Moonlight Over Paris

by Jennifer Robson

  He was middle-aged, perhaps in his early fifties, and was dressed more like a banker than an artist, with a collar and tie and rather old-fashioned coat. His hair, which he wore swept back off his brow, was less conventional, for it was dark and wavy and fell almost to his shoulders, and he had a carefully trimmed Vandyke mustache and beard. She wasn’t sure if he was handsome, or merely striking. Either way, he wasn’t the sort of man one ignored.

  He waited, his demeanor unchanging, until the room was entirely silent, and only then did he speak.

  “I am Fabritius Czerny. I expect one-quarter of you, perhaps as many as a third, to flee by the end of this week. I make no apologies. This is a difficult course of study, and far beyond the talents of many here today. If you find the work I give you too challenging, you are free to withdraw from the course, or you may wish to join our class for beginners.”

  His voice was soft and low, and only lightly accented. Under different circumstances, Helena might even have thought it beautiful.

  “I will be blunt: I am not a pleasant person. I am not, as the Americans among you might say, ‘a nice guy.’ I am not here to be your friend or your mentor, and I have no interest in your thoughts or opinions.

  “We shall begin from the beginning. You may think you know how to paint, but you do not. You know nothing. And so you must unlearn all the rubbish you have been fed, like so much pap, by your other teachers. You must forget all so you may learn all.”

  He surveyed the room, a dark-maned lion assessing a herd of terrified gazelle, but rather than hide behind her easel, as others were attempting to do, Helena straightened her back and didn’t look away when his gaze swept across her. She was made of sterner stuff, and she’d faced disapproving stares before. Compared to the first ball she’d attended after Edward had ended their engagement? This was nothing.

  “Most of you are American or English, so I shall teach this course in English. If you have difficulty understanding, ask a neighbor, and don’t even think of bothering me. You shall now embark on a series of sketches. Before you is paper sufficient for the exercise, as well as a selection of charcoal.”

  Maître Czerny set a tall stool upon the center of the stage and then strode to the side of the room, to a set of shelves that was crowded with objects of every color, shape, size, and substance. He selected a bowl of apples and, returning to the stage, placed it on the stool.

  “You may begin. You have ten minutes. Do not bother to prepare the paper; simply draw. Draw what you see before you.”

  Never in all her life had Helena been as apprehensive of a task as she was now. Withdrawing a stick of charcoal at random from the cup on her easel, she sketched a light outline—but she had chosen a piece of soft charcoal by mistake, and it left a thick, almost jet-black line on the paper. She scrubbed at it with a lump of putty eraser, and succeeded only in smearing the paper. Praying Maître Czerny wouldn’t notice, she flipped the paper over, found a thin stalk of vine charcoal, and began again. Outline. Shadows. Shadows softened.

  She needed to remove some of what she had added, and so add highlights, but the light in the salon was coming from two sources, the bank of windows and the electric lights that dangled overhead, and was reflected in quite different ways by the apples, which she was certain were papier-mâché or wax, and by the bowl, which was made of a dark, almost opaque glass. She needed to—

  “Enough!” Maître Czerny carried the bowl and apples back to the shelf and returned with an ornate and heavily tarnished silver candelabrum. “Take up a fresh sheet of paper. This time you have five minutes. Begin!”

  Her hand flew over the paper, trying in vain to capture what her eye saw, but she got the proportions all wrong, and she hadn’t the time to erase what she’d done, and the finer details of the silver were vanishing into a misshapen blur that bore more resemblance to a dead tree than a piece of antique silver, and—

  “Enough!” He removed the candelabrum and replaced it with a wreck of a violin, its strings broken and tangled. “Two minutes!”

  The shape of the instrument was easy to capture, but she’d barely sketched its outline when the dreaded order came—“Enough! One minute!”—and the violin was replaced with an enormous conch shell, pale ivory with a delicate pink interior, its curving lines so—

  “Enough! That is all for the moment.”

  Helena set down her charcoal, her hands shaking so badly that she had to fold them into her lap. Her sketches were crude, unfocused, and amateurish, while Mr. Moreau’s—she couldn’t help but glance at them—were elegant and effortlessly graceful.

  “Choose the best of your efforts, and set it on your easel,” their teacher commanded.

  Maître Czerny walked along the rows, muttering to himself in French and what Helena took to be Czech. Periodically he would groan loudly, or run a hand through his hair. Two or three times he examined a sketch for a few seconds longer, and then, before moving on, nodded curtly.

  At last he was at their row. He paused by Mr. Moreau’s sketch, a marvel of simplicity that captured the conch shell in four or five sweeping lines, and nodded approvingly. For Helena’s sketch, he offered no response, instead moving past as if he hadn’t even seen it. A moment later, she knew she’d been lucky to escape so easily, for his groan of disdain upon seeing the American girl’s work was accompanied by yet more hair-pulling and grumbling.

  When he had finished his inspection he returned to the front, scrubbed his hands over his face, and raised his eyes to the heavens. “Terrible. Simply terrible. Try again,” he commanded the entire class.

  Ten minutes to sketch a vase filled with ostrich plumes, five minutes for a heap of red and gold brocade, two minutes for a forlorn and moth-eaten stuffed pheasant, and finally one minute for a green glass fisherman’s float.

  “A few—a very few—of these sketches show promise,” he said upon his return to the front of the salon. “The rest belong in the bottom of a chicken coop. There is only one thing to be done: you will start at the very beginning.

  “Cone. Cylinder. Sphere. Cube. Torus.”

  Someone at the front must have grumbled, or made a face, because Maître Czerny was across the room in a flash, looming over the poor fellow, all but shouting in his face. “Did I not say I care nothing for your opinions?”

  He paced the width of the salon, back and forth, pulling his hair back from his brow so forcefully that Helena’s eyes fairly watered at the sight.

  “You long to be successful, do you not? You long to be the young new painter everyone is talking about. But you do not wish to do the work. And you cannot become great without learning how to draw.

  “It does not matter if you wish to paint like an Old Master or a Cubist—the education is the same. If you cannot draw, you are nothing. And your art? It is nothing.”

  He went once again to the shelves, and this time took down a plain wooden cylinder. This he placed on the stool. “I will give you one half hour to draw this cylinder. Begin.”

  Calm yourself, Helena thought. Calm. She could draw a cylinder in half an hour. This, she could do.

  Helena decided to prepare the paper before she began—not as painstakingly as she would ordinarily do, but enough to provide some depth to the sketch’s background. She dug a flat piece of compressed charcoal from the cup on her easel and, holding it flat against the paper, spread an even layer of light gray across its entire surface. No rag had been provided, so she used the cuff of her smock to blend the charcoal to a pale, even wash of silver. Turning the stick on end, she sketched the cylinder’s outline in quick, confident strokes. Shadows came next, and then highlights, which she created with swift, sure touches of her putty eraser. She worked carefully, pausing now and again to survey her progress, blocking out all thoughts of Maître Czerny and the other students.

  “Enough!” he called. “We have only enough time for one more shape. Shall we see what ruin you can make of a sphere? Begin.”

  Moments later, it seemed, the bells at Notre-Dame Cath
edral began to chime the hour. It was noon.

  Maître Czerny went to the door, issuing a final directive before departing. “Take your work with you. I have no use for it. For tomorrow, I expect you to prepare one example of each shape, executed to the best of your sadly limited abilities. À demain.”

  Chapter 9

  As soon as the door had closed behind Maître Czerny, air began to fill the salon again. Helena took a deep breath and tried to collect her thoughts.

  “You seem a little bouleversée,” Mr. Moreau said. “I am not sure of the word in English. Overturned?”

  “Bowled over, perhaps?”

  “Yes, exactly. I was thinking we should—”

  “Étienne!”

  They were interrupted by the arrival of another student, a woman who had been sitting on the other side of the salon, and whose work had elicited several rare nods from Maître Czerny. She and Mr. Moreau kissed cheeks and began a conversation in French that was far too animated for Helena to follow.

  “Miss Parr, allow me to introduce you to Mathilde Renault. I was about to ask if you’d like to share a coffee with me.”

  “Yes, please. But you must both call me Helena. I insist.”

  “We shall. We should all be on a first-name basis, should we not? As comrades in arms? Yes?”

  “I have the time for one coffee,” said Mathilde. “But what of your other friend?” she asked, looking over Helena’s shoulder at the American girl, who was slowly gathering her sketches into a bundle.

  “Of course,” Étienne agreed. “Excuse me, Mademoiselle—would you like to join us?”

  “I’d love to,” she said, her expression brightening.

  “I am Étienne Moreau, and these are my friends Mathilde Renault and Helena Parr.”

  “I’m pleased to make everyone’s acquaintance. I’m Daisy Fields.”

  No one spoke for a moment. The American girl simply had to be teasing them.

  “Truthfully—that is your name?” Étienne said, his eyes wide with amazement.

  “Well, my real name is Dorothy, but my parents called me Daisy when I was little and I guess it just stuck. It’s pretty silly, I know.”

  “Not at all,” Étienne insisted gallantly. “I think it suits you very well. Now—where shall we go? Mathilde?”

  “The Falstaff is not so very far.”

  “The Falstaff it is. Allons-y!”

  AS THEY FILED out of the grand salon and down the stairs, they were joined by a middle-aged woman who had been sitting on a stool in the corridor.

  “Do you know her?” Helena whispered to Daisy, for the woman’s eyes were focused to a disconcerting degree on her new friend.

  “That’s just Louisette. Daddy insists she accompany me everywhere. We hate one another.”

  “Oh . . . I see.”

  “I shouldn’t use the word ‘hate,’ I know. But she does get on my nerves. When Daddy first hired her, I tried to be nice. I’d invite her to sit with me, to have what I was having, but she always said no. So now I try to pretend she doesn’t exist.”

  When they got to Falstaff’s, which was just down the street from the academy, Daisy politely but firmly banished Louisette to a table at the far side of the café and asked the waiter to bring the woman a glass of water. But she didn’t touch the water, or ask for anything else. All she did was sit and stare at Daisy and, by extension, the rest of them. It really was quite unnerving.

  Soon, though, Helena was caught up in their conversation and having a grand time, though she barely touched the café noisette she had ordered. Étienne was on his third café express before he noticed.

  “Is there something not right with your coffee?”

  “Nothing at all. It’s simply . . . well, it’s a bit strong for me. I would normally have a café au lait, but—”

  “But the garçon would faint if you asked for such a thing after nine in the morning,” Étienne agreed. “The milk in the noisette—it isn’t sufficient?”

  “I think the trouble is that it still tastes like coffee to me, and I’m used to tea,” she admitted. “Don’t mind me. I’m in Paris now, and this is how Parisians take their coffee. I’ll learn to like it.”

  The Falstaff was a curious place—a café-bar in the heart of Paris that was decorated to resemble a British public house, with forest green banquettes, framed prints of hunting hounds and Scottish stags, and enough oak paneling to satisfy a Tudor. At least Helena assumed that had been the decorator’s intent, for she’d never actually been inside a public house.

  Their conversation so far had centered on Maître Czerny and their morning class. Daisy and Helena were still feeling bowled over, while Mathilde and Étienne were more phlegmatic. It seemed that tyrannical behavior was not uncommon among the city’s art teachers.

  “I was in a class once where the maître ripped our drawings to pieces when they displeased him,” Mathilde recalled. “And there was another teacher—remember Maître Homard, Étienne?”

  “God, yes. That wasn’t his real name, but we called him that because his face would become as red as un homard—how do you say it in English?”

  “A lobster?” Daisy offered.

  “Yes, that’s it. Once, I remember, he was so enraged by one student’s efforts—I think the poor fellow had overworked his paint—that he came leaping across the studio, waving a palette knife, and slashed the canvas in two. Right down the middle!”

  “Goodness me,” Daisy said. “That does put things in perspective.”

  “Do not be disheartened,” Mathilde advised. “Czerny will not always be so fierce.”

  “How do you and Étienne know one another?” Helena asked. He seemed to be in his early twenties, while Mathilde was nearer to thirty, she judged; as their accents when they spoke French were quite different, she doubted they had grown up together.

  “We were students at the École des Beaux-Arts together, last year,” Mathilde answered. “But we both found it . . . I’m not sure how to say . . . désagréable?”

  “Disagreeable.”

  “Ah. Nearly the same. Yes, it was disagreeable. I thought the teachers too rigid. Too attached to old traditions.”

  “I was asked to leave,” said Étienne with mischief in his eyes. “I consider it a great honor.”

  Thinking it impolitic to question him on the reason for his expulsion from the prestigious school, Helena turned to Daisy.

  “Did you come over from America specially for the course?” she asked.

  “Oh, no. I’ve been here for years. My father’s a doctor, and during the war he came over to oversee the American hospitals here. My mother had died a few years before, and he needed someone to run the house and act as his hostess when he entertained. That kind of thing.”

  “I see,” said Helena, thinking that Daisy would have been awfully young for such responsibilities, at least when they first came to France.

  “Daddy’s retiring at the end of the year—they asked him to stay on after the war, which is why we’re still here—so I suppose we’ll be going home then.”

  “Why are you taking the course?” Mathilde asked. “Have you studied art before?”

  “No, not really. After the war, I worked in a studio for a while, helping with the supplies and some preparatory work. I learned a little while I was there, and then, after the studio closed, I bought some instruction books and tried to learn that way. Daddy wasn’t very keen on my going out to school, you see. But I convinced him, finally, that I should have some lessons. So here I am, although it may not be for long . . .”

  “For someone who’s never had an art class in her life, you are very good, you know,” Helena reassured her. And it was true. Maître Czerny had been wrong to dismiss Daisy’s work so cruelly, for several of her sketches had been competently executed.

  Étienne reached across the table to pat Daisy’s arm. “Here we say le chien qui aboie ne mord pas. The barking dog does not bite, I think? He is a loud man, and a rude man, but you must not be afraid of h
im.”

  “And you, Hélène?” Mathilde asked. “Why are you here?”

  “Just after Christmas last year, I came down with scarlet fever, and I nearly died. Even after the worst was over, I was bedridden for ages. Once I was a little better, I told my parents that I wished to come to Paris and learn how to paint properly.”

  “They let you come to Paris all on your own?” asked Daisy, her mouth agape in wonder.

  “Heavens, no. My aunt lives here, otherwise I’m sure they’d have made a huge fuss. And I think the only reason they did agree is because they felt so badly for me.”

  “Shall you return home when the course ends?” Étienne asked.

  “I think so. Although if Maître Czerny keeps making faces when he looks at my work I may be home before Christmas!”

  “No, no,” Étienne said, shaking his head. “You will be fine, and so will you, Daisy. Now—it is time for lunch. Shall we order something?”

  “Désolée, Étienne, but I cannot stay,” Mathilde said. Something passed between them—a look of understanding, something that hinted of shared hardships? It made her very curious to learn more about her new friends.

  “I’m sorry, too, but I must go as well,” Helena said, gathering her things. “It was lovely meeting all of you. À demain?”

  “À demain.”

  She had done it. She had made it through the first day of classes, her dignity more or less intact, and she had made three new friends who knew her as Helena Parr, an art student like themselves. Just the thought of it made her so happy she could hug herself, for with friends at her side, she knew, she could weather any storm—even the unpredictable gale of the maître’s ire.

  Chapter 10

  10 October 1924

  Dearest Amalia,

  I hope this letter finds you well and happy, and that Peter and the children are also in fine form.

  Today marked the end of my first month of classes—four weeks of dessin, dessin, dessin, and yet more dessin, all with Maître Czerny. There are days when I feel as worn-down as the stub of charcoal I use for sketching, but there are good days, too, when everything suddenly makes sense and the drawing I produce comes close to matching the one in my head.