by Stacy Gregg
I didn’t even know what vegan meant. “I eat cheese,” I said.
Nicole returned with some crusty baguette and cheeses and a green salad. It was really good.
“How long have you been a vegetarian, Maisie?” She asked.
“Since today,” I had to admit. The look she gave me made it clear that now she thought I was being difficult and, possibly, a little bit nuts.
“It’s because of Rose,” I said. “She loved animals so she didn’t eat them, and it’s inspired me, I guess.”
“Was she a vegetarian?” Nicole said. “How do you know? What makes you think so?”
I realised then that I still hadn’t told them about the diary. “I … umm … I think I read it somewhere.”
“Did you?” Nicole said. “That is so interesting. I would love it if you could recall where you read about her. You know there is so very little historical information about Rose Bonifait. Renoir, Picasso, Matisse, all these male artists had biographies written about them and their work. But Rose was a woman artist in a male-dominated world, and at the time they did not regard her as significant, not the way we know her to be today. So we know virtually nothing about her life. I did not know, for instance, that she was a vegetarian.”
“Did you know that she was crippled?”
The words came tumbling out of my mouth before my brain could put the brakes on and stop them. Nicole looked at me, totally stunned.
“There have long been rumours of an accident, a terrible horse fall. But nothing concrete. Is this what you are you talking about?”
“Yes!” I could feel my heart pounding. I had to be careful what I said. How could I possibly know such things unless I had the diary in my possession. And I didn’t want to give her the diary, not yet. And so I bare-face lied. “I think I read it in an art book at the college.”
Nicole frowned. “I should like to know which book. And when was this fall? What year? Do you recall?”
I did recall. There had been a date at the top of the diary entry. August 1852.
“The year of the accident was 1852,” I said.
Nicole’s frown deepened. “It is not possible. Are you certain?”
“I think so,” I said. I knew so. But Nicole shook her head doubtfully
“Come with me,” she said.
We walked out of the dining room and down the hallway.
“In 1856,” Nicole said as she led me on, “Rose had left Paris behind. We don’t know why. She was living in the Camargue by then, and there is a date-stamped photograph of her from that time. It hangs by the elevator in the entrance – you probably did not see it. Come and look at it now.”
I followed her, thinking that if the diary entry where Rose’s back had been broken was from 1852 and the photo had been taken two years later and the doctor was right about Rose being paralysed, then surely she was already in a wheelchair?
When Nicole, Françoise and I walked into the entranceway, I realised I hadn’t seen the photograph because it was tucked around the corner in the alcove by the window and shadowed by a large houseplant with gigantic green leaves that matched the malachite pillars.
“There,” Nicole said. “That is Rose Bonifait in the photograph.”
Now as I looked at it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The photograph was a black-and-white print, taken outdoors. It was a spooky, almost ghostly image, of an old French country house, the sky above all dark and ominous. It looked like a storm was coming. But what truly left me startled about the photograph was the girl in the picture, who must have been Rose herself. She did not look injured in any way. She was not sitting in a wheelchair. She was sitting astride a big grey horse.
“The horse, I believe, is a Camarguaise, a wild thing,” Nicole at my shoulder breathed to me. “They say Rose was the only one who rode him as no one else could.”
“That’s impossible …” I began. But then I knew I couldn’t say more. Was the diary itself a lie? A fake? That made no sense.
“What happened to you?” I murmured to the photograph. But Rose Bonifait did not reply.
November 23, 1852
Madame Gris has just left my room after giving me a lecture about my life. She walked in here and pulled back my curtains and proclaimed that it was a lovely day and the tulips were in bloom and people were promenading in the Place des Vosges.
“And you lie here in this pit of darkness,” she scolded, tying the curtains back, despite my protests that the sunlight hurt my eyes. “You refuse to eat. You won’t even get out of bed! I have had enough of your moping, Rose. You must accept what has happened. There is still so much to enjoy in life!”
I lost my temper at her. “Shall I get up then and take a walk in the park?” I snarled. And I threw the bedclothes back, exposing my pale, skinny legs. It is shocking how lifeless my muscles have become, wasted away from disuse in the months since the fall.
“You think I don’t want to promenade?” I shouted. “Or ride Celine? Or paint? These things were all I lived for! What am I living for now, Madame? Tell me! Then I will get out of bed and go and see your stupid tulips!”
Then I threw a shoe at her, and she went back out of my door and left me alone.
I don’t know what the shoe was even doing there. I seldom wear shoes now. What use are they when my feet never touch the ground? I have my wheelchair parked beside the bed and I can slide myself on to it, and use my hands to push myself by the wheels, but this apartment is not built for wheelchairs and I get stuck all the time in doorways and then I have to shriek for Madame Gris to come and get me free again. She is fed up with me and my miserableness. But I don’t care. I don’t care about anything any more since the fall. I’m not getting out of bed for some ridiculous flowers.
November 30, 1852
Dorian took me down to the stables today in my wheelchair. He had convinced me we were just going for a short walk, but then he turned and wheeled me towards the yard and I couldn’t stop him. I was shouting at him the whole way that I didn’t want to go there and what made him think he had the right to kidnap me.
“You need to see her,” he kept insisting. “She misses you.”
When we reached the stables and I caught sight of Celine with her head over the door of her stall I began to cry. It was so horrible to be reunited with her there like that, knowing that I couldn’t be with her as I used to be before.
“Look! You can still stroke her. Take joy in that!” Dorian encouraged me as Celine stretched her long neck out to me over the stable door. I stroked her muzzle and smelt the warm sweetness of her scent, but it only made me cry harder.
“I want to ride,” I sobbed. “And I’m never going to. Don’t you see? It’s like showing me a feast and telling me I can’t eat.”
Dorian refused to be defeated by my misery. “You can still paint her. I’ve brought your things, you can work from your chair.”
He dried my eyes with his handkerchief, held my chin in his hand and raised my face, tilting it so that I was forced to look at him. “Paint me a picture, little sister. Come on. Do it for me, Rose.”
There were tears in his eyes, and I realised in all my life I had never seen Dorian cry before. I didn’t want him to pity me.
“All right,” I sighed. “Set up the easel.”
Dorian hurried about before I could change my mind. He swung open the stable door and wheeled me in to sit beside Celine and then set up the easel and adjusted its height while I organised the palette of paints and brushes on my lap. Celine struck a perfect pose with her ears pricked and I settled down and began to work.
And I tried, I really did. But the work did not sing to me. I slapped the paint on and the technique was there at my fingertips as it had always been, but when I drew back and looked, the canvas was mundane and soulless. When I had finished, all I had to show for my three hours in the stables was a portrait of the horse in front of me that had proportion and veracity but absolutely no energy or depth. The beating heart of something deeper that had always been
the power of my work, it simply wasn’t there.
Dorian couldn’t see what was so wrong with it – or at least he pretended he couldn’t see it. “It is good for a first attempt after all this time,” he insisted as he wheeled me home. “What you need to do is go back to the Paris School, finish the year studying under Demarchelier, and then you can return to your studio and begin to paint again like you used to do. Your gift will return to you. You’ll see.”
My brother was being kind, but he knew as well as I that this is not how a ‘gift’ works. Before, when I painted, my portraits expressed the power of nature. Is it because my own nature is so weakened now that my work is limp and bleak? And as for returning to the Paris School. What was the point of that? This was what I tried to explain to Papa tonight at dinner.
“Dorian says you are painting again, so you are ready to return,” he said.
“I won’t go,” I argued. “You can’t make me.”
“I can,” Papa said. “And I will. I am not having you stay at home in a sulk for the rest of your life, Rose. You are going back to school.”
A sulk! I am paralysed from the waist down and will never walk again! I have never liked my father, but today that changed. Now, I hate him. And Dorian too, for being a traitor.
December 10, 1852
This morning, when I woke, I knew that I wouldn’t get up from my bed. They couldn’t make me do it any more. Every day I’d tried. I’d put on a brave face and gone out into the world just to please them: Dorian, Madame Gris, my papa. God, but they are patronising! “Oh, good girl, Rose!” “You are doing so well, Rose!”
Do they think I’m an idiot? What am I doing, exactly, other than trying to please them by pretending to want to be alive? I have nothing left in me. I’m dying here in this claustrophobic room, and yet I can’t bear to go outside either. Paris in the springtime is hateful; it glares a cold, hard light on my frailties. I see the way people look at me! The poor girl, so sad in her wheelchair.
At art school, Master Demarchelier has taken to fussing over me in an unseemly manner. The other day in class I drew a horse that was so badly proportioned that a child of five could have done better, but he didn’t chastise me and point out my failings as an artist. Instead, he was positively rapturous about how beautiful it was. “Well done, Rose!” he said enthusiastically. “I love the use of light and colour! Very good indeed!” And I swivelled my chair wheels around to face him and snapped. “It’s not my brain that is damaged. It’s just my legs that are useless. I know this work is no good, so don’t try and humour me. It’s worse than when you hated me.”
I tried to storm out of the class after that, but it’s not possible in a wheelchair and I got stuck. My wheels wouldn’t budge and the master tried to help me to get them free and I swiped at him with my fist, and then I sobbed and sobbed until he got one of the other pupils to fetch my father to come and take me home.
December 21, 1852
Papa asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said, “To walk again.” When he sighed a deep sigh and repeated the question, I said, “I want to be left alone, and I want you to stop making me go to school.”
So I got my wish. Papa withdrew me from the Paris School and now he no longer makes me do anything I don’t want to do. We’re having Christmas at Fontainebleau this year. We leave tomorrow, me and Papa, Dorian and Philippe and Philippe’s new wife, Claudette. Also, Papa’s sister, Marianne, is coming from Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to stay with us. Marianne is Papa’s older sister. I haven’t seen her for a long time now, but I seem to recall that I like her. I’m not looking forward to Christmas. It will be the first time I’ve been back to Fontainebleau since the accident.
December 28, 1852: Fontainebleau
Aunty Marianne is not like a normal aunt. She is very much like myself. She wears trousers instead of skirts, and she likes to smoke little cigars after dinner and she has a laugh that is as hearty as a farmhand’s. She tells me not to call her Marianne. “I cannot stand it. It’s like an old woman’s name.” So I call her Mimi, which is the childhood nickname my papa had given her.
When my papa’s parents died, the Bonifait family estate was split two ways. Papa got the Paris house and Fontainebleau and Aunty Mimi got Flamants Roses, their large country estate in the Camargue. She lives there now with her friend Chantal. Chantal had to stay on the estate and didn’t come with her to Fontainebleau because it’s the wet season right now and the rice plantation needs to be sown. Flamants Roses is a very large farm in the marshlands on the coast. It sounds magical. Aunty Mimi breeds bulls there – big black ones – as well as running the rice plantation. The bulls are used for bullfighting. I admit I got really angry when she told me this.
“They should not be made to fight,” I told her over Christmas dinner. “It’s barbaric.” I had already made a fuss that morning because the Christmas lunch was not vegetarian, so my views hardly seemed surprising to Mimi.
“They do not fight like the bulls in Spain,” Mimi insisted. “It’s not a blood sport. These bulls have long and happy lives and are very well cared for. I treat them like my own children.”
“You don’t have your own children,” my papa pointed out.
“Because, as I just said, the bulls are my children,” Mimi replied snippily.
“I still think it is wrong to make animals do your fighting,” I said.
“Would you come and visit me and see my bulls, Rose?” Mimi smiled. “And my horses of course.”
“You breed horses too?” Dorian asked.
“Not exactly,” Mimi said. “They are wild, the horses of the Camargue. They roam our lands at will. Once or twice a year the gardians, who are the cowboys, the gauchos who manage my land, they herd them all together and they brand them and care for the young ones, break the older ones in under saddle so that they can be ridden. Then they let them loose again in winter and they run wild and free in the sea.”
“In the sea?” I became interested in spite of myself.
“Yes,” Mimi said. “The Camargue is a tidal swamp, and the horses are accustomed to having wet feet. They graze on the sea grass and they run through the waves and they are all coloured grey like the skies and the oceans – they are very beautiful.”
She smiled at me again. “So you’ll come and stay? Your father says you have no more school. We have plenty of room. It would be fun, I promise.”
It strikes me now that this is what Mimi and my papa had planned all along. Tonight, I was just making my way to bed when I heard voices in the study. I wheeled my chair up the hall and through a crack in the door I could see them in there – Papa and Mimi – both of them sitting in enormous leather armchairs at the edge of the fireplace. The fire was crackling very loudly as the wood split and bubbled in the grate. My papa and Mimi were both smoking cigars and enjoying some dark reddish-brown liquid in crystal glasses, and they were talking in very serious voices. The topic of the conversation was me.
“I hope you are aware of what you are taking on,” Papa was saying. “Rose has never been an easy child to raise. She’s always been wilful, and refused to do things in a way that most girls do. Now, since her accident, it has become impossible to reason with her.”
Aunty Mimi’s voice was gravelly but warm. “Being obstinate and headstrong are good qualities in a girl as far as I’m concerned. I was the same as a child, wasn’t I?”
“Yes. And look how you turned out!” Papa growled.
Through the gap in the door I saw Mimi reach out and clasp my papa’s hand, and I must say I was shocked to see that a genuine affection existed between sister and brother – just as it is with Dorian and me.
“Jacques, listen to me. You know what I am saying makes sense. Rose will go mad if you continue to coop her up in that apartment. The life you had planned for her, the Parisian artist, it ceased to exist on the day that pheasant flew up from beneath her horse’s hooves. I am offering her a new future. Take the opportunity with both hands, Jacques, because you know if y
ou do not let Rose come with me, her resentment, the pain of losing her liberty, it will be turned back on you. Or worse still, on herself.”
My papa went quiet and then he said. “I cannot bear to look at her, Marianne. My own child and I cannot turn my eyes on her …”
And at the moment my wheelchair rolled forward slightly and I heard the floorboards beneath the wheels give a very loud creak.
I was worried that Papa and Mimi would hear it too, but they must have thought it was just the crackling of the wood in the fireplace because they carried on talking. And I left and continued to my room.
Now, I lie here in the darkness, and I think about what I have been reduced to. My own father admits it! He cannot stand the sight of me now that I am a cripple. I am being sent away to the salt marshes where he no longer has to confront what I have become. Well, that is fine by me. Whatever lies ahead of me, it cannot be worse than this.
Rose had resigned herself to leave Paris, but I felt I couldn’t quit now – even though each day Augustin confirmed his lack of faith in my talent. In the weeks that followed, I did all that I could to work on my art – I went to the Célestins almost every day, spending hours drawing Claude. Despite what Augustin believed, I was trying. I listened in class to everything he said and I took it on board. I was improving too. My sketches now had a flow, a gracefulness of line that I hadn’t possessed before. I could see myself maturing as an artist – even if Augustin could not.
“You have developed even greater technique,” he said grudgingly as we sat down for my half-term assessment. “But you still lack emotion. Where is your heart, Maisie? Why won’t you let it show? And the work, it is just not contemporary. Look at what everyone else in the class is producing around you! Modern art should be thought-provoking and say something about the world we live in today. And you bring me portrait after portrait of horses …” Augustin carried on telling me how awful my art was and then he delivered the final blow. “It is not good enough, I am afraid. I will not put this work forward for the auction intake. My professional reputation as an educator is at stake here. You need to bring me something else before the end of term or you will not earn a place in the selection of work to be sold at Lucie’s.”
