The Girl from Paris

by Joan Aiken

  “Réalisme is the fashion now,” Germaine said. “Art must be an impersonal, unidealized picture of life. Champfleury and Duranty set the vogue, and M. de Balzac. And, above all, Madame George, our heroine. She is the epitome.”

  “Madame George?”

  “George Sand.” Germaine opened wide her huge gray eyes. “You have not read her yet? Well, her latest, which came out this year, Elle et Lui—that tells all about her affair with Alfred de Musset, it is very entertaining—oh, what a wretched, wretched character, that man! You must certainly read it. However, Arsinoë is in the middle of it at present, so I will lend you Le Marquis de Villemer and her play François le Champi.”

  Ellen recalled some scathing remark from Lady Morningquest about “that Dudevant woman.”

  “Is she not wicked? Madame Dudevant?”

  “Wicked, why? To leave a husband who was not her equal, who was unfaithful to her? To take lovers as she chose? Men can do so, why not a woman?”

  Ellen was not sure why not. The question alarmed her, as much as if the assertion that two and two made four were to be disputed. Suddenly a boundary appeared ahead of her, and, on the far side of it, anarchy and chaos.

  “But to write novels about her lovers?” she said doubtfully. “Is that kind? Or right?”

  “Kind? Right?” Germaine laughed at her. “What a little English pedant you are! What has rightness to do with the case? What other subject would one write about, if not one’s lovers?”

  “Does she often come to this house—Madame Sand?”

  “Not very often. She prefers to work in the country, in her château at Nohant. She says of herself that she is unsociable, a savage. But when she does visit Paris, then she comes here. You must meet her. She is wonderful—a strong, wise, untrammeled being. But now, leave that nonsense—” Ellen was making pictures of horses for little Menispe to copy, having discovered that this subject, of all others, had power to hold the child’s fickle attention. “Leave that nonsense,” repeated Germaine, “and come out for a promenade about the city. I will be your cavalier.”

  “I must bring Menispe, then. She has not been out today.”

  “Oh—! Very well.” Germaine screwed up her handsome face in an impatient, lightning grimace. “What a stickler you are for duty. Is not my English excellently idiomatic?”

  Menispe having been arrayed by Véronique in bonnet and pelisse, the trio set out.

  “Just like a good bourgeois family,” said Germaine, who was, as usual, wearing a man’s redingote, trousers, and a top hat. “We will walk along one of the new boulevards and drink pastis at one of the new family cafés. Or I shall drink pastis; I suppose you and Menispe will take eau sucrée.”

  “We certainly shall.”

  Despite some doubts as to the proprieties, Ellen greatly enjoyed these promenades about Paris with Germaine. They climbed to the top of Notre-Dame to watch the sunsets; they browsed along the stalls on the quais by the river; on wet days, for as long as Menispe would endure it, they strolled in the Louvre and Luxembourg picture galleries and looked at works by Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, and Rubens.

  Ellen had stayed in Paris before, visiting her godmother, and had been taken for heavily chaperoned, carefully supervised outings; but there had been nothing like this heady freedom to stroll and gaze, to observe and discuss. What would Papa think if he were to see me now, she sometimes thought. Or Eugenia? Or Kitty?

  “Of course, this is academic stuff,” said Germaine, dragging her away from Rubens. “All those gods and goddesses! Realism is the coming thing in art, as in writing.” And she insisted on taking Ellen to someone’s atelier to look at two enormous paintings, one of a village funeral with a crowd of stolid peasants all in black, the other of an untidy studio with a painter and his friends. “Everyone laughs at this man now, but he will make a name for himself, you will see.” The name was Courbet.

  Sometimes they drank sirop or lemonade at the Café Riche, which, Germaine told Ellen, was frequented by all the literary lions of Paris; it was a sumptuously decorated place, all white, gold, and red velvet. The customers all seemed to know one another, and there was such a brisk interchange between tables that Ellen felt almost stunned by the noise and the rapidity of the conversation, which seemed mainly concerned with literary fees and royalties, and the faults of somebody called Ponson. “He is the only writer in Paris who rides about in a dogcart,” shouted a cadaverous, bearded man. “And why? Because he has sold his soul to the devil—or, in other words, to popular taste. He tells his editor, ‘Give me notice a few days ahead, and, if the readers are getting bored, I’ll finish the book at the end of this chapter.’ Imagine that!”

  On one occasion they visited a famous fortune-teller in the rue Fontaine St. Georges. “I have sold my new novel to Le Siècle for three hundred francs,” said Germaine. “I will buy us all a good fortune!”

  The walls in the fortune-teller’s dimly lit dining room were all covered with hands cut out of white paper, framed on a black background. Famous hands were there—Napoleon and Robespierre, Madame de Pompadour and the Empress Eugénie, all marked with dots and annotations in ink. The seer was a silent, solemn man with a large square head and a huge mustache; he wore a black velvet gown and smelt strongly of snuff. First he asked them questions: their day, month, and hour of birth, favorite flower, animal, and color; they were invited to choose a card from an outsize pack in which the cards were a foot high and the pictures were of Eastern gods.

  “Arsinoë does not believe in all this,” said Germaine gaily. “She is not at all superstitious. I tried to make her come last month—she laughed me to scorn. Well, monsieur, what fate have you in store for me?” as he peered at her hand.

  “Prison,” he replied unexpectedly. “I see you in a cell. I see you shut up—a long period of incarceration, inactivity.”

  The light came feebly through stained-glass windows, but Ellen thought Germaine paled a little—though, with her biscuit skin, it was hard to be sure.

  “Eh bien!” she said drily. “Many I know have been imprisoned for their political opinions. Madame George nearly was, two years ago, when she wrote La Daniella; the newspaper that published it was suspended, until Madame herself appealed to the Empress, begging for the poor newspaper workers to have their jobs back. If I must go to prison I shall be in good company, and at least it will give me new material for my writing.”

  The fortune-teller now turned to Ellen and studied her palm.

  “You have a brother?” he asked her suddenly. “The same age as yourself? Un jumeau?”

  Startled, she nodded.

  “I see an old man—the father. And two hungry women. They open their mouths like cormorants. The father carries a great stone. It is his heart—cracked in two. On one half ‘salvation’ is written, and on the other, ‘hell’! That half holds a mass of writhing devils. The old man raises the stone—he is going to crush your brother with it. No—he is going to crush you. You must escape—as your brother escaped—or free him from the stone—”

  The seer seemed to be in a kind of trance; he was sweating freely and swayed from side to side.

  Little Menispe broke the tension by starting to fidget nervously and knocking a china vase, which fell to the floor. A large white owl which had been perched on the mantelpiece—stuffed, they had assumed—silently spread its wings and coasted down onto the back of a chair.

  “Oh! L’hibou!” Menispe shrieked. “J’ai peur! J’ai peur!”

  “Quiet, you little imbecile!” scolded Germaine, but the spell was broken; the seer glared at them and said angrily, “How can I foresee the future amid such disturbance?”

  “My hand, look at my hand now?” Menispe demanded, holding out her small sticky palm.

  The man took it, then threw it down angrily.

  “I cannot predict the future of a child. There is nothing to work on. You are too small. Y
ou must come back in five years, seven years.”

  Yet, Ellen thought, he had studied Menispe’s palm for a moment.

  “That is all, that is quite enough,” he informed them curtly. “I can tell you no more. I have another client. Good day.”

  “Brrrr!” exclaimed Germaine when they were in the street. “What a dismal, churlish boor! And what a worthless pair of fortunes he has sold us! I have a mind to ask for my money back. Prison for me—and all that rigmarole for you about the old man and your brother. Do you have a twin brother? You never told me about him?”

  “I had one,” said Ellen, “but he died at birth.”

  An odd, cold silence held them for a moment. “Oh well,” said Germaine, “I daresay the man could tell that easily enough from your hand. It shows he is not wholly a charlatan. But I am disappointed! Come, let us go to Tortoni’s and eat an ice.”

  * * *

  From Germaine, Ellen learned facts about the la Ferté ménage that shocked her profoundly.

  “We made a pact, Arsinoë, and I,” Germaine explained. “An alliance—how do you call it?—an offensive and defensive alliance.”

  It was a sunny afternoon; they were sitting on the stone seat by the fountain that played in the courtyard.

  At Ellen’s suggestion, since Menispe was so fascinated by horses, a tiny New Forest pony had been procured for her, and, mounted on it, breathless with excitement, she was about to undergo her first riding lesson, under the tutelage of the old coachman.

  “Watch me, Mademoiselle Elène!”

  “I am watching, never fear!”

  Ellen had brought out a translated chapter of Germaine’s novel Ondine, to discuss with the author. But the sun was so pleasant and the play of the fountain so lulling that they had fallen, instead, into a lazy conversation, interspersed with long stretches of silence.

  “It is such a pity that Menispe was not a boy,” Germaine remarked, watching the child as she valiantly grasped the reins.

  “I agree that her character would have sat more comfortably on a boy. But I think I am surprised to hear you utter such a sentiment, mademoiselle? Since you advocate the equality of the sexes, what difference should it make?”

  “Always ready to debate a point, you English logician!” Germaine said, laughing. “But I was thinking of it as related to the greatest good of the greatest number. Raoul passionately desires an heir. If only Menispe had been a boy, he would be content. But Arsinoë was so disgusted by the process of childbearing that I greatly fear she will not capitulate a second time. And then, only think what trouble to us all will ensue.”

  “It is an unhappy situation, I agree,” Ellen said thoughtfully. She remembered her own mother, a small, delicate woman, badly injured by the births of Eugenia and Kitty, both of whom had been unusually large infants; weakened still more by carrying twins, of which Ellen had been the sole survivor; after the birth of Gerard, another large child, she had contracted a fever of the womb from which she never fully recovered. “One would think,” Ellen went on slowly, “that, since childbearing is such a risk to women, they themselves should be the arbiters. And yet—if an heir is needed? Louise must have known that when she married? And Raoul is her husband, and she loves him?”

  “Not she,” said Germaine.

  Ellen opened her dark eyes wide. “But my godmother told me it was the most romantic love match?”

  “On his side, bien sûr. But on hers, no. He happened to be the first that offered; the first suitable, that is to say. It was our pact, you understand.”

  “Pact?”

  “Our business partnership.” Germaine grinned her urchin grin; then she enlightened Ellen. “Arsinoë and I were two poor girls with our way to make in the world. Both wished to become writers. But we had no money; my mother died bankrupt, my father left me a pittance only. And Louise was in the same case. The career of a female écrivain is far from easy, you must be aware; if you are Madame George, even! The men hate us. Jules Goncourt and his brother loathe women. Imagine it—Jules said, ‘Women have never done anything remarkable, except for sleeping with a man, absorbing his moral fiber. And a virgin has never produced anything.’”

  Ellen gasped, partly from shock at Germaine’s freedom of expression. But Germaine, for once, was not studying Ellen’s reactions. She went on vehemently, “And that artist Gavarni—whom one must admire, because he is a genius—but he, the monster, said, ‘Woman is impenetrable, not because she is deep, but because she is shallow.’ I repeat, the men hate us—the world is run to suit them, and we are beginning to threaten their ascendancy. Who controls the finances, who makes the laws, of inheritance, for example? They do. Why should Menispe not inherit? Because she is not a boy. But so it is—and so it will be, I daresay, for decades to come. Therefore I, and Arsinoë, decided that in this life-and-death struggle, all is fair; or, rather, that women have been used to such outrageous injustice for so long that we are entitled to any means we can find to redress the balance. We agreed—we made a pact when we were fifteen, signed in blood—that the first who could marry advantageously must do so, and then support the other on her husband’s money.”

  “What?” Ellen gasped.

  “It was too bad that Raoul turned out to be so unexpectedly miserly,” Germaine added drily. “He seemed such an open-handed creature at first—Louise thought he would be as clay in her hand.

  “But then she, as I say, is proving tediously obdurate in this matter of the heir. One should keep to one’s bargains, I think. If only she would make a second attempt! Do you not think you might be able to persuade her, dear Callisto?”

  Ellen looked at Germaine in stunned astonishment. There she sat, quite at ease, today wearing a severely simple white cashmere robe bordered with ornamental Persian work in black, and with a black velvet ribbon round her supple neck. She leaned her ash-fair head against the carved stone seat back; she looked like an angel.

  With some irony, Ellen thought: And, in fact, Germaine’s wishes in this matter are exactly those of my godmother. How surprised Lady Morningquest would be to hear this conversation.

  “If you cannot persuade Louise—is it likely that I would be able to do so? She does not like me at all.”

  And Ellen was obliged to admit—but to herself, not aloud—that the lack of liking between herself and the Countess was mutual. She found Louise cold, self-centered, superior, languidly irritable, and unkind to her child; also something of a malade imaginaire. But, knowing now that she had been maneuvered into this marriage by her charming, dominating friend, Ellen began to feel some tinge of sympathy for the unfortunate girl. Most probably she had not in the least realized what she was taking on. Without malice, glancing at Germaine, Ellen wondered if the latter had played fair with her “business partner.” Or had she taken care that Louise would be the one to accept the first eligible offer? Had she remained silent about marital chances of her own, if they did not appeal to her? Behind her apparent candor and captivating charm there lay a calculating brain.

  “Oh, you are wrong there, mon amie; Arsinoë likes you well enough,” Germaine said easily. “It is just that she is a true intellectual; mathematics, history, philosophy are to her of far more importance than personal relations. Ideas, and her own writing, have more value for her than people.”

  Louise’s own writing, Ellen had gathered, was a theoretical work depicting a Matriarchal Age which was believed by some savants to have prevailed from 2500 BC to 1500 BC, benignly presided over by a Mother Goddess. Even the misogynistic Goncourt brothers, said Germaine, who had been privileged to see some chapters of this work, had been greatly impressed by its scope and profundity.

  “Though whether she will finish it in the next twenty years…” Germaine shrugged. “There is yet much to do. But I have pointed out to her that childbearing need not affect her work. If she feels tired, she can always lie on her couch and dictate. Has not your Mrs. Gaske
ll produced both children and novels?”

  “Yes—but—” Ellen could not feel that the cases were comparable. “If she refuses to bear Raoul another child—what can he do? Could the marriage be dissolved?”

  “Possibly. But—he loves her. That would not be a desirable solution for him. And it certainly would not be for me!” She laughed ruefully. “Then I would be obliged to put my head into the matrimonial noose. And I assure you, my dear Callisto, that is the last thing I wish. Males are to me, as a tribe, objectionable; I have never met one whom I could consider as a mate—not even your charming Benedict! But, in any case, matters are not come to that pass yet. I daresay the la Fertés will presently hold a conseil de famille, and try to bring pressure to bear on my poor Arsinoë.”

  Raoul clattered into the courtyard in his dogcart, and, seeing Menispe, radiant on her pony, went to praise and admire her. Then he approached Ellen and Germaine. His bow was polite, but Ellen thought she detected a chill in his manner toward Mademoiselle de Rhetorée. Having heard the history of the marriage, Ellen could not find this surprising. How much about the “pact” between the two friends did Raoul know, or guess?

  “Where is Louise?” he asked Germaine.

  “She had one of her migraines; she was lying down. I will send to inquire how she does… Thank you for this, Callisto; it begins most promisingly. I will read it through and let you have it back tomorrow.” She tapped the bundle of manuscript and strolled away with her long, leisurely stride.

  “You are a writer also, Miss Paget?” Raoul asked. He sounded surprised, and far from delighted.

  “No, Comte; I am merely translating some of Mademoiselle de Rhetorée’s work into English for her.”

  “I hope she pays you,” he commented rather drily.

  Ellen reflected that this point had not been raised.

  “I imagine that, if the work is brought out in England, I will have a share of the proceeds.”

  “You are no businesswoman, Miss Paget. Myself, I would enter into no such arrangement without a hard-and-fast agreement beforehand.”