Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  “It’s the one you thought of in my courtyard, isn’t it?”

  He nodded, rapt. “It gives me peace.”

  In the ballet school scenes of Degas, slim dancers in frothy skirts held their raised legs in arabesques at the practice barre. In Caillebotte’s snow-covered roofs of Paris, quietness and somberness prevailed, and in a scene of an empty room, floor scrapers prepared the wooden floor for refinishing. An unusual perspective, I remarked, and Maxime seemed pleased.

  In front of Pissarro’s Louveciennes cottages there stood the washerwomen and farmwives who had used his precious canvases as aprons. Still outraged, I told Maxime about it, feeling proud that I knew something he didn’t.

  “Do you understand now, Lisette? Even though you don’t have an academic education, you have information and insights that trained dealers and critics don’t necessarily have.”

  “Only of three painters.”

  “But that can build. You have deep feelings. And you have curiosity. I can help you. We can make contacts with painters. Here. In Paris.”

  “After I find my paintings.”

  I turned, and there were red roofs behind trees, looking very much like Pissarro’s orchard and red roofs.

  “Truly, Maxime. It looks like the same place as in Pascal’s Red Roofs, Corner of a Village, Winter. He loved it for its warm colors.”

  “Do you see now what an important painting you have?”

  “Will have, if I ever find it.”

  I GRASPED MAXIME’S ARM in excitement as we entered the large Cézanne gallery and strolled along Cézanne’s rocky cliffs above the Mediterranean Sea at L’Estaque, through the upward reach of a grove of poplar trees, and in the countryside of the desolate House of the Hanged Man. With Maxime’s guidance, I was seeing more—the wideness of Cézanne’s brushstrokes, thickly painted passages alternating with thinly covered areas, vigorous reworkings, hesitations, corrections.

  Two walls displayed still lifes. Apples, pears, peaches, oranges, even onions. A flowered pitcher. A figurine. The same white compote. The same green olive jar.

  “Look at the spread of the paintings’ dates. They show that he studied his whole life to give shape by color gradations,” Maxime said.

  I turned around, and there it was. “Les Joueurs de Cartes!” I burst out in a voice too loud for a gallery. “You knew it was here all along!”

  He grinned. “You said you wanted to find it yourself.”

  Two players in profile seated at a small table faced each other and studied their cards in absorption. I could see that the bottle of wine between them on the table divided the scene into symmetrical halves.

  “Those rustic touches convey that they are in a spartan farmhouse or a tavern,” Maxime said.

  “What rustic touches?”

  “The table leans to the left. The sheen and stiffness of the table covering suggest that it’s an oilcloth, not cotton. Even his brushwork is rough.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not necessarily. It conveys his passion. Even though it’s a simple composition, it shows the character of the men.”

  “They do look like Provençaux. Rumpled trousers. The hat of the man on the right. Pascal had a chamois hat just like that, the same yellowish tan with only a small curved brim, and a beige cotton jacket too. It could be him!”

  My words spilled out in a tumble of syllables. “Just before he died, he said he had posed for this painting. I took it to be a dream or a fantasy, but it could be true, couldn’t it, when he was younger? Pascal’s droopy mustache must have been brown once, like this man’s, under his pointed nose. His eyebrows were shorter than the width of his eyes, just like they are in this painting.”

  “We’ll probably never know.”

  “Is there anyone we could ask?”

  He smiled down at me indulgently. “I’ll look into it.”

  It didn’t matter what he would find out. In my heart, I knew. This was the painting Pascal had gone to Aix to buy. The card player was him. Someday I would tell that to Monsieur Laforgue.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  WINGED AND VICTORIOUS

  1947

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, WHEN MAXIME AND HÉLOÏSE BOTH had to work, I had several destinations on the Left Bank to visit alone. At place Saint-Michel, I passed flower sellers, fruit carts, postcard vendors, and stopped in front of an old man selling handmade wooden toys. I chose a bilboquet set, a cup on the end of a handle and a ball attached by a string, for Théo. The man took great delight in demonstrating a perfect plonk into the cup.

  Strolling pleasantly through Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the quarter where I had grown up, I bought a pain au chocolat at Maison Gérard Mulot. The pretty counter girl seemed so young, but in truth, I had been her age when I had worked there. I asked the proprietress if my friend Jeannette, who had claimed she was a Gypsy, still worked there. No, the woman said in disgust. Jeannette had gone off with a German soldier and was never heard from again. I was momentarily stunned. Had she been apprehended? Was her head shaved? The pity of it overcame me as I left the shop.

  The corner of boulevard Saint-Germain and rue des Saints-Pères, where André had gallantly given me, a stranger, his umbrella, opened the floodgates of lovely memories: the ease with which he had steered me around the broken edge of this very curb—there it was still; the leap of my heart when, after passing this corner on a dozen afternoons, I caught sight of the jaunty tilt of his black fedora; the excitement I felt when he recognized me, smiled broadly, and hurried toward me as I stood motionless, and said in his warm, slightly teasing voice, “I’m not going to let you get away this time”; the smooth way he ushered me into Debauve et Gallais, on rue des Saints-Pères, the elegant shop of the legendary chocolatier of His Majesty Charles X, where chocolates were displayed as though they were crown jewels, hardly to be eaten, only admired; André’s invitation to pick out some to fill the dainty basket he placed in my hand, not knowing that I worked for the rival pâtisserie et confiserie a few streets away; that first lingering walk along the quays; that first café crème in the Bois de Boulogne, where he shared that he was a frame maker and an officer in the Guild of Encadreurs, and where we discovered that neither of us had siblings, that he had been raised by grandparents, and I by a nun. Through it all, like a magical thread of spun sugar, ran the delicious sense that a rainbow arched over us and that we were falling in love.

  Approaching the Daughters of Charity of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, on rue du Bac, I panicked. What if it had been bombed? I walked faster, my thoughts riveted to Sister Marie Pierre. I couldn’t count all the words she had taught me or how many times she had rapped my knuckles with a spoon for biting my nails. She kept the spoon on a string in the folds of her habit for that express purpose. I used to tease her by saying that she was trying to steal the orphanage’s silver.

  Once, returning from an errand, I had said that the carved faces on Pont Neuf were ugly. What a mistake that was! She made me return to it every day for a week until I could clearly express what I found so ugly in them.

  “If they are truly distasteful,” she said, “defend their ugliness with facts. Don’t just call them ugly out of mental laziness. Give me word pictures.”

  A week later, I gave her my report. “They are grotesque and exaggerated. Some are scowling like mean kings, some screaming like monsters, some staring with oversized eyes like flies. Some have pointed ears like the devil or horns like a ram. They’re all different and all ugly,” I insisted.

  “Fine,” she said. “What is another word for difference?”

  I knew she was leading me to a conclusion I didn’t want to admit. “Individuality.”

  “Good. Individuality is a beautiful quality.”

  “You tricked me!”

  LA MAISON DES FILLES de la Charité Saint-Vincent-de-Paul was not damaged. It was just as I remembered it. In the public room, where parents could visit the children they had abandoned, I found her. We hugged instantly.

  “Oh, bless you,
child. I’d despaired of ever seeing you again.” She shook her head, and the points of her starched white headdress jiggled at the sides of her head.

  “And I you.”

  She guided me to a bench, and we sat close together. Her natural beauty and smooth, rose-tinged cheeks had not faded.

  “My, you were an incessant questioner, always asking things like, Why do you have to wear those blue-gray habits? Wouldn’t you rather wear pink in the summer? Does God care how we dress? How do I know if God cares about us at all? If He cared about me, why did He let my parents abandon me? Will I ever be loved by a man? And all that time I was loving you with all my heart.”

  “I know. I always felt that. You were like a mother to me.”

  She took my hand. “And you were like a daughter to me.”

  “You remember my husband, André? He was killed in the war.

  I’ve been without him for seven years. And now I think I might be loved by another man, his closest friend.”

  Out spilled my tale of the last decade, all of it, including André’s death, Maxime’s tribulations in the prison camp, and my friendship with him. “My affection for this man is growing deeper. I feel such powerful stirrings that it seems there’s no bottom to them. It’s almost frightening to think where it might lead. I fear what André would think.”

  She listened intently, leaning forward, her hands clasped on her lap as though she was praying to know what to say. She had always been like that. Most of her devotions must have been spent in listening.

  I summoned my courage. “Is it wrong for me to love again?”

  “It is wrong for you not to love, under any circumstances, even those you explained. Sorrow can paralyze a person. Don’t succumb to that temptation. Love broadly and deeply, Lisette, without demands, without expectation of love returned.”

  “But I do think it’s returned.”

  She nodded. “That’s good. I’m happy for you. But there must be discretion in love, and there must be honesty and action. Grief can be stubborn, and it can be perfunctory and can lead you to mistake something as love when it’s false and only serves to assuage the vacancy you feel. However, if you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal.”

  “Do you find it strange or wrong that from something so horrible something wonderful and loving can grow?”

  “Not at all. That is God’s mercy. Such an experience binds people together. Trust it.”

  She stroked and patted my forearm, her customary gesture of comfort. “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “No.”

  “It’s because I could not trust myself on the streets of Paris. They made me want too much. Their beauties and allurements trampled on discretion. That’s why I sent you out on my errands.”

  “You mean you …? I thought you sent me because you have crippled feet.”

  “I can walk perfectly well, but you needed to learn to walk the streets with discretion and alertness and your own joyous observations.”

  “But what a sacrifice—”

  “Isn’t that what we do for our children? As I said, love requires action.”

  “Yes, but …” I let my astonishment settle. “You helped me develop a good conscience. And you taught me to see.”

  “I taught you description and metaphor and appreciation.”

  I kissed her hand. “I appreciate you.”

  “God is with you, Lisette. I can see His most bountiful gift, the bright and morning star, in your eyes.”

  “It must be love that makes them shine.”

  MY NEXT DESTINATION WAS in Montparnasse, 182 rue de Vaugirard, the address on the paper from Marc Chagall, where I now imagined I might enter the art world and participate as a gallery assistant if Monsieur Laforgue wouldn’t have me, or a seller of art supplies, or the housekeeper of a painter, or even as a model. Wearing my magical blue suit, swinging its flared skirt, clutching the scrap of paper, I walked with a firm step toward my destiny. Maybe I would find out from Marc’s friend where the Chagalls were living so I could write to them and tell them how much I treasured Marc’s painting. If they returned to France, maybe I could even visit them someday.

  From Saint-Vincent’s, I took boulevard Raspail and stopped at the corner of rue de Sèvres to pay my respects to Hôtel Lutetia, the glorious building that had housed returning prisoners of war after the Gestapo had been ousted, the building in which Maxime had begun his recovery, its beautiful rounded stone balcony overlooking the busy intersection itself a survivor.

  On rue de Vaugirard, there were still huge bomb holes and damaged buildings in between structures that were being rebuilt. I began checking the addresses, my concern growing because more destruction was evident the farther I walked. The building at number 164 was intact, 168 partially intact; at 174, the façade had been blown off, and the roofless building was an empty shell; 182 and the rest of the street, a pile of rubble. Any remains of a sign with a name lay buried in fragmented stone. I put the paper with Marc’s handwriting back in my handbag. I would keep it, a generous gesture from a famous painter.

  With nothing else to do, I walked toward the street one block over, where André and I had lived, rue du Rennes, at an angle from rue de Vaugirard, and marveled that our building remained intact while others were in ruin or were being rebuilt.

  I wandered through Montparnasse as a flâneuse, a social observer, watching Paris put itself together again, greeting plasterers and stone masons and shovel-bearing laborers with words of gratitude. I stopped to think at Le Select, on boulevard Montparnasse. I poured milk from a tiny pitcher into my noisette and concluded that whatever and whoever survived when the building or the being adjacent did not survive would always be beyond human understanding.

  I would not let the lost opportunity of number 182 defeat me. There were other ways to gain entrance. Besides, the time wasn’t right. I still had five paintings to find in Roussillon and the notes to write for Monsieur Laforgue.

  MAXIME CAME HOME FROM work looking glum.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He gestured to a sofa in the parlor, and I sank into its cushions. He unfolded a clipping from a Paris weekly and laid it on my lap. It had been written by Marc Chagall.

  To the Artists of Paris,

  Thirty-five years ago, as a very young man, like thousands of others, I came to Paris to fall in love with France and study French art.

  In recent years I have felt unhappy that I couldn’t be with you, my friends. My enemy forced me to take the road of exile. On that tragic road, I lost my wife, the companion of my life, the woman who was my inspiration, due to lack of a simple medication, all supplies having been sent to the Allies on the Continent. Thus, she was a victim of war as surely as any fallen soldier. I want to say to my friends in France that she joins me in this greeting, she who loved France and French art so faithfully. Her last joy was the liberation of Paris.

  In the course of these years, the world was anxious about the fate of French civilization, of the legacy of French art. The absence of France seemed impossible, incomprehensible. Today the world hopes and believes that the years of struggle will make the content and spirit of French art even more profound, more than ever worthy of the great art epochs of the past.

  I bow to the memory of those who disappeared, and of those who fell in the battle. I bow to your struggle, to your fight against the foe of art and life.

  Now, when Paris is liberated, when the art of France is resurrected, the whole world too will, once and for all, be free of the satanic enemies who wanted to annihilate not just the body but also the soul—the soul, without which there is no life, no artistic creativity.

  Dear friends, we are grateful to the destiny that kept you alive and allowed the light of your colors and your works to illuminate the sky darkened by the enemy. May your colors and your creative effort have the strength to bring back warmth and new belief in life, in the true life of Fr
ance and of the whole world.

  October 19, 1944

  The print blurred, my hands trembled, and I wept.

  Max took my hand. “I am so sorry. I know how you loved her.”

  “He adored her.”

  “I am sure he did.”

  “How could this have happened? After the trials they must have faced to escape, it’s so unfair.”

  Max cradled me in his arms. “Life isn’t always fair.”

  OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, Maxime did all he could to lift me out of the depths. We whirled around Paris doing the things André and I used to do. We rowed in the lagoon of Bois de Boulogne and Maxime sang the barcarole; we danced in the Bar Américain, the basement of La Coupole; we rode the carousel in place des Abbesses in lower Montmartre, thrilled that it had not been damaged. In the funicular up to Sacré-Coeur, Maxime encircled me with his arms in case I lost my balance, teasing me by not touching me.

  As we walked the perimeter of Île de la Cité, Maxime pointed out the bullet holes in the Conciergerie, the notorious prison of the Revolution, where modern-day résistants began the battle that liberated Paris. We were solemn, respectful, but he was not morose. I took that as a sign that he was liberating himself. Perhaps now was the time for me to do the same.

  I insisted that we climb the long Daru staircase in the Louvre, pausing at each step to appreciate the full marble glory of Nike of Samothrace, winged and victorious. Her commanding presence, well over three meters high and set on a tall pedestal, demanded that we look up in adoration. I was certain that I felt the wind ruffling her gown.

  “What a victory it was to remove that for hiding,” he said. “September third, the same day de Gaulle declared war. We volunteers gathered to watch, holding our breaths as she was lowered down the steps on runners and held upright by ropes. More than twenty centuries old, she is. It does me good to see her back in her rightful place, undamaged.”

  In the Musée Rodin we stood transfixed before the two entwined white marble figures of The Kiss. Equal partners in ardor, and on the cusp of passion, they were forever chaste.