by Joan Lingard
‘The rue du Cherche-Midi?’ he repeated, then nodded, following the tracking of her mind. He was quite willing to indulge her whim, if it could be so described. He always found enthusiasm difficult to resist and hers was palpable, almost mesmeric.
‘Gwen John lived there,’ Clarinda explained to the others.
‘Gwen John,’ echoed Cathy, one of the girls.
‘Don’t tell me you don’t know Gwen John!’ reproved Robbie, ‘Tut, tut. Such ignorance.’
‘Gwen John was a painter, a wonderful painter, sister of Augustus, but better in my opinion,’ declared Clarinda, leading the way, map in hand, leaving the rest of the group to straggle untidily behind. ‘She’s been compared to Modigliani, hasn’t she, Cormac?’
‘I believe so. Her work is very quiet,’ he told the others. ‘Very intense and delicate.’
‘What’s this Gwen woman got to do with it?’ grumbled Sue, friend of Cathy. ‘I thought it was Rodin we were meant to be after.’
‘Apart from being a painter,’ said Clarinda over her shoulder, ‘she was a model of Rodin’s.’
‘There’s no holding our Clarrie once she gets going,’ said Robbie, lengthening his stride to catch up with her.
Their hotel was not far from the rue du Cherche-Midi. They reached it in a few steps.
‘Number 87,’ said Clarinda. ‘Top floor.’
They gazed up at the top of the four-floor typical Parisian apartment building of the nineteenth century with its long windows and narrow wrought-iron balconies.
‘What’s that supposed to do for you?’ asked Sue.
‘I like to see where people lived,’ returned Clarinda, ‘so that I can imagine them coming along the street, climbing the stairs to their room. It was in that room up there that she painted a number of her most famous paintings.’ From her notebook she produced a postcard depicting a basket chair and simple table on which rested a small bowl of flowers, the scene lit by filtered light coming through the muslin-curtained window.
‘I can see what you mean by quiet,’ said Cathy. ‘Not much going on in a room like that.’
‘That’s all you know,’ said Clarinda with a small smile.
Cathy made a face behind Clarinda’s back.
‘Let’s move on,’ said Cormac.
‘Can we go next to the rue de l’Université?’ asked Clarinda. ‘Please! I want to see where Rodin had his atelier.’ Cormac had never thought to seek it out himself on previous visits to Paris. He had spent most of his time in the Rodin Museum itself.
‘Rodin had his studio in the rue de l’Université before moving to the Hôtel Biron,’ Clarinda informed Alec McCaffy, the other teacher accompanying the pupils. ‘87. Just like Gwen John in the rue du Cherche-Midi. Lucky number.’
Alec was impressed. ‘They seem to know their stuff,’ he observed to Cormac. He was pleased to see so many of them armed with maps and appeared to think it was due to his influence since he taught geography. He was happy to freely confess to knowing nothing about art, apart from the fact that he had heard of and seen photographs of the Mona Lisa and a few other similarly famous pictures such as Renoir’s lusciously appointed ladies or Degas’ ballet dancers. His mother had one of the ballet dancers on the lid of a box that had originally contained chocolates but in which she now kept loose buttons. Cormac’s mother had also had a button box when he was a child, probably still did. It was something he had in common with Alec McCaffy. He doubted if he had much else.
‘Clarinda knows it, anyway,’ said Cormac, although he suspected quite a lot had rubbed off on the others too. He would not expect them to express their enthusiasm so openly, however, since they worked hard to appear laid back.
When they passed number 83 in the rue de l’Université Cormac began to have doubts. The next building was a corner café, and then they were on the Place du Palais Bourbon.
‘It’s not the kind of area you’d find a studio, Clarinda. It was in the old marble depot if I recall rightly. That’s the National Assembly over there. The seat of the government.’
‘It said 87 in the book.’ Clarinda was frowning.
‘You can’t believe everything you read in books,’ said Robbie, skipping over a puddle.
There were several police vans parked on the rim of the square and a considerable number of police gathered in and around it. Some wore protective coverings on their lower limbs and carried riot shields.
‘They must be expecting a riot,’ said Robbie hopefully. A couple of the policemen had turned to look them over. ‘Maybe they’ll think we’ve come to make a protest about student rights. They might even spray us with tear gas. Bonjour!’ He gave the two policemen a short bow.
‘That’s enough, Robbie,’ said Cormac. Robbie was known at school to be a tempter of providence as well as an occasional truant player. He truanted only when he got bored, so he claimed. He survived because he could do quite brilliant work when he put his mind to it.
‘It’s a pity we don’t have a camcorder with us,’ said Robbie. ‘We could make a video called Looking for Rodin’s atelier in the rue de l’Université sur la Rive Gauche de Paris while the police play silly buggers with their riot shields.’
‘And enter it for the Turner Prize,’ said Clarinda.
Robbie grinned at her and raised his thumb.
Clarinda was still looking round, hoping for enlightenment. Suddenly she stepped out and stopped a smartly dressed woman walking with a small yappy dog on a short lead. ‘Excusez-moi, madame. Nous cherchons l’atelier de Rodin.’
‘Ah, l’atelier de Rodin!’ The woman tapped the dog on its nose to quieten it, then told them that the street numbers had been changed at some point. It seemed to happen in Paris. She shrugged. ‘Mais l’atelier de Rodin—’ Why, she believed it had been demolished many years ago.
‘Another dream shattered,’ sighed Robbie, when woman and dog had departed. ‘So much for lucky 87!’
‘Oh, shut up, Robbie!’ said Clarinda, surprising him and Cormac by her vehemence.
A few days before they were due to leave, Anita Gibb, a member of the English department, came to see him with a couple of sheets of paper in her hand. ‘I’ve got rather an interesting essay here, from one of the fifth years. I thought you might like to read it. It falls into your province, rather.’ A little bemused smile was making her bottom lip twitch. ‘I set them an essay, you know the kind of thing, a day in the life of. The kind of essay they might have done in primary but I thought it might be interesting to see what they would do with it now. They could choose to do anyone they wished, known or unknown.’
It is spring but the morning is cool, with a chill wind coming off the river. I shiver and pull my coat tightly round me. I am feeling the cold even more than usual because I am nervous about this visit. Of course I am! What woman would not be, going to keep an appointment with a genius? Will he want to model me once he sees me naked? I am conscious of how thin I am whereas I know that he likes his models to be firm-fleshed and mature, with generous breasts and buttocks. My Finnish friend Hilda Flodin, who is a sculptor herself and who introduced me to Rodin, told me that he thinks that young girls are poor specimens in comparison. But he did ask me to come and show him my body so why would he do that unless there was something about me that he found attractive? And I need to earn money. I can’t expect to live from my painting.
I knock and wait and while I wait I think about running away. And then the door opens and one of his assistants admits me and conducts me into the high, vaulted room where he works. My eyes are dazzled by the array of female sculptures in every imaginable pose, some of them quite suggestive and daring. They seem almost to be alive. Flodin told me that Paul Claudel, the writer and brother of his former mistress, Camille, called them a ‘banquet of buttocks’. I hesitate in front of such a formidable array. I want to turn and run again, for I know I cannot ever expect to measure up to women like these, but he is coming towards me, the great man himself, in his long white smock, with his strong head and bu
shy white beard, his hands held out to mine, and my heart is leaping. I take his hands, I could not refuse, and he leads me kindly to the stove, and brings forward a wicker chair and sits me down. I want to faint.
‘Warm yourself,’ he says. ‘There’s no hurry.’
I feel overwhelmed by him, this giant of a man. He puts me at my ease, he is gentle, so when it is time for me to go to the model’s couch behind the screens and take off my clothes my nervousness has gone. I even feel proud of my body. I stand erect and await his verdict.
He tells me that I have ‘un corps admirable’. I glow with pleasure, I am no longer cold. He says he likes my legs and my swan-like neck. I lift my head high.
‘Come tomorrow,’ he says.
From that moment onward I know that I shall be prepared to come whenever he wishes and to do whatever he wishes. I am entranced by him. I am happy with my nudity and I know that I shall be happy to be with him. When the work is finished for the day and the assistants leave he will light candles in wine bottles and then we shall be alone together. We shall kiss in the warm, flickering light, and that will be the beginning of something wonderful. I can feel his hands on my body, moving over it, caressing it. I will cry out. Each time we are left alone he will make love to me. It will be the moment of the day that I wait for, hunger for. I will never have enough of him. I do not care that he is sixty-three years old and I am so much younger, and that he might tire when making love more quickly than me. Rodin says he claims that sex makes him feel old but I cannot believe that. I know it will it make me feel young and liberated.
Cormac, remembering the essay now, looked at Clarinda frowning with frustration over her map. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in looking any further,’ he said.
‘Since we have obviously been chasing wild geese,’ said Robbie. Clarinda came reluctantly. They turned back along the rue de l’Université and headed up past the massive pile of Invalides to the rue de Varenne and the Rodin Museum, formerly the Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had installed himself in 1908, renting the room on the ground floor with three tall windows looking onto the garden.
‘Gwen hated it when he left his old studio,’ said Clarinda. ‘She found the old one more friendly.’
‘Familiar, aren’t we?’ said Robbie. ‘Gwen.’
‘What do you mean by friendly?’ asked Cathy.
‘Intimate?’ suggested Robbie.
Clarinda was not to be drawn.
Before going into the house she went purposefully round the garden until she found the black marble statue she was seeking. The rest followed, as if she, with the long pale hair streaming behind her, were the Pied Piper. The Muse, sculpted as a memorial to Whistler, stood above them, armless, head bowed, mouth slightly open, her right foot lifted onto a high rock. Rodin had intended to do the arms at some point but had never got round to it. Cormac explained that Rodin often put together limbs and bits and pieces of bodies afterwards. In the museum out at Meudon one could see rows of casts for arms and legs and hands.
‘Gwen John was the model,’ said Clarinda, her eyes fixed on the downturned face.
‘Camille Claudel was his most important model,’ put in Cormac. It seemed necessary to get things into perspective.
‘Didn’t she go off her head?’ said Robbie. ‘Camille? Maybe all his models did.’
‘The statues she posed for are the most erotic and sensuous,’ said Cormac.
It was so much easier here in Paris to speak of sensuality and eroticism than back in Edinburgh within the constraints of the classroom where the pupils tended to giggle or catcall. Here they were determined to show they were fully fledged adults. Most of them had probably had some sexual experience, if statistics were to believed, and in this instance he was sure that they were. He had read somewhere that the average starting age for having sex in the UK was 15.3 years, whereas globally it was 15.9. These young people were not as he had been at sixteen and seventeen, gauche in his encounters with the opposite sex, and, apart from any experiences they had had themselves, they went regularly to the cinema and saw films marked 18.
‘If you look at Gwen’s face here or in her self-portrait,’ said Clarinda, ‘you would never imagine that she was so sensual and so passionate. Or so wild.’
‘I suppose she had it off with Rodin too, like all the others?’ said Robbie.
Clarinda ignored him and continued to address Cormac. ‘She seems so demure, wouldn’t you say? Do you remember reading about how she sat on rocks at the edge of the sea on the Welsh coast and a huge wave came and swept her out to sea and then swept her back in again? She called it “delicious danger”.’ Clarinda lingered over the last two words. ‘I understand that.’
‘You do?’ He did remember something about Gwen John liking to swim naked and go far out to sea but did not recall her being swept off rocks. But then it was a long time since he had read about her life, and indeed had not given it much thought until now. ‘It can sometimes be a mistake to get too interested in the lives of artists,’ he cautioned. ‘Especially taking one particular aspect of them, for that can distort the person.’ Rachel had once accused him of caricaturing his aunts by dwelling on their oddities whereas much of the time they were douce women living quietly and minding their own business; he had responded that it was their peculiarities that made them interesting and brought them into relief. But aunts did not come into the same category as artists whom one did not know in a personal way. ‘Better to concentrate on the work, Clarinda,’ he went on. ‘That, after all, is what matters.’
‘But when Gwen was unhappy it affected her work! She had no energy, she couldn’t paint. If you were unhappy could you go on with your work?’
‘It could be a diversion from unhappiness.’ He was to find that this would not be so in his case.
The exhibits in both the garden and the building inspired all of them, even those like Cathy and Sue who had probably come on the trip for the city of Paris itself more than its art. The students wandered around entranced by the sheer beauty of the sculptures, their energy and charged emotion. They circled round the larger pieces, such as The Burghers of Calais, in wonder, eager to see them fully and from all angles, going back to them again and again. They squatted on the floor inside the high, spacious rooms and on the grass outside drawing busily in their sketch books. They kept remarking how alive the pieces seemed, as Cormac had told them that they would. He was pleased, of course he was, and their responses made him reflect how fortunate he was to be a teacher with the opportunity to inspire young minds. That was what he thought at that moment as he stood by one of the long windows looking out into the garden, as Rodin himself must often have done.
It was The Kiss, predictably, the man and woman locked together in perpetuity, their marble-white bodies fluid and graceful, flowing the one into the other, dependent on each other, that held the students especially enthralled, but Clarinda in particular. She studied it for a long time.
Even Alec was impressed. ‘He certainly had something, that guy.’
They could have an hour, Cormac told the group, to wander round on their own. ‘Take your time, look, sketch, photograph, but don’t leave the grounds, and meet in the garden outside the front door afterwards. Understood?’
He knew some of them would make for the café in the garden but he did not mind. They had all had a pretty good look already. As he moved on his own from room to room and along the garden paths enjoying the bright sunshine he observed some of them, still looking, still sketching. He saw Robbie intently sketching The Thinker but saw no sign of Clarinda.
When they gathered after the hour was up she was missing.
‘Anyone seen Clarinda?’ asked Cormac, scanning the garden.
Nobody had.
‘Maybe she’s run off with Rodin’s ghost,’ said Robbie, which raised a laugh. ‘Or Gwen’s? That might be even more interesting.’
Cormac asked him to nip round the back and see if Clarinda might be taking a last look at The Muse. He returned sayin
g, ‘Not a sign. She’s vanished! There’s a lot of that thin air hanging about.’
Five minutes later Clarinda came rushing out of the building. ‘Sorry.’ She was slightly breathless. ‘I forgot the time.’
‘Where have you been?’ asked Cormac.
‘In the archives. I asked and they were terribly nice. I hope that was all right?’
She didn’t have to tell him what she would have been doing there. What exactly was going on in this girl’s mind? How could he possibly guess? He did not know what went on in his daughter’s head much of the time and he had watched over her since birth.
‘What’s up, Dad?’ asks Sophie, laying her warm hand on top of his cold one. ‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Yes, fine,’ he mutters, turning his back on Clarinda who is sitting at a corner table of the bistro talking animatedly to a young man. She has noticed him, he knows that; he saw the rapid flicker of her eyelids, although she did not look in his direction. And she was talking and gesticulating too wildly, which is unlike her. The display was for his benefit, he suspects.
He regards his daughter, who goes to a different school than the one where he taught, which is fortunate. They had to tell her about Clarinda, of course; it would have been impossible not to. When they did she blushed and looked startled at the idea of her father being embroiled in such an affair but said nothing for a moment. Then she asked aggressively, without looking at him, ‘Are you innocent or guilty?’ Rachel was outraged, too much so, in his opinion, for it seemed a legitimate question to ask. Perhaps it was one that Rachel herself would have liked to ask outright instead of pussyfooting around it, as she had been doing. ‘How can you even doubt your father, Sophie!’ her mother demanded. ‘He needs all the support we can give him.’
