The Library of Light and Shadow

by M. J. Rose

  I tried to hold in my sob but failed.

  “What did I say?” Clifford had come up behind me. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  I shook my head. “You didn’t say anything wrong.” I sighed. Then tried to smile. “I’m getting so very tired of crying.”

  Chapter 7

  My mother was my painting teacher until I turned nineteen, when we both decided I’d do well to get a broader education. I was already too influenced by her, and she wanted me to find my own style as much as I did. Paris and L’École des Beaux-Arts were the obvious solution. L’École was the Notre Dame of schools. Every great painter from Jacques-Louis David to Delacroix, from Fragonard to Matisse and Rouault, and my mother’s mentor Gustave Moreau, had attended. In 1894, my mother had been its first female student. But by the time I began my studies there in 1919, there were quite a few women attending.

  Since my great-grandmother, my older sister, and my brother were all in Paris, I had family to live with, which made the whole plan feasible. The City of Lights was far too sophisticated, my parents said, for me to live there on my own. I’d grown up in the south of France, which was calmer and more genteel, and I wasn’t as urbane as most city dwellers, they reminded me. Focusing so much on my art, I hadn’t yet learned the ways of the world.

  I enjoyed living with my great-grandmother in our family home in the sixth arrondissement. Maison de la Lune, as it was called, was one of a half dozen four-story mid-eighteenth-century stone houses that shared a common courtyard backing up onto rue du Dragon. Decorated and designed to please her gentlemen friends, her salons and “fantasy bedrooms,” as Grand-mère called them, were the stuff of legend. In the old days, only rich men had been able to afford the many pleasures found inside. But Grand-mère had a soft spot for soldiers, too, and they could enjoy offerings for far less.

  Grand-mère had given me my mother’s bedroom on the second floor and her studio in the bell tower. The oldest part of the house, that ancient wing dated back to the fifteenth century and had been imbued with magick by my ancestor, the original La Lune.

  For all my parents’ concerns, Grand-mère was quite liberal. One of France’s great courtesans, she believed in women’s equality and freedom and wanted me to explore all the opportunities her great city offered. She gave me a generous allowance on top of what my father provided and set few rules. The one she stressed was that if I chose to take a lover, I would promise to be careful and follow all the steps she outlined to prevent pregnancy.

  Nothing, she insisted, could ruin a woman’s life more than an unwanted child. Just as nothing was as rewarding as having a wanted one. Her son, my grandfather, had died before I was born, and Grand-mère could never speak of him without a smile accented by tears.

  The war had ended in late 1918, and by 1919, there was a certain fierceness to Paris. As if people had been holding their breath and were finally letting it go and couldn’t get enough fresh air. My brother was attending the Sorbonne and studying business administration, since his ambition was to open an art gallery and sell both my work and my mother’s. He was also living at Grand-mère’s house. As a man, he could come and go as he liked, but when it came to me, he was even more overprotective than our great-grandmother. Sebastian checked up on my whereabouts all the time. Mostly, he was worried that a young man would try to seduce me.

  “You’re vulnerable,” he’d remind me. “You’re not a city girl. These Parisians, especially those back from the war, are wily and know how to turn a girl’s head.”

  “I’m not interested in romance, Sebastian. I only care about painting,” I always told him.

  “You say that now, but there’ll be a man who comes along, and you’ll feel differently. He’ll sweep you off your feet, and you’ll forget you ever picked up a paintbrush.”

  I’d laugh at him, and as soon as he went out or retired to his bedroom, I’d sneak out and meet my friends in the bars in Montmartre, or in their studios, where, unlike me, they lived in squalor and artistic glory.

  I’d meant what I’d told him. I really wasn’t romantically interested in the young men I met. I was in love with painting. With seeing. Losing my sight for that long year and then regaining it had given me an appreciation that ruled my world. I yearned to learn all the tricks and hone my ability, so that one day, I could put down on canvas the strange dream world that I saw all around me, with all of its shine and gloss.

  Despite my freedom, I didn’t take a lover the first few months I lived in Paris. I fraternized with the other students, joining them after class around the corner for coffee or wine at La Palette, visiting museum exhibits, going to nightclubs.

  The war was over, but everyone was still learning how to live without a threat hanging over them. Paris was trying to heal, but she was wounded. And there seemed an endless flow of young disfigured or wounded men. Most of the men and the boys who’d been to war still had a glazed look in their eyes. What they had seen at the front couldn’t be unseen. What they had endured couldn’t be unlived.

  During those first months at L’École, in addition to studying painting, I began learning more about my esoteric heritage at the feet of one of my mother’s mentors, the publisher and mystical leader Pierre Dujols, who owned the Librairie du Merveilleux at 76 rue de Rennes, only a few blocks from Grand-mère’s maison.

  The bookshop also functioned as a salon frequented by all sorts of occultists, magicians, kabalists, hermeticists, and alchemists. France had been home to mystics since the Middle Ages. Spiritualism had been popular since the nineteenth century, and even the most respected dignitaries dabbled in the dark arts. In 1853, Victor Hugo began conducting a series of more than one hundred séances to contact his drowned daughter. The painters Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Moreau, the writers Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, and the astronomer Camille Flammarion, just to name a few, were all fascinated with alternative beliefs.

  Aside from the serious occultists and magicians, the bookshop also catered to people who were simply curious, like the Manhattan partygoers at the Stewards’ penthouse who were fascinated by the idea of psychics, séances, and so on but would never have gone so far as to step into witchcraft.

  Dujols had spent his whole life studying various disciplines and searching for the philosopher’s stone. Often in the evening, his wife, Marie-Louise, offered card readings, palmistry, and séances. Although she was only in her early fifties, she had long white hair. With her very black eyes and strong bone structure, she looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting I’d once seen of a Delphic oracle.

  After the war erupted, the police began to reinforce an ancient law against fortune-telling in order to protect the country’s desperate citizens who were trying to make contact with deceased loved ones. So many had been duped by charlatans. Madame Dujols had a true gift and the deepest respect for those who came to see her. Even so, she was forced to conduct readings in a hidden room of the bookshop in order to avoid arrest.

  Immediately after meeting me, she asked if she could study my palm. Hesitant at first, I relented when she told me how she’d read my mother’s palm when she was only a little older than I was and how she’d seen me in my mother’s life line.

  “I told her she would have four children,” Madame Dujols said. “And Sandrine pulled back her hand as quickly as if I had burned it.”

  I laughed.

  “I saw you and your brother, twins, caught in the currents. I told her that one day, you would save him from drowning.”

  “Very close,” I said, impressed. The stories I’d heard about her and her remarkable clairvoyance were true. “He saved me. Not the other way around.”

  During the evenings and afternoons I spent with Marie-Louise, we talked about my second sight, and she shared stories of her own abilities and how she had come to integrate them into her life and not be afraid of them. Her advice came too early for me. I wasn’t yet scared of my powers. They hadn’t been exposed to the world yet. They remained untested. By the time I dis
covered how destructive my gifts could be, she was in Paris and I in New York, and I could only remember some of what she’d imparted.

  Madame Dujols read my palm several times. She said she saw a break in my life line, a brush with death. And we both decided it was the afternoon that Sebastian and I had been swimming, when the rope had come loose and I’d almost drowned.

  “And there will be two men in love with you.”

  “Only two?” I was twenty, and it didn’t seem like enough.

  She laughed and then said, “To have one man truly love you is a gift. Two is a miracle.”

  “Which will I marry?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you see something wrong?”

  I knew that unlike some clairvoyants, Madame Dujols didn’t hold back when she saw danger or disaster or death.

  “Does he die?” I asked.

  “It’s possible, Delphine. I’m just not sure. Let’s look again in a few months. The lines change. Did you know that? Destiny is not fixed. It’s a probable path, but life alters it. Otherwise, how boring life would be, non?”

  All that fall and winter, I attended gatherings at the Librairie du Merveilleux and met many fascinating people, some of whom were working on the most arcane projects.

  Pierre Dujols was writing and publishing several books. Two of his protégés, Eugène Canseliet and the much older illustrator Jean-Julien Champagne, were often found at a table poring over the rare manuscripts that filled the shop’s shelves. There was talk that the two of them were working on a groundbreaking book, Le mystère des cathédrales. Their thesis suggested that alchemical secrets were encoded in the stone carvings and structures of Gothic cathedrals.

  By May 1920, Paris was awash with flowers and leaves bursting forth on all the trees. Often after school, I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens to find scenes to sketch, honing my skill at capturing a scene quickly.

  On May 16, in the late afternoon, I was walking around the pond, attracted by the young children with their toy sailboats.

  The sun was in my eyes, and there was a curious shimmering around the white sails, making each of them look like a passage to dreams.

  I’d just taken out my journal, turquoise leather with unlined sheets, and was sketching when I saw Mathieu Roubine, a man I recognized from the bookshop. He was Pierre Dujols’s nephew, and he was helping a little boy who was fretting over a sail that wouldn’t unfurl.

  I watched with curiosity. I’d never been introduced to Mathieu, but from the first time I’d seen him, he’d looked oddly familiar. His interactions with the child made a charming tableau, but I didn’t start sketching them because I was a sentimentalist. I was there to practice, and the composition of the tall man and the small boy had a symmetry to it that made a good design.

  I’d thought it would be challenging to capture the sweetness and the details. To get the right expression of worry on the boy’s face, the concentration on Mathieu’s, and the movement of their hands and bodies bent toward each other.

  Mathieu’s reflection swam on the surface of the pond. The simulacrum seemed ripped. Light was pouring out through the center of Mathieu’s back, as if he were made of paper and had been torn in half.

  Mesmerized, I continued watching the watery image as a shadow crept up behind him. A man with the face of an insect—a metallic head, ovoid dark eyes, a hose where his nose and mouth should have been. Only when I saw the bayonet he held, pointed at Mathieu, did I realize the man was wearing a gas mask.

  “Mathieu, watch out! On your right!” I shouted, as I ran toward him.

  Startled, Mathieu looked up.

  I continued running, prepared to—what? Push the attacker out of the way? I was hardly tall enough or strong enough to have done much good. But I wasn’t thinking. I just knew he was in danger. Terrible danger.

  I was in such a hurry that I didn’t see the young girl on the bicycle. Afterward, between her sobs, she claimed I had run in front of her. Her wheel hit my right leg. I fell forward toward the pavement.

  Mathieu was by my side in seconds. “Are you all right?”

  Ignoring the throbbing pain in my leg, I looked around behind him for the assassin. No one was even close except the child. Where had the attacker run? Impossibly, he’d been there one moment and was gone the next.

  “Are you all right?” Mathieu asked again.

  The boy was watching us, seemingly delighted by all the excitement.

  “Me? No. Yes. It doesn’t matter. There was a man …” I turned and looked around again in confusion. “There was a man behind you.”

  “There was no one here.”

  “Yes, he was right behind you. Wearing a helmet—it was gleaming in the sun.”

  “A soldier?” the boy asked, even more excited. “With a helmet? Like a Hun?”

  Mathieu’s gaze shifted away from me, off to the distance. “But that’s impossible.” He reached up and brushed his golden hair off his forehead. His gaze returned to me as he peered into my eyes. “Who are you? How do you know what happened to me? How do you know my name?”

  “I don’t know what you mean about what happened to you, but I know who you are from the bookshop. I’m there quite often.”

  Mathieu cocked his head. “I haven’t seen you.” He seemed bothered. Then he looked over at the boy, at his boat, and back at me. “Can you wait a moment? I have things I need to ask you, but I was just in the midst of salvaging my nephew Charles’s sailboat.”

  I nodded and prepared to stand, but I was a bit wobbly.

  “Let me help you up.”

  He held out his hand, and I took it. His fingers were rough. His grip strong. Almost too strong. Once he’d pulled me up, I tested standing on my leg. There was only a little pain. I reached down and touched it. My stocking had ripped, but there was no blood. By that night, though, I’d probably be black and blue.

  “You’ll wait?” he asked again, anxiously.

  “Of course,” I said. “I need to get my supplies and my notebook anyway.”

  I walked back to the bench where I had been sitting, barely limping. My pencils and case were there but not the journal. Then I remembered. I’d been holding it. When the girl on the bicycle hit me, had my notebook gone flying?

  I searched around but didn’t see it anywhere. There was only one other possibility. I walked up to the edge of the pond. There was my lovely turquoise sketchbook, lying on the bottom of the shallow concrete pool.

  “You dropped it because of me.” Mathieu had come up beside me.

  “No, because the cyclist hit me.”

  “But she hit you because you were running to me. Let me get it for you.” He rolled up his sleeve and reached down into the water.

  I was glad his back was to me, because I was sure I winced. His arm was a mass of ugly scar tissue, ropes of twisted, bubbled, white skin, stretched tight and shiny. I didn’t have to ask. We’d all seen far too many war wounds. But compared with most, he was one of the lucky ones. He still had that arm, and from watching him fish my journal out of the pond, I could see that it functioned properly.

  I tried to look away before he turned back, but he caught me staring. He handed me the journal. His fingers, I noticed, were unharmed and unscarred.

  “I’m afraid it’s ruined,” he said, as he rolled his sleeve back down. For a moment, I thought he was talking about his injury, but then he continued. “And it looks like it was once quite a lovely sketchbook.”

  I didn’t know what to do with the waterlogged and swollen mess dripping onto my shoes, so I put it down on one of the green metal chairs that ringed the pond.

  “Will you allow me to buy you a café crème or a glass of wine?” he asked.

  “So you can ask me questions, you mean, about what I saw?”

  He smiled. It seemed an effort and a bit restrained. Almost as if he were giving away a secret. “That, too. Aren’t you direct?”

  “I suppose I am. I’ve never understood people
who talk around things. My great-grandmother says it’s not a very feminine or socially acceptable trait.”

  “Well, I don’t understand people like that, either. There’s enough in the world not to understand without them mucking it up even worse by being coy or obtuse,” he said. “So your great-grandmother would find me socially unacceptable as well. But you won’t, will you? So please accept my poor apology and a libation.”

  Before I could answer, the little boy Mathieu had been helping came running up, tugged on his jacket, and asked Mathieu if he could finish fixing the boat. He looked at me.

  “It will only take a few minutes.”

  “Go ahead.”

  In the shop, I’d only seen Mathieu from a distance and not often. But now I had time to study him. He looked to be a little older than I. Perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five. As he bent over the boat, the wind blew his hair onto his face. Light brown shot through with strands of gold that he wore parted down the middle, waving to his shoulders. It wasn’t in style at all. Short, polished haircuts were all the rage. Were Mathieu’s Bohemian looks a statement of individuality or a defiant stance against the establishment? I imagined him in a painting done by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the famous eighteenth-century artist and one of my favorites. He’d paint him dramatically, at the bow of a boat or atop a steed, battling a foe.

  Mathieu’s face was a study in contrasts, from his wide forehead and aristocratic sharp nose to his almost too gentle mouth. There were secrets in his blue-gray eyes, unreadable to me, and an invitation.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen a man quite as beautiful.