by Stacy Gregg
All term I’d been trying to convince myself that I didn’t care what Augustin said. I was following in the footsteps of Rose Bonifait – and if she could stick to her guns, then I could too. But his words that day rocked me.
“But can he really do that?” Oscar asked when I arrived at the Célestins and told him what had just happened. “Surely you have had your fees paid and your work should be sold at the student auction?”
“Being included in the auction is reserved for the very best pupils,” I said. “Augustin is the decider. I can’t make him include me.”
Claude, who had been standing over in the corner of the stall as we spoke, came over to us now and stuck his head over the loose box door. I gave his velvet muzzle a stroke and saw the worry in his eyes.
“It’s not your fault, Claude,” I told him firmly. “You’re a good model. It’s me that Augustin doesn’t like.”
“What’s he talking about anyway?” Oscar continued. “This auction he refers to?”
“It’s a tradition at the school,” I said. “The pupils all produce a work and the top achievers have their art sold under the hammer at Lucie’s.”
“Lucie’s?” Oscar said. “Really?”
“You know it?”
“It’s a very famous auction house,” Oscar said. “So famous that even I have heard of it. Lucie’s is very grand. All the bourgeoisie go there to buy fancy things for enormous prices.”
“What’s a bourgeoisie?”
“Somebody who is rich and pretentious,” Oscar said. “I think in English you might call them social climbers? Trying to impress each other with their money and fancy things. You know the kind.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
I didn’t know any rich people back home. I certainly didn’t have an insight into what kind of art they liked, but I was pretty sure it would be all the modern stuff that Augustin was trying to make me do. I didn’t think they would go wild in a bidding war over a portrait of a police horse.
Augustin had decided it wasn’t enough to just tell me that I wasn’t good enough to be in the auction. He’d told Madame Richard, as well. And, of course, she had told Nicole.
“Madame Richard says Augustin is very concerned about you,” Nicole explained over dinner.
I pushed my food around on my plate, not sure how to respond. “Augustin isn’t concerned,” I said. “He just hates my work.”
“Maisie,” Nicole said gently. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
“It is!” I shoved my plate away. I’d lost my appetite. I felt sick. “He told me again today that my art still isn’t good enough.”
“That’s just ridiculous,” Françoise almost choked on her food as she leapt to my defence. “I love your pictures of Claude!”
“Well, Augustin doesn’t love them,” I said. “He likes art that is modern.”
Françoise huffed at this. “So you are supposed to just become a clone and do whatever Augustin likes? I thought art was about having your own ideas? What is original about doing what everyone else in the class is doing?”
Nicole frowned. “Françoise has a point. You must be true to yourself, Maisie. Good art can never be made by pretending to be someone else.”
Nicole put her hands to her throat and fiddled with a large gold necklace that she often wore that was studded with tourmaline and tiger’s eye. “All the same, Augustin is a great teacher, his opinion is very respected. For him, I know, there is much at stake with the Lucie’s auction looming. The cream of Paris society will be out in force to snap up the work of his students, and the success of this society event is all riding on Augustin. He is the gatekeeper, choosing which work is good enough to put forward for auction. He is incorruptible too. He will never hand over anything that does not genuinely meet his exacting standards. To do so would be to destroy the esteemed name of the Paris School itself.”
Nicole placed both her palms flat on the table decisively. “Maisie, we need to solve this problem. I can see now I have not done enough since you arrived in Paris to expand your vision and feed your creative spirit. You are young, and it is only natural that you lack the historical perspective the older pupils in your class possess. To develop your art in the contemporary way Augustin wishes you to do, you should be exposed to the galleries here where all the best examples of those kinds of work are held. Tomorrow, Françoise will take you to the Pompidou Centre and the Louvre. The famous artists you see hung on the walls there may inspire you to progress in your own art.”
“The Pompidou and the Louvre?” Françoise groaned. “Maman! There will be queues of tourists for miles!”
“Do you want to help Maisie or not?” Nicole replied. “Then get out the door by nine and you two will be at the front of the queue before anyone else has had their morning coffee!”
***
“Maisie! Wake up, we are late already!” Françoise was at my door the next morning at nine, yawning and still in her pyjamas. We dressed in haste to make up lost time but by the time we’d had croissants and hot chocolate it was almost ten. We walked briskly through the streets towards the Pompidou Centre. “Come on!” Françoise kept coaxing me to go faster. “The crowds, oh the crowds!”
The Pompidou already had a queue when we arrived. The building looked like a spaceship – covered with weird plastic test tubes housing the escalators to the different levels.
As we swept from floor to floor, I tried hard to take it all in as Françoise led the charge through art eras from the surrealists, to cubists and postmodernists.
In the Dadaist wing, Françoise pointed out the painting of the Mona Lisa with a moustache drawn on her. “That is Duchamp. And that is too, and that one,” she pointed at a urinal sitting in the middle of the room.
“Is that a toilet?” I said.
“No.” Françoise looked at me like I was stupid. “It’s art.”
“This is why Augustin and I are never ever going to understand each other,” I grumbled to Françoise.
“This is too modern for you, I think.” Françoise shrugged. “You’ll like the Louvre better. It’s full of the old stuff.”
To get inside the Louvre you had to enter through a big glass pyramid. Once we were inside we had to queue for an hour to see the real Mona Lisa – which looked just like the one at the Pompidou with the moustache only now there was no moustache, so that was a waste of time.
From there, we roamed each and every room, and I found myself awash in a sea of antiquity; cherubs flying and angels playing harps and statues of naked women with no arms. It was all beautiful, and I could see how amazingly clever the artists must have been to paint them or carve them out of marble, you know, all of that, but even though I could see the works were important, none of them truly connected with me. Until I came into a room of nineteenth-century art. Here, one wall of the room was taken up by a massive painting, almost half the length of the gallery wall. The painting drew me to it and I stood in front of it and felt dwarfed by its size and power.
It was a painting of horses. There were almost a dozen of them in the image, a wild herd, all of them grey. In the foreground there was a cluster of mares, some with young foals at foot, and behind them were the stallions standing guard over the rest, gazing imperiously to the horizon where the coastline was battered by the wild, roiling grey-blue waves of the ocean. This was a desolate and remote landscape where the surf was rough, the skies were darkened and stormy and the tempestuous weather was clearly maddening for the horses. Some of them were fighting against the wild weather, shaking their heads and flinging their manes. Two young colts to the far left of the frame were engaged in a fight, rearing up on their hinds legs, although it looked like their battle was nothing more than play to let off a little steam.
The real focus of the artwork, though, was at the centre of the painting. A proud and stoic grey mare, who weathered the storm that was raging about her and focused her gaze on the young colt that was at her flank. He looked so newborn that his legs could bare
ly hold him up. He was vulnerable and precious, as if all the things that were pure and good in the world belonged in that one moment just to him. And the painting itself – it was remarkable. It was both real and magical at the same time. The technique was so flawless it could almost have been a photograph, and yet at the same time there was so much of the artist’s heart and soul on display. It moved me in a way no art, not even the mighty Whistlejacket, had ever done before.
I was so consumed by it, the crowds of tourists around me melted away and I was awash in the grey seas that expanded before me. How did the artist make each and every brush stroke so perfect, how did they give the horses such depth and character? This painting in front of me now was exactly what I wanted to do with my own work, to capture the very essence of nature armed with nothing more than oils and brushes. I didn’t care what Augustin said about art being modern. I wanted to paint something real and to have it be as good as this art that hung before me now. Finally, I tore my eyes away from the work itself and I stepped forward at last so that I could read the plaque beneath:
Rose Bonifait, Grignons de Camargue, 1853.
***
“She has this way of doing their tails, so that the colours of the hairs are all very different, taupe and mustard, charcoal and white but together they mingle into grey and it looks so lifelike …” I raved on to Françoise as we walked back upstairs heading up and into the glass pyramid space so that we could exit through the gift shop to leave the Louvre.
I had not stopped talking about Rose since I saw the painting. I was still processing its significance, I think. It was an amazing work, and what made it even more amazing for me was the date on it – 1853. So Rose had painted it after she became paralysed.
Françoise, though, was barely listening to me. She was whingeing about the Louvre again. “The crush of people to get out is even worse than it was to get in!” she complained as we pushed through the doors.
“It’s not just the crowds,” I said. “There’s something else going on outside.”
We were trying to leave, but for some reason everyone else was pushing past us in the opposite direction, back inside the museum.
“Get inside!” Somebody shouted at us. “Get inside now!”
Suddenly the mad surge of people coming at us was no longer just a crowd of annoying tourists. They were a panic-stricken mob! There were people with terror in their eyes, fighting to get in – running and shoving, all of them desperate to get inside the building. We were stuck in the crowd and I was calling out to Françoise. I’d lost her completely and then I felt her hand grasp mine and pull me forward and suddenly the both of us were out on the street and there were more people, pushing us, shoving us.
“Françoise?” I felt panic rising in me now too. “Françoise? What’s going on?”
And then there was the deafening sound of police sirens wailing through the air, and a pop-pop-pop like fireworks and smoke fizzing up from the cobblestones. Smoke bombs, thrown by the police, had landed on the ground outside the pyramid. They let out long silver plumes of smoke shrouding the square around the Louvre.
All around us now, people were no longer just pushing and shouting. Now they began to scream. I was still blocking the Louvre exit and one man pushed past me so hard that I fell over. Françoise helped me back to my feet again.
“Come on!” she said. “We need to get out of here.”
I ran after her, panting, terrified. The smoke from the bombs was making my eyes stream and it was hard to see where I was going.
And then, across the road, on the other side of the square, I saw Oscar and Claude.
Oscar wore a high-vis vest, and he rode alongside three other mounted officers on chestnut horses. They were blowing whistles, signalling and moving the crowds along, beckoning for people to move out of the open street and into the buildings that bordered the square.
“That’s Claude!” I pointed him out to Françoise. “The horse? The one from my pictures? It’s him –”
I didn’t get to finish because over the sound of the sirens and the bombs, suddenly another noise cut through. There was a car, the engine revving, tyres squealing and more screams now, people yelling and crying out.
Across the courtyard, people were scattering, running in every direction as the car – well, it was a van, I could see it now, a white van – going as fast as if it were on a motorway, sped right through the crowds.
“What’s he doing?” Françoise said. “Hey! He can’t drive through here, it’s pedestrians only!”
And that was when I realised what the van was doing. “He’s going to hit the pyramid!” I said. “He’s doing it on purpose! Françoise, we need to run!”
By then, though, the crowds were pushing us back towards the Louvre, but I fought my way out, heading towards Claude and Oscar.
“This way!” I called to Françoise. “Run!”
I began to sprint across the square as the van mounted the kerb, still driving straight for the pyramid.
“Françoise …” I had thought she’d been running right behind me, but she must have been swept up in the crowd and forced back towards the Louvre entrance. I could see her now, far behind me and only just now breaking free of the crush, running to catch me.
“Françoise!”
I screamed as the van veered towards her. There were police cars chasing it, driving fast through the smoke haze and the siren noise. And at the same time I saw Oscar and Claude heading towards the pyramid too, galloping over the cobbles at breakneck speed. At first I thought their intention was to get to Françoise before the van could strike, so that Oscar could scoop her up on to Claude’s back with him and out of harm’s way, the way a knight swoops and picks up a princess. But this was not a fairy story, this was a horror story, and such a move now was impossible. Instead, Oscar, as a trained policeman, had seen Françoise in the path of the van and had immediately understood that he must commit to an action that had only one outcome.
What happened next would have a hundred witnesses. The people directly inside the pyramid had a ringside seat to it all. As the van bore down on the pyramid they realised they had nowhere to escape and all they could do was watch it come for them. Except … then the young gendarme of the Garde républicaine came riding on his enormous black horse, galloping hard, coming straight at the pyramid from the opposite direction so that at the very last moment he appeared to confront the van. And before anyone could really understand what had just happened, there was the most sickening screech of tyres and the smell of rubber and then the horrible thud of flesh on metal as Oscar and Claude took the full impact and the van ploughed straight into both of them.
Claude’s legs buckled as he went down and then he and Oscar both disappeared. And then before I could even gasp for breath, the noise was deafening as the crowd broke free of the Louvre pyramid, and all of a sudden the courtyard was in the grip of mass panic. People were running at me! Trying to get as far as they could from the van and the pyramid, and within seconds I was being thrown to the ground and trampled and trapped by the crush of bodies above me. I felt myself being kicked in the head as I tried to stand and I was certain I would be killed, and then suddenly I felt a hand reach out to me.
“Maisie!” Françoise dragged me back to my feet. “Come on! We have to get out of here!”
I was shaking with shock and horror, but she had her arm around me. “Run, Maisie!” And although my mind was reeling my body obeyed and we did the only thing we could. We ran.
Sixteen missed calls blinked up in neon green on Françoise’s phone – all of them were from Nicole.
“It is all over the news!” Nicole told Françoise when she called back. “Are you safe? Tell me where you are! I’ll come for you.”
We sheltered in the doorway of a fancy boutique on the rue de Rivoli and minutes later Nicole arrived. When she leapt out of the car and clutched Françoise to her, the tears in her eyes made me suddenly miss my dad, and I realised the news of what had happened had p
robably gone global already.
“I should call him in case he’s worried about me,” I told Nicole.
She gave me her phone – mine had been lost in the rush. “Of course. Let him know you are OK.”
There was such relief in my dad’s voice when he heard me over the phone. He’d been trying to call me too. “It’s all over the BBC,” he said. “They’re calling it a terror attack.”
He hadn’t realised, of course, just how close I had been at the time and when I told him I was actually at the Louvre when it happened – well, that was a big mistake!
“Maisie, I want you on the next flight out of there,” he said.
“Dad, that’s ridiculous!” I said. “I’m fine. I don’t want to come home.”
“Maisie …”
“Dad, please …”
All the way home in the car we fought about it. I could see why my dad was so worried, but like I said to him, terror attacks happen in London too! What surprised me when I was talking to him was how much I wanted to stay in Paris. Even though things had been tough at art school, it seemed like the wrong thing to leave now. What was keeping me here the most was Claude and Oscar. Reports on the attack were coming through non-stop on the news. They said the horse and the gendarme were both alive but in a serious condition. I kept thinking there must have been a way I could have helped them, somehow gone back to them after the van had struck. At the time, though, we’d been running for our lives, and after that …?
“You would never have got through the police cordon,” Nicole said. Which was probably true, but now it was all over, I knew I needed to see them. Except I didn’t know where to begin to find them.
“Leave that to me,” Nicole said. She made some calls, and by the time we were home again, Nicole’s team had tracked Oscar down to the local hospital on the Île de la Cité.
