Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  She paid the bill, left the café, and walked on with no idea where she was going and only intermittent clues about where she actually was. She wandered into crooked lanes lined with yellow restaurant signs and placards picturing platters of couscous or glossy Vietnamese stir-fry, a deserted side street of dusty shops with vintage printing presses, a block of bland concrete apartment houses. At last she rounded a corner and found herself in the place de la Contrescarpe.

  Getting her bearings encouraged her, as did the lovely square. Hey, this wasn’t so bad—being in Paris by herself without a care in the world! And let’s hear it for magical thinking! Once more, it was as if her thoughts affected her surroundings, as if the improvement in her mood had managed to conjure up this curving street of bookstores, this shop window full of glossy volumes on Flemish painting, these bins of wispy botanical drawings in crackling cellophane slips. The rain had stopped. From time to time there were even coy hints that the sun might break through.

  Nina walked on and got lost again and at last had a panicky moment when she came out of a dark narrow street and into an open square and looked up and saw the Eiffel Tower looming above her like Godzilla. All right! She knew where she was now! Not where she wanted to be! In the wrong direction completely and much farther than she’d intended.

  But what was she so scared of? At any point she could find the nearest metro station and take the subway back to the hotel. What stop was nearest the hotel? That was something Leo would know, one of the many travel facts he would have on file in his mind. Probably he would also know where exactly the hotel was. This was scary, Nina saw now, how quickly one could surrender charge of the most basic information.

  Once she’d got lost with Leo. Even Leo was lost. They’d come out on a grimy boulevard jammed with buses emitting black smoke. Leo sent her to look at the street sign, and when she came back and told him the name, he gritted his teeth and snapped, “Spell it!”

  An elderly gentleman stopped and helped them, a pleasant man who seemed to Nina still to be living in Paris in the ’50s, a city of lovers so wrapped up in each other they often wound up lost and had to be set back on course. He beamed and warmly grasped Leo’s elbow, and soon Leo and Nina forgot their quarrel and were grinning at each other and at the old man, whom they kept turning around to wave at.

  Now, reaching a corner, Nina looked down a street of pale dignified houses. It was the neighborhood—the street—on which she’d stayed with Leo. Halfway down that block was the hotel in which Edith Wharton entertained Morton Fullerton while waiting for the plasterers and parquet-polishers and stained-glass installers to finish work on her home. Now the hotel seemed magnetic, drawing Nina to it. And for what? To gaze in at the lobby with a lump in her throat?

  Nina remembered Leo pointing down the street and noting that the Rodin Museum was just a few blocks over. He said they had to go there, but they hadn’t gone anywhere. They’d stayed in their room and joked about Nina writing a piece for which she didn’t have to get out of bed. They never went outside—not once—except to move to the next hotel. So the neighborhood was harmless enough if Nina steered clear of that one building.

  She would go to the Rodin Museum. And she would try, she would really try not to get suckered into thinking about the tragic life and death of Camille Claudel.

  Leo loved the story of Camille Claudel having been Rodin’s student, his mistress, then his colleague, a gifted sculptor, then going mad because he wouldn’t leave his wife. Just before they put her away in the mental ward forever, she destroyed her own work, trashed her entire studio and her most brilliant sculptures.

  Nina liked the story considerably less than Leo did, yet now the thought of Camille Claudel made Nina feel reassuringly in control. She was still a long way from going certifiably insane over Leo! Were there Claudels in the Rodin Museum? Nina couldn’t remember. But she wanted to find out. It was similar to, but better than, a pilgrimage to Simone de Beauvoir’s grave. If this was what Paris was giving her, Nina might as well be gracious and take it. De Beauvoir, Claudel, Madame Cordier, Achmed’s girlfriend, Nina—sisters under the skin, in this city of women who love too much, Paris, city of broken hearts!

  She walked around the block to avoid the Edith Wharton hotel and was afraid she was lost again when she took a turn—the wrong one, surely—and found herself alongside the smooth cement wall that bordered Rodin’s gardens. This experience of being lost and lost and then suddenly found had happened to her in Venice but never before in Paris.

  Somehow she’d found the Rodin Museum! But the heavy doors were half shut. The ticket booth was empty. Was the museum closed? Nina might have turned away, but at that moment a chill autumn sun burst through the clouds, which (thinking magically, again) she took as a message of personal encouragement.

  Several people were in the garden, too far away for Nina to see if they were museumgoers or workers. On the opposite side of the building was the famous statue of Balzac in his voluminous robe, staggering beneath the prodigious weight of his own genitalia. From a sagging rope connecting two trees hung scallops of tricolor bunting and a banner announcing the hundred and fiftieth anniversaire of the naissance of Auguste Rodin.

  Nina ventured up the walk between the plane trees, up the steps, through the doors, and into the huge foyer. The wintry light streaming onto the parquet floors and the scrolling staircase was refracted at crisp brilliant angles by the antique glass in the tall windows.

  A young man was sitting at a desk. After a while he looked up. He was desolated to tell Nina that the museum was fermé.

  “Pourquoi?” said Nina.

  “Une fête,” he explained. “L’anniversaire de l’artiste.”

  “Ah, oui! D’accord.” said Nina. She felt she should seem more happy about the great sculptor’s birthday than disappointed for her own selfish reasons, being shut out of the museum. But why hadn’t they posted a sign outside or closed the gate completely? Why had they lured her in so this young man could reject her in person?

  Just then a door opened, and an elderly woman ran out and shook Nina’s hand.

  “Welcome! Welcome! Enchantée!”

  Obviously, she was mistaking Nina for someone else. But in the rush of the moment Nina couldn’t say so. First there was the challenge of putting it in French. And something about the woman’s age made Nina hesitant, lest the woman assume her mistake was a sign of decrepitude and decline. Or was Nina the decrepit one? Her own self-doubt was so intense that for a moment she wondered: Maybe they did know each other, and Nina had just forgotten. Lately she often found herself greeting strangers warmly or failing to recognize people who seemed to have known her for years. She often believed and trusted the other person more than she trusted herself, and had had many friendly bewildered chats on the phone before the caller inquired if she might like to sit on his face. All this had set her up for Leo’s telling her what to think, all the more so because she thought of herself as having a mind of her own.

  “Je suis Madame Ariette Martin,” the old woman said.

  Nina smiled and inclined her head. There was no need for her to say her name—that is, whatever name was supposed to be hers.

  Madame Martin addressed the young man in French, too fast for Nina to catch it. Like Madame Cordier, the old woman was wearing a suit, but hers was a severe dark blue. A tiny medal winked from her right lapel. Another little sparrow, the same species as Madame Cordier, a different breed from the peasant women who slaughtered the nightly pig.

  A silk paisley scarf was tucked artfully under the collar of her jacket. Her penciled eyebrows were sketched in with a feathery hint of surprise repeated in the bright blue eyes that widened as she said, “Parlez-vous français?”

  “Je comprends,” said Nina. “Mais je ne parle pas.”

  Madame Martin smiled ruefully. She understood why Nina might not want to speak: shyness combined with an understandable respect for the beauties of the French language.

  “Je suis désolée! Je ne par
le pas anglais.” Well then, it was settled. She could just speak French to Nina and not have to listen to what Nina said.

  And Nina might not have to reveal that she wasn’t whoever this woman thought. Because by now Madame Martin had taken Nina’s coat and they were rapidly passing the point at which Nina could gracefully bail out. And what if she didn’t? At parties, everyone pretended to recognize people they couldn’t place and watched helplessly as the last moment for a confession sped by. Obviously, whomever Nina had been mistaken for was entitled to be welcomed and given a private tour of the museum that was closed to Nina. And as Leo used to say: Whom was it going to hurt?

  Had Nina had a good flight? Madame Martin began in a French that sounded as if she herself were learning it phonetically.

  “Oui,” said Nina. “Très confortable.”

  Madame touched her heart and said, It is his birthday. Already her speech had been slightly sped up by an influx of emotion.

  It occurred to Nina that she could write a piece for Allo! on the centenary and a half of Auguste Rodin’s birth. Allo! readers adored that sort of thing, invitations to make their own pilgrimages to honor the first appearance or demise of romantic cultural figures.

  Madame Martin stepped back so Nina could precede her into the museum. And now it was definitely too late to find out who she thought Nina was. Probably some American art historian or curator or writer. Writer? Had Leo alerted her, too? Relax, Nina reminded herself. He couldn’t have known she’d come here.

  Nina drifted into a gleaming salon, then stopped so abruptly that the old woman almost stepped on her heels and gave a stifled yelp of alarm. A moment later, Nina paused before a marble sculpture of a crouched woman, leaning forward, spilling her long hair onto a rock. Her white marble back was smoother than skin. The hollows at the base of her spine made Nina’s hand ache to touch them.

  Last summer, Nina rode up in the elevator at Allo! with a man who had a beautiful tattoo, an elaborate apple tree dropping an apple that reappeared twice as it rolled down the length of his suntanned arm. Nina could hardly stop herself from reaching out to press the apple with the tip of her finger. The man wore black short shorts, a leather cap, a leather lace-up vest. He probably wouldn’t have minded. Leo would have misunderstood; he would have thought her wanting to touch the man’s arm was about sex. But it was more about childhood, when the world had a sexual buzz, the air, the sun, the bees, earthworms, dogshit, and you wanted to touch it all, before you learned that you shouldn’t.

  An old girlfriend of Leo’s had joined a cult and now wrote him letters saying that she was experiencing nonstop sex with plants and rocks and trees. Leo told Nina, and they’d had a good laugh about that. They knew what real sex was. It wasn’t about vibrations from rocks or about the vegetable kingdom. Nor was it those women shrieking behind every French hotel room door!

  He loved women, someone said in French. Madame Martin had come up behind Nina.

  Madame spoke faster and faster, and soon Nina was losing crucial connectives. Sometimes she would follow whole sentences and then miss one critical word. What made it even harder was the talking and stopping, talking and stopping, the peculiar rhythms of speech while walking through a museum. Half the time Nina’s back was turned as she moved from one work to another, in this case from naked body to naked body or group of naked bodies, lovely smooth athletic torsos, one sex sculpture after another, here a couple embracing, tipped back on their knees, his face buried in her breast, there a young man with his robe open to just above his groin.

  The gist of what Madame Martin was saying was what a genius Rodin was, his work was entirely original, entirely new, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, like the Renaissance, Leonardo. Never in art history did the human body have the life that Rodin gave it. How sad it was, how long it took for the world to recognize his gifts. First they accused him of casting from life, and then called his work obscene. Madame threw up her hands and shrugged. Then she said something Nina didn’t quite get, something about people, Paris, rumors accusing Rodin of being Nijinsky’s lover…. Was Rodin Nijinsky’s lover? The next few sentences streamed past in a current that Nina could only observe until the word Rilke leaped out like a gleaming silver trout.

  “Yes, Rilke!” Nina said. “Son secrétaire.”

  You didn’t have to be a psychologist to understand that Madame Martin was madly in love with Rodin. Well, who wouldn’t adore this genius who so worshiped the female body? There were photographs on the walls that Nina and Madame Martin studied together: Rodin, incredibly handsome at every stage of his life.

  In one photo he sat on a park bench. He’d grown stout and looked very much the Artist in his bushy white beard, long morning coat, and straw hat. He was sketching a Thai or Cambodian dancer, a lovely girl of about eleven, in costume, with her toes turned out, her delicate hands curled like temple spires. In the background, two policemen looked on, fascinated. Leo would have loved this photo with its graphic representation of Eros on the periphery of the domain of Law and Order.

  It was sad, Madame Martin was saying. Fame ignored Rodin in his youth; old age cut him down in his prime. His mind went, he was not himself, and just before his death he finally married Rose Beuret, who had been his mistress for forty years and bore him a son, and in the beginning wet down his maquettes so that the clay wouldn’t harden. Madame Martin doused one of the sculptures with imaginary water: a naked woman crouched like a cat on the chest of a naked man.

  “Madame Rodin,” Nina said. “Sajemme. Après quarante ans.”

  Was Nina’s French so unintelligible? The old woman looked bewildered. At last, she nodded vigorously. Ah, yes, Madame Rodin, the old shoe worn for forty years and married mostly for comfort, the good fit of the broken-in. Madame Rodin posed no threat; she was no one Madame Martin had to contend with.

  They reached a group of figures in bronze, and perhaps Nina already knew whose work it was because she leaned over and checked the caption though she hadn’t, with the others. Of course, it was Camille Claudel’s, this trio of tragic figures, a man trudging forward, suffering, refusing to be consoled or dissuaded, though a nude kneeling woman pulled at his arm, begging him to stay. He forged onward into the protective and smothering embrace of a monstrous old hag with wings, a witch pretending to be an angel.

  Maturity, the piece was called.

  “Give me a break,” said Nina.

  “Pardon?” said Madame Martin.

  The sculpture was technically excellent. But not nearly so good, not half so good as the worst piece by Rodin. But of course. His work was all about sex, and this one was all about grief. Who would choose this sculpture over a Rodin, except perhaps for a melancholic, suicidal adolescent?

  But that was unfair to Camille Claudel! Her life was so much harder than Rodin’s, as she progressed through the frustrating stages from student to apprentice to famous artist’s mistress. A childish voice whined in Nina’s head: At least she had Rodin! Nina remembered Leo saying how they’d found Claudel in her studio standing amid the shards of clay and chunks of broken marble. Maybe she overlooked this sculpture or wanted it to survive: her wrenching transparent comment on losing Rodin to his wife.

  “C’est triste,” Madame Martin said.

  “Oui, c’est triste,” said Nina. And now she felt bitterly sorry for poor Camille Claudel, dead and buried in the ground while they patronized her with their pity, Nina and this old woman who loved Rodin herself and was secretly glad that her major rival was out of the way for good. Wasn’t this just another version of the jealous unspoken competition that had made for such a lively breakfast this morning with Madame Cordier?

  As if Claudel’s grief were contagious, Nina felt tired and chilled, and her guide wasn’t nearly so frisky as she’d been a short while before. But then Madame Martin had a happy idea.

  “Venel, venez,” she said. Nina trotted after her, outside, across the garden and into an adjacent building.

  “Son atelier,” Madame announced, and
now it was Nina who touched her heart.

  “His studio,” she translated for herself.

  “Oui,” said Madame Martin.

  Elegant track lighting spotlit selected parts of a long dark room with a central island partitioned into segments—not unlike a salad bar. But this salad bar held clay body parts, thousands of thumb-sized legs, knees, shoulders, tiny forearms and tinier noses. They reminded Nina of milagros, those silver cutouts of feet, heads, and eyes that, in Latin countries, the faithful left on their altars to let the saints know which organs were in need of miraculous cures. In his office Leo had a giant wooden cross encrusted with milagros—practically his favorite possession. He said one reason he loved it was because he was Jewish. But unlike milagros, those icons of damage and disease, these arms and legs were healthy. In fact they were in motion, wriggling around in their cases, seeking their lost living bodies.

  “Toujours, toujours,” said Madame Martin. She held out her hand and flexed her fingers as if kneading clay, and she and Nina stood there watching her knead the air. Always Rodin had clay in his hand, always he was making something: a body out of nothing.

  Nina walked along the cases and stopped at a tray of breasts, the shape and size of gooseberries, walnuts, grapes, or cherries, each one different from the next, every one of them pretty. The old woman noticed where Nina had stopped.

  He loved the body, she said.

  And now she was nearing a part of her story that she so much wanted Nina to hear that for the first time she acknowledged that Nina might not be following every word. She slowed down and repeated everything several different ways.

  It seemed that Rodin often made love to his models in his studio. And when he did, he put a sign on his door that said: ABSENT. VISITING CATHEDRALS.