Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  “Perhaps she knew and did not concern herself.” Mme Beauvoisin offered this consideringly.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Theresa. “I’d need proof, though. I’m not interested in speculation, theory, or even in a juicy story. I’m interested in the truth.”

  Mme Beauvoisin’s smile said that she found Theresa very young, very charming. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I believe you are.” Her voice grew brisker. “Beauvoisin’s papers are in some disorder, you understand. Your search may take you some weeks, and Portrieux is far to travel twice a day. It would please me if you would accept the hospitality of La Roseraie.”

  Theresa closed her eyes. It was a graduate student’s dream come true, to be invited into her subject’s home, to touch and use his things, to live his life. Mme Beauvoisin, misinterpreting the gesture, said, “Please stay. This project—Beauvoisin’s papers—it is of great importance to us, to Luna and to me. We feel that you are well suited to the task.”

  To emphasize her words, she laid her twisted hand on Theresa’s arm. The gesture brought her face into the sun, which leached her eyes and skin to transparency and made a glory of her silvered hair. Theresa stared at her, entranced.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I would be honored.”

  Young Woman in a Garden (Luz at La Roseraie) 1879

  Edouard Beauvoisin’s artistic reputation rests on this portrait of his Spanish mistress, Luz Gascó, seated in the garden of La Roseraie. As in Reclining Nude, the composition is arranged around a figure that seems to be the painting’s source of light as well as its visual focus. Luz sits with her face and body in shade and her feet and hands in bright sunlight. Yet the precision with which her shadowy figure is rendered, the delicate modeling of the face, and the suggestion of light shining down through the leaves onto the dark hair draw the viewer’s eye up and away from the brightly-lit foreground. The brushwork of the white blouse is especially masterly, the coarse texture of the linen suggested with a scumble of pale pink, violet, and gray.

  “The Unknown Impressionists”

  Exhibition Catalogue

  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

  “This is the studio.”

  Mme Beauvoisin laid her hand on the blue-painted door, hesitated, then stepped aside. “Please,” she said, and gave Theresa a courteous nod.

  Heart tripping over itself with excitement, Theresa pushed open the door and stepped into Beauvoisin’s studio. The room was shuttered, black as midnight; she knocked over a chair, which fell with an echoing clatter.

  “I fear the trustees have hardly troubled themselves to unlock the door since they came into possession of the property,” said Mme Beauvoisin apologetically. “And Luna and I have little occasion to come here.” Theresa heard her shoe heels tapping across the flagstone floor. A creak, a bang, and weak sunlight struggled over a clutter of easels, canvases, trunks and boxes, chairs, stools, and small tables disposed around a round stove and a shabby sofa. The French sure are peculiar, Theresa thought. What a way to run a museum!

  Mme Beauvoisin had taken up a brush and was standing before one of the easels in the attitude of a painter interrupted at work. For a moment, Theresa thought she saw a canvas on the easel, an oil sketch of a seated figure. An unknown Beauvoisin? As she stepped forward to look, an ancient swag of cobweb broke and showered her head with flies and powdery dust. She sneezed convulsively.

  “God bless you,” said Mme Beauvoisin, laying the brush on the empty easel. “Luna brings a broom. Pah! What filth! Beauvoisin must quiver in his tomb, such an orderly man as he was!”

  Soon the old woman arrived with the promised broom, a pail of water, and a settled expression of grim disapproval. She poked at the cobwebs with the broom, glared at Theresa, then began to sweep with concentrated ferocity, raising little puffs of dust as she went and muttering to herself, witch-like.

  “So young,” she said. “Too young. Too full of ideas. Too much like Edouard, enfin.”

  Theresa bit her lip, caught between curiosity and irritation. Curiosity won. “How am I like him, Luna?” she asked. “And how can you know? He’s been dead almost a hundred years.”

  The old woman straightened and turned, her face creased deep with fury. “Luna!” she snarled. “Who has given you the right to call me Luna? I am not a servant, to be addressed without respect.”

  “You’re not? I mean, of course not. I beg your pardon, Madame . . . ?” And Theresa looked a wild appeal to Mme Beauvoisin, who said, “The fault is entirely mine, Mlle Stanton, for not introducing you sooner. Mlle Gascó is my companion.”

  Theresa laughed nervously, as at an incomprehensible joke. “You’re kidding,” she said. “Gascó? But that was the model’s name, Luz’s name. I don’t understand. Who are you, anyway?”

  Mme Beauvoisin shrugged dismissively. “There is nothing to understand. We are Beauvoisin’s heirs. And the contents of this studio are our inheritance, which is yours also. Come and look.” With a theatrical flourish, she indicated a cabinet built along the back wall. “Open it,” she said. “The doors are beyond my strength.”

  Theresa looked from Mme Beauvoisin to Mlle Gascó and back again. Every scholar knows that coincidences happen, that people leave things to their relatives, that reality is sometimes unbelievably strange. And this was what she had come for, after all, to open the cabinet, to recover all the mysteries and illuminate the shadows of Beauvoisin’s life. Perhaps this Mlle Gascó was his illegitimate granddaughter. Perhaps both women were playing some elaborate and obscure game. In any case, it wasn’t any of her business. Her business was with the cabinet and its contents.

  The door was warped, and Theresa had to struggle with it for a good while before it creaked stiffly open on a cold stench of mildew and the shadowy forms of dispatch boxes neatly arranged on long shelves. Theresa sighed happily. Here they were, Beauvoisin’s papers, a scholar’s treasure trove, her ticket to a degree, a career, a profession. And they were all hers. She reached out both hands and gathered in the nearest box. As the damp cardboard yielded to her fingers, she felt a sudden panic that the papers would be mildewed into illegibility. But the papers were wrapped in oilcloth and perfectly dry.

  Reverently, Theresa lifted out a packet of letters, tied with black tape. The top one was folded so that some of the text showed. Having just spent a month working with Beauvoisin’s letters to Manet at the Bibliothèque Nationale, she immediately recognized his hand, tiny and angular and blessedly legible. Theresa slipped the letter free from the packet and opened it. I have met, she read, a dozen other young artists in the identical state of fearful ecstasy as I, feeling great things about Art and Beauty which we are half-shy of expressing, yet must express or die.

  “Thérèse.” Mme Beauvoisin sounded amused. “First we must clean this place. Then you may read Beauvoisin’s words with more comfort and less danger of covering them with smuts.”

  Theresa became aware that she was holding the precious letter in an unforgivably dirty hand. “Oh,” she said, chagrined. “I’m so sorry. I know better than this.”

  “It is the excitement of discovery.” Mme Beauvoisin took the letter from her and rubbed lightly at the corner with her apron. “See, it comes clean, all save a little shadow that may easily be overlooked.” She folded the letter, slipped it back into the packet, returned it to the box, and tucked the oilcloth over it.

  “Today, the preparation of the canvas,” she said. “Tomorrow, you may begin the sketch.”

  Edouard Beauvoisin had indeed been an orderly man. The letters were parceled up by year, in order of receipt, and labeled. Turning over Manet’s half of their long correspondence, Theresa briefly regretted her choice of research topic. Manet’s was a magic name, a name to conjure up publishers and job offers, fame and what passed for fortune among art historians. But Manet, who had been documented, described, and analyzed by every art historian worth his pince-nez, could never be hers. Beauvoisin was hers.

  Theresa sorted out all the business pape
rs, the bills for paint and canvas, the notes from obscure friends. What was left was what she gleefully called the good stuff: a handful of love notes written by Céleste Rohan over the two years Beauvoisin had courted her, three boxes of letters from his mother, and two boxes of his answers, which must have been returned to him at her death.

  It took Theresa a week to work through the letters, a week of long hours reading in the studio and short, awkward meals eaten in the kitchen with Mme Beauvoisin and Luna. It was odd. In the house and garden, they were everywhere, present as the sea-smell, forever on the way to some domestic task or other, yet never too busy to inquire politely and extensively after her progress. Or at least Mme Beauvoisin was never too busy. Luna mostly glared at her, hoped she wasn’t wasting her time, warned her not to go picking the flowers or walking on the grass. It didn’t take long for Theresa to decide that she didn’t like Luna.

  She did, however, like Edouard Beauvoisin. In the studio, Theresa could lose herself in Beauvoisin’s world of artists and models. The letters to his mother from his early years in Paris painted an intriguing portrait of an intelligent, passionate, and, above all, naive young man whose most profound desire was to capture and define Beauty in charcoal and oils. He wrote of poses and technical problems and what his teacher M. Couture had said about his life studies, reaffirming in each letter his intention to draw and draw and draw until every line breathes the essence of the thing itself. A little over a year later, he was speaking less of line and more of color; the name Couture disappeared from his letters, to be replaced by Manet, Degas, Duranty, and the brothers Goncourt. By 1860, he had quit the École des Beaux Arts and registered to copy the Old Masters at the Louvre. A year later, he met Céleste Rohan at the house of Berthe Morisot’s sister, Edma Pontillon:

  She is like a Raphael Madonna, tall and slender and pale, and divinely unconscious of her own beauty. She said very little at dinner, but afterwards in the garden with Morisot conversed with me an hour or more. I learned then that she is thoughtful and full of spirit, loves Art and Nature, and is herself something of an artist, with a number of watercolors and oil sketches to her credit that, according to Morisot, show considerable promise.

  Three months later, he announced to his mother that Mlle Rohan had accepted his offer of hand and heart. Mme Beauvoisin the elder said everything that was proper, although a note of worry did creep through in her final lines:

  I am a little concerned about her painting. To be sure, painting is an amiable accomplishment in a young girl, but you must be careful, in your joy at finding a soul-mate, not to foster useless ambitions in her breast. I’m sure you both agree that a wife must have no other profession than seeing to the comfort of her husband, particularly when her husband is an artist and entirely unable to see to his own.

  When she read this, Theresa snorted. Perhaps her mother-in-law was why Céleste, like Edma Morisot and dozens of other lady artists, had laid down her brush when she married. Judging from her few surviving canvases, she’d been a talented painter, if too indebted to the style of Berthe Morisot. Now, if Céleste had just written to her future husband about painting or ambition or women’s role in marriage, Theresa would have an easy chapter on the repression of women artists in nineteenth-century France.

  It was with high hopes that Theresa opened the small bundle of Céleste’s correspondence. She soon discovered that, however full of wit and spirit Céleste may have been in conversation, on paper she was terse and dull. Her letters were limited to a few scrawled lines of family news, expressions of gratitude for books her fiancé had recommended, and a few shy declarations of maidenly affection. The only signs of her personality were the occasional vivid sketches with which she illustrated her notes: a seal pup sunning itself on the rocks at the mouth of the bay; a cow peering thoughtfully in through the dairy window.

  Theresa folded Céleste’s letters away, tied the tape neatly around them, and sighed. She was beginning to feel discouraged. No wonder there’d been so little written on Edouard Beauvoisin. No wonder his studio was neglected, his museum unmarked, his only curators an eccentric pair of elderly women. There had been dozens of competent but uninspired followers of the Impressionists who once or twice in the course of their lives had managed to paint great pictures. The only thing that set Edouard Beauvoisin apart from them was the mystery of Luz Gascó, and as Theresa read his dutiful letters to his mother, she found that she just could not believe that the man who had written them could bring his mistress to live with his wife. More importantly, she found herself disbelieving that he could ever have painted Young Woman in a Garden. Yet there it incontrovertibly was, hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts, signed “Edouard Beauvoisin, 1879,” clear as print and authenticated five ways from Sunday.

  A breeze stirred the papers scattered across the worktable. Under the ever-present tang of the sea, Theresa smelled lilies of the valley. She propped her hands on her chin and looked out into the garden. A pretty day, she thought, and a pretty view. It might make a picture, were there anything to balance the window frame and the mass of the linden tree in the left foreground. Oh, there was the rose bed, but it wasn’t enough. Then a figure stepped into the scene, bent to the roses, clipped a bloom, laid it in the basket dangling from her elbow: Gascó, a red shawl tied Spaniard-wise aross her white morning gown, her wild black hair escaping from its pins and springing around her face as she stooped. Her presence focused the composition, turned it into an interesting statement of light and tension.

  Don’t move, Theresa thought. For God’s sake, Gascó, don’t move. Squinting at the scene, she opened a drawer with a practiced jerk and felt for the sketchbook, which was not on top, where it should be, where it always was. Irritated, she tore her eyes from Gascó to look for it. Lying in the drawer was a child’s cahier, marbled black and white, with a plain white label pasted on its cover and marked “May-June 1898” in a tiny, angular, blessedly legible hand.

  “Out of place,” she murmured angrily, then, “This is it,” without any clear idea of what she meant by either statement.

  Theresa swallowed, aware that something unimaginably significant had happened, was happening, that she was trembling and sweating with painful excitement. Carefully, she wiped her hands on her jeans, lifted the cahier from its wooden tomb, opened it to its last entry: June 5, 1898. The hand was scratchier, more sprawled than in his letters, the effect, perhaps, of the wasting disease that would kill him in July.

  The Arrangement. A pity my death must void it. How well it has served us over the years, and how happily! At least, C. has seemed happy; for L.’s discontents, there has never been any answer, except to leave and make other arrangements of her own. Twenty years of flying into rages, sinking into sulks, refusing to stand thus and so or to hold a pose not to her liking, hating Brittany, the cold, the damp, the gray sea. And still she stays. Is it the Arrangement that binds her, or her beloved garden? Young Woman in a Garden: Luz at La Roseraie. If I have a fear of dying, it is that I must be remembered for that painting. God’s judgment on our Arrangement, Maman would have said, had she known of it. When I come to make my last Confession, soon, oh, very soon now, I will beg forgiveness for deceiving her. It is my only regret.

  By dusk, Theresa had read the notebook through and begun to search for its fellows. That there had to be more notebooks was as clear as Monet’s palette: the first entry began in mid-sentence, for one thing, and no man talks to himself so fluently without years of practice. They wouldn’t be hidden; Beauvoisin hadn’t been a secretive man. Tidy-minded. Self-contained. Conservative. He stored them somewhere, Theresa thought. Somewhere here. She looked around the darkening studio. Maybe it would be clearer to her in the morning. It would certainly be lighter.

  Out in the garden, Theresa felt the depression of the past weeks release her like a hand opening. A discovery! A real discovery! What difference did it make whether Beauvoisin had painted two good paintings or a dozen? There was a mystery about him, and she, Theresa Stanton, was on the
verge of uncovering it. She wanted to babble and sing and go out drinking to celebrate. But her friends were three thousand miles away, and all she had was Mme Beauvoisin. And Luna. Always Luna.

  Theresa’s quick steps slowed. What was her hurry, after all? Her news would keep, and the garden was so lovely in the failing light, with the white pebble path luminous under her feet, the evening air blue and warm and scented with lilies.

  In the parlor, an oil lamp laid its golden hand upon the two women sitting companionably together on the velvet sofa, their heads bent to their invisible tasks. The soft play of light and shadow varnished their hair and skin with youth. Theresa struggled with a momentary and inexplicable sense of déjà vu, then, suddenly embarrassed, cleared her throat. “I found a notebook today,” she announced into the silence. “Beauvoisin’s private journal.”

  Luna’s head came up, startled and alert. Theresa caught a liquid flash as she glanced at her, then at Mme Beauvoisin.

  “A journal?” asked Mme Beauvoisin blandly. “Ah. I might have guessed he would have kept a journal. You must be very pleased—such documents are important to scholars. Come. Pour yourself a brandy to celebrate—the bottle is on the sideboard—and sit and tell us of your great discovery.”

  As Theresa obediently crossed the room and unstopped the decanter, she heard a furious whisper. “Mierda!”

  “Hush, Luna.” Mme Beauvoisin’s tone was happy, almost gleeful. “We agreed. Whatever she finds, she may use. It is her right.”