autumn, but her father had suddenly conceived an irresis
tible marriage scheme for his daughter and summoned her home rather abruptly in order to meet the Marquis de Farandal, to whom she would be betrothed. This arrangement, moreover, had been kept quite secret—only Olivier Bertin had been informed of it, in great confidence, by Madame de Guilleroy.
So of course his first question was “Has your husband’s plan been favorably received?”
“Yes, in fact I think everything’s working out quite well.”
Whereupon they saw fit to discuss other matters.
One of which, of course, was painting, and in this crucial regard Madame de Guilleroy made yet another effort to convince Bertin to undertake a Christ. He resisted, pointing out that the subject was now undertaken the world over, but she held her ground, insisting on his Christ until she lost patience. “Oh, if I only knew how to draw, I’d show you what I mean: it’s something entirely new and very bold. . . . When they take Him down from the Cross, the soldier who releases His hands releases the whole upper part of Our Lord’s body. He comes crashing down on the crowd below, everyone raising their arms to receive and support Him. Do you see what I mean?”
Yes, he saw, he even considered the conception quite original, but since he found himself in an entirely modern mind-set, and a dear friend was lying right there on his couch, one foot released and offering to the eye the sensation of flesh seen through a virtually transparent stocking, he was compelled to exclaim, “There it is, right there! There’s what must be painted, life itself: a woman’s foot released from the hem of her gown! Now everything can be disclosed: Truth, Desire, Poetry! Nothing’s more attractive, nothing’s lovelier than a woman’s foot—and all the mystery thereunto attached: a leg hidden, lost, yet divined under all that drapery!”
Kneeling on the floor like a Turk, he seized the one visible shoe and pulled it off. Released from its leather sheath, the foot squirmed like a restless little animal astonished to find itself free.
Bertin kept repeating, “Isn’t that delicate? Isn’t that distingué? It’s lifelike, that’s what it is, much more lifelike than a hand. Show us your hand, Any!”
She was wearing long gloves that reached to her elbows. To take one off, she held it at the top and quickly slid the glove down her arm, twisting it as if she were skinning a snake. The arm appeared: pale, plump, and so suddenly exposed that it seemed a complete and shameless nudity.
She held out her hand, letting it seem to dangle from her wrist. Several rings glistened on her white fingers, so that the carefully filed pink nails seemed like amorous talons growing out of this woman’s lovely paw. Olivier Bertin gently fondled the hand as he praised it. “What a strange thing, Any, here’s this compliant little member, so intelligent and so nimble it produces whatever it’s told: ledgers or laces, locomotives, pyramids, even cream puffs, not to mention caresses—which happen to be the best of its many artifacts!”
One by one Bertin slipped off her rings, and when the golden circlet of her wedding ring fell in its turn, he murmured, with a respectful smile, “The Law, my darling, the Law! Hats off!”
“Drivel!” she snapped, slightly offended.
The artist had always been disposed to raillery, a French preference for mingling ironic touches with the most serious sentiments. Often he inadvertently distressed her by his failure to appreciate a woman’s subtler distinctions, or by his negligence to discern certain sacred boundaries, as he liked to call them. She was especially annoyed whenever he referred to their intimacy having lasted so long it was most likely the best example of love the nineteenth century had to show for itself. After a significant silence she asked, “Will you take Annette and me to varnishing day?”
“Of course I will.”
Then she asked him which would be the likeliest canvases to win prizes in the next salon, scheduled to open in a fortnight. And then, quite suddenly, apparently recalling some forgotten errand: “All right, let me have my shoe back. I’m leaving.”
He had been dreamily playing with the little shoe, turning it over and over in apparently oblivious hands. He bent down and kissed the foot that seemed to float between gown and carpet, no longer moving at all, and carefully slipped the shoe on for her. Madame de Guilleroy immediately stood up and walked toward a table strewn with papers, open letters—some old, others quite recent—next to a painter’s inkstand in which the ink had dried. She examined what she saw with great curiosity, shifting the piles of paper, lifting some to look underneath.
He came over to her, saying, “Watch out, you’ll disorganize my chaos.”
Paying no attention, she asked, “Who’s the gentleman that wants to buy your Bathers?”
“Some American. I don’t know who he is.”
“But you’ve agreed on a price for your Street Singer?”
“Yes. Ten thousand.”
“You did the right thing. The picture’s fine, but nothing exceptional. Goodbye, my dear,” and she presented her cheek, which he calmly brushed with a kiss, whereupon she disappeared under the portiere, having said in an undertone, “Friday, eight o’clock. There’s no need to see me out. We both know the way. Goodbye.”
Once she had gone, he lit a fresh cigarette and began pacing up and down his studio. The entire past of their affair floated before his eyes. He kept encountering improbable details that he tried to identify by linking them together, fascinated by this pursuit of memories he was obliged to pursue alone. Those had been the days when he had risen like a star on the horizon of artistic Paris, days when painters had monopolized public favor and occupied whole streets of magnificent residences, when even the most unlikely figures occupied splendid apartments earned by a few brushstrokes.
Bertin, returning from Rome in 1864, had survived in Paris for several years without success and without renown; but then, quite suddenly, in 1868 he exhibited his Cleopatra and in a few days was praised to the skies by critics and public alike.
In 1872, after the war and after Henri Regnault’s death had created a sort of pedestal of glory in the eyes of his confreres, Bertin produced his Jocasta, a subject that ranked him among the intrepid, though its carefully original execution made him sufficiently palatable to the academicians as well. In 1873, upon his return from a trip to Africa, he received the Gold Medal for his Juive d’Alger, and in 1874 a portrait of Princess de Salia ranked him in fashionable circles as the best portrait painter of his time. From that day on he became the chosen painter of Parisiennes, the most adroit and ingenious artist to reveal their grace, their figures, and their souls. In a matter of months, every fashionable woman in the city was soliciting the favor of being reproduced by Bertin.
Now, since he was in fashion and regularly paying visits merely as a man of the world, one day at the Duchess de Mortemain’s he caught sight of a young woman in deep mourning who happened to be leaving just as he came in and whose appearance in the doorway dazzled him with a lovely vision of grace and elegance.
Asking her name, he learned that she was the Countess de Guilleroy, the wife of a Norman country squire, an agriculturist and a deputy, and that she was in mourning for her father-in-law, as well as being witty, much admired, and generally sought after.
He immediately remarked, still moved by this apparition that had seduced his artist’s eye, “Now there’s one portrait I’d be glad to paint.”
The following day, this remark was repeated to the young woman, and that same evening he received a note, blue-tinted and vaguely perfumed, written in a small, regular hand slightly slanted from left to right, which read as follows:
Monsieur,
The Duchess de Mortemain, who has just left my house, assures me you would be disposed to employ my poor countenance in making one of your masterpieces. I should gladly entrust it to you were I certain that you were not speaking in jest and that you see in me something worthy of being reproduced and idealized by you.
Please accept, monsieur, the expression of my sincere regards.
Anne de Guilleroy
He replied at once, asking when he mig
ht call upon the countess, and was simply enough invited to luncheon the following Monday.
Luncheon ensued in a large and luxurious modern house on the boulevard Malesherbes. Crossing a vast salon of gold-framed blue silk panels, our painter was shown into a sort of boudoir hung with tapestries of graceful figures à la Watteau, apparently designed and executed by artisans collectively daydreaming of love.
No sooner had he sat down than the countess appeared. She walked so lightly that he had not heard her cross the adjoining salon, and he was somewhat surprised when he saw her. She held out her hand in a businesslike fashion.
“So it’s true,” she said, “you’re willing to do my portrait?”
“I shall be very happy to do so, madame.”
Her close-fitting black frock made her seem slender, quite young, and rather serious, though such gravity was belied by her smiling face and shimmering blond hair. The count appeared, holding the hand of their six-year-old daughter.
Madame de Guilleroy introduced him: “My husband.”
This was a short fellow with no mustache, his hollow cheeks shadowed under the skin by a close-shaved beard. He had something of the polished manner of a priest or an actor, the long hair brushed back, and two deep lines curving around his mouth from cheeks to chin were apparently formed by the practice of speaking in public.
He thanked the painter with an abundance of phrases that revealed the public speaker. For a long time he had sought to commission his wife’s portrait, and it was certainly Monsieur Olivier Bertin he would have chosen had he not feared a refusal, for of course he was aware that the artist was overwhelmed by solicitations.
But it was soon agreed, with much civility on either side, that the very next day the count would bring the countess to Bertin’s studio. However, the count wondered if, because of his wife’s bereavement, might it not be wise to bide one’s time, but the painter declared his eagerness to capture first impressions, and surely the striking contrast of a countenance so sprightly, so delicate, and so positively luminous under that golden head of hair, with the austere blackness of her mourning garments must not be missed.
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