I Always Loved You

by Robin Oliveira

  “Who is that woman?” Degas said.

  “Which woman? Henriette?”

  “No, the woman over there, on the causeuse, the one who looks as if she is going to murder someone the second she gets a chance.”

  “Half the women in Paris look like that at any given moment. My Suzanne threatens me daily,” Manet said.

  “And with good cause, you bastard. If you can’t keep your hands off Méry Laurent or your sister-in-law, I might murder you myself.”

  “Berthe is here?” Manet asked, rising to his tiptoes to search the crowd.

  “I don’t know. I am not your social secretary, nor do I keep track of your women.”

  “You injure me, Degas. Berthe and I are dear friends, admirers of one another’s work. Besides, all that was long ago. She is married to Eugène now and my brother is my beloved friend. Not that I admit to anything. Ever.”

  Degas snorted. “Of course not.” But he would not tease further. He loved Édouard and besides, Édouard was handsome; the man couldn’t help it if women found him irresistible. Degas had yet to meet the woman who did not melt after a mere glance at his friend’s rugged blond tête. On the street, women openly turned and stared at Manet’s passing figure, which was more confident, dashing, and marvelous than Degas’s unimpressively round-shouldered and thoroughly unstriking one, though he had long ago given up jealousy; he had moved past that and had voluntarily and officially entered the realm of resigned admirer, for Manet charmed everyone from hack drivers to ballet dancers, and though Édouard frequently cavorted merely out of sport, he, unlike Degas, truly loved people. The tendency mystified.

  “No,” Degas said. “I meant the elegant woman over there, the one who wears her clothing as if she were the Empress Eugénie herself, come back from England to dazzle us with her finery and impeccable taste. And mind you, leave her alone. I spotted her first.” Appreciation spilled from him, and though the woman’s eyes were too close together and the shape of her nose was wrong, he admired its misbegotten residence on a face with such magnificent cheekbones. Those were positively architectural.

  “News, news, Monsieur Degas is taken with a woman. No doubt you will seduce and then discard her. I don’t know why you even try anymore; I don’t know a woman in Paris who doesn’t despise you for your impotent flirtations. This one will throw you out,” Édouard said, but he scoured the crowd for the newest object of Degas’s regard while simultaneously catching the glances of half a dozen beautiful ladies and fielding enthusiastic assaults from two flirtatious fans. He didn’t like being bested by Degas, especially when it came to women, and it disgruntled him now to have to stand by as Degas planned to exert his rather particular form of charm on a woman he might have been interested in, forgetting, again, that Suzanne, his wife, had thrown the breadboard at him that morning for mentioning a gorgeous laundress he had spied toting a basket of clean laundry down the Rue de Rivoli.

  “You are too generous,” Degas said, but pulled at his wide necktie, ever puzzled by the convoluted twists of Parisian gossip and its ability to confound truth. What had women been whispering about him now? Were his peculiarly focused attentions such an affront to their unstated wishes that they exaggerated? He didn’t know, and didn’t like the exposure. Gossip, so often his sword, may have turned against him. But he could not keep his eyes off the woman, even in the crowded room, where the plethora of beribboned hats perched on absurd piles of curls were enough obstacle even without the press of the hyperventilating masses going gaga over Édouard’s latest triumph. In Nana there was story, suggestion, rebellion, and in this portrait, knighted by the jury, there was merely . . . what? Taste. Which was the worst insult Degas could think of. No, the mystery woman was not beautiful. He didn’t even think she thought herself beautiful, but her strict self-possession appealed for its singularity alone, as if she cared what no one else thought of her. And her posture, dear God. It was as if she fancied herself a Grecian statue, all cool marble and elegance.

  Suddenly, the woman rose and just as quickly disappeared into the crush, and not even Degas’s sudden wail of frustration could produce her.

  “Pity,” Édouard mocked.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “You can hunt for her on the streets.”

  “She is not the streetwalking type.”

  “Then she should be of little interest to you. A woman who doesn’t take off her clothes on command? Who won’t let you paint her juicy bits? Why would you even care?”

  Degas turned away. He had already spent too much time with Édouard today , whose persistence in exhibiting at the Salon when Degas and the others had long ago refused to participate in the yearly hypocritical disgorgement verged on disloyalty. That Manet remained his friend despite this betrayal was in part due to the aforementioned charm, but also the man’s talent, which to this day overwhelmed Degas, even though he told everyone that Manet was so mannered that he never thought of making a brushstroke without thinking of the masters. Yet Manet’s work broke rules even while retaining something of the old elegance, a combination so seductive that no one, not even he, could refuse, though he would never inform Manet of his deep regard.

  “Return to your admirers, Édouard. They’ll be few enough tomorrow.”

  “You are only jealous. Admit it. You wish your pictures hung in the ‘D’ room. You wish you weren’t such a stubborn soul. You wish you had submitted.”

  “If only you weren’t so deluded, we could truly be friends,” Degas said, and after giving Manet a reassuring pat on his shoulder—for Manet always careened between bravado and terror on opening day—he elbowed his way through the vast warren of rooms, past patrons blocking the passageways, clotting the refreshment bars, and making exit a slow endeavor. He pushed through the “D” room, where he had last exhibited in 1870, and into the “C” room, where he wrestled a square of floor space for himself to scan the wall of paintings, searching for the name Mary Cassatt, whose work he’d once seen. He would very much like to see a painting by her again. There had been something so intimate about that portrait he had admired of hers. Ida, was it? His friend Tourny was always saying he was going to introduce them, describing Mademoiselle Cassatt as Degas’s secret admirer. Tonight, Degas was going to the Tournys’ for dinner, and he would ask, finally, to be introduced. Salon be damned, Degas thought. He could use some admiration.

  Shame seeped in, grasping at his weakness. Fame? If he wanted fame, he could easily paint the types of pieces the Salon demanded. And perhaps he should. The failure of the de Gas family bank, revealed only upon his father’s death three years ago, had left his and all his siblings’ finances in shambles. Even the paltry price of today’s ticket had debited him further, making the next payment to his father’s creditors, among them the Bank of Antwerp, all the more in jeopardy. He had been reduced to counting sous. But he considered it a matter of honor that the de Gas family—or Degas, as he had begun to call himself—repay everything. Monthly, he sent off payments, which involved a humiliating, time-consuming trot down to the bank, discussions of wires and amounts, the painful disbursements from his account, leaving a paltry sum only for his rent, his food, his housekeeper’s salary, and enough money for his evenings at the café and his Monday night seats at the Opéra Garnier. In order to raise the necessary funds, he had to paint and sell hundreds of fans and turn out dozens of articles. His articles, his paintings, had become currency. Oh, dear God, the facts of his life were depressing.

  And in the corner some farmer in from the country was oohing and ahhing over some beastly little portrait that any fourteen-year-old with half an eye could execute. Most of the work here was dreck. Why hadn’t the Prussians remained after they’d won the war? Perhaps they would have infused some discipline into the brains of the ignorant, though he immediately shook off the unpatriotic thought. Dear God, the Prussians and that awful winter. Oh, the cold. The coldest winter Paris had seen in a long time. It was amazing he even had any eyesight left at all. This morning his righ
t eye was particularly bothering him. He dabbed at it with his handkerchief, then looked up and glanced across the room, where the woman he had been admiring was approaching the doorway. Unable to control himself, he raised his hand and called, “Madame! Madame!”

  At that moment, a patron sidled alongside him and said, “Monsieur Degas, are you exhibiting? Have you seen Sylvestre’s painting? It’s enormous.”

  Degas would not sanction enormity as a value, even more so because Sylvestre had won the Prix du Salon. As a matter of principle, Degas despised awards.

  “Shut up,” he said, then turned and called, “Madame, madame,” but the woman slipped through the crowd as if she couldn’t stand to be in the palais one minute longer. Degas shouldered through the chattering tourists and gossiping Parisians, following the gay plume of the woman’s hat as it weaved ahead of him in the crowd.

  Descending the grand staircase, he dodged arriving patrons, causing at least a dozen to curse at him. Upon reaching the sidewalk, though, he could not find her. She had been swallowed up by the horde of art lovers come to drool over the parade of canvases the idiots at the École had deemed worthy for viewing this year.

  This was it, Degas thought. He was losing his mind. He was forty-two years old and he had actually chased a woman onto the street. Perhaps the toll his disastrous finances were taking on him was more than he had estimated. And now his eye was acting up again. The little black hole that had appeared mysteriously one day on his visit to see his brother in New Orleans flickered in his vision, no doubt brought on by the sudden sunlight. He shut his eyes, waiting for the blight to disappear, but when it did not, he swore and set off for the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes.

  He did not mind the long walk. He loved the city, loved its poverty and wealth, its ugliness and beauty, its history and future jumbled together in a welter of humanity. But the city was changing; the Paris of old had been a vessel for his life, and Haussmann was erasing it.

  At the café, Degas pushed open the glass doors with the familiar absentmindedness of long habit, a gentleman returning home, confident of welcome and comfort, expecting to be greeted by his friends, who often met here in the evening, eager for talk after a day of working alone. But the café was devoid of anyone he knew. Neither Monet nor Renoir nor Caillebotte nor Pissarro was holding forth at a table littered with the remains of a shared meal. No one. Not even Émile Zola was here as he usually was, scribbling in a corner in a notebook.

  Jean, the waiter who always took care of them, rushed forward and steered Degas to a table. Degas removed his silk top hat and put it on the chair beside him and ordered a bowl of onion soup and a glass of wine. He ate disconsolately. Lately, Degas thought, his café evenings had felt depleted. His youth was disappearing, or had already disappeared, which he only acknowledged on evenings like this one, when his eye was bothering him. No more the raucous evenings of the Batignolles at the Café Guerbois, when they had been young and life had seemed a far more open field. Degas swallowed the last of the wine, the dregs sour on his tongue, spoiling the piquant aftertaste of the soup. No matter; he was off tonight to the Tournys’, who would feed him well.

  Outside, Montmartre shimmered in the setting sun. Above the encroaching city, the wind was turning the moulins; he could hear the windmills’ blades slowly whispering as they traced their eternal paths. Beneath them murmured the tintinnabulation of cattle bells, the trill of a piano keyboard, the hollow click of a key turning in a lock, an escaped sigh of pleasure from a bedroom window. Degas stood transfixed, the chatter from the café, banal and urgent, falling away as he strained to hear the other. This aural innocence—the sonnettes and a door slamming and amorous silences and the melody of moulin dance halls offering seduction—seemed to Degas something essential. But he feared that no matter how many years he had left before his eyes failed him, he would never be able to capture on canvas the hole these simple sounds tore in his heart tonight. The landscape of yearning was always the next brushstroke away, a vanishing eternity no desire of his, no matter how ardent, could ever produce.

  The thought that perhaps this longing had nothing to do with the limits of art, he refused to entertain. And then the other receded, and he turned back to the city and his evening engagement just as the city’s lights began to flicker on.

  Chapter Three

  Édouard Manet had spent the first day of the Salon fielding praise from his friends and suffering the criticism of the ignorant, all the while surreptitiously scanning the crowd for Berthe Morisot, his brother Eugène’s wife. In the afternoon, he had sent his own wife, Suzanne, away almost as soon as she arrived, as she had grown restive and shrill in the burgeoning crowd. Now, at this hour, four o’clock, most of the patrons at the Palais de l’Industrie had drifted off to the outdoor gardens for tea and glaces at the pretty little tables set up under the chestnut trees, where the ladies could be assured of propriety and the men could be seen to be indulgent before they turned their thoughts to their evening plans. But on this pleasant afternoon, as waiters ferried thé-complets and glasses of beer out to the tired patrons scattered under the low flowering branches, a hint of lilac wafting from the garden beds, Édouard strolled among the tables, battling the indignity that forced him to make this display of himself. If Berthe hadn’t come to the opening, then she had broken his heart with her unkindness, and if she had come but not made herself known to him, then she had broken his heart yet again.

  She claimed survival. He declared her cruel. This was their eternal conversation.

  Oddly enough, it had been propriety that had forced the match between Eugène and Berthe, a practical answer to their impossible problem. It was Berthe’s mother who had finally decided the matter. Berthe, as her mother had contended in a letter to Berthe’s sister, Edma, couldn’t spend her life mooning over Édouard when his perfectly acceptable brother—acceptable but regrettable—could offer Berthe at least rescue. And she, Cornélie, wasn’t going to live forever, she told Edma, wasn’t going to be able to provide Berthe home and protection after she died, which she did two years after Berthe married Eugène in a black dress at the mairie, marrying him while she was still mourning her father. Perhaps it had been the surprise of mortality that had nudged Berthe into the practical, or perhaps it had been that he, Édouard, had encouraged the match, had told the weeping Berthe that she needed to be cared for, that a woman of her elevated social standing couldn’t be on the loose forever. He repented this cavalier assertion as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but in that moment of betrayal he had tied the knot of his own undoing, having seeded Berthe’s mind with a tortuous logic that no amount of his later pleading could undo.

  Now, two and a half years later, Édouard strolled the palais grounds, trying to appear contemplative in the sea of society and its show of finery and arrivisme, even as his sense of longing grew into an ardent panic. Once again he felt himself unseated. He didn’t like to feel this way, but that assertion, he knew, might just be a lie. There was something so enlivening about his persistent boiling need and the secretive glances and the perpetual denial that at times he thought it might be desire he loved and not Berthe.

  Berthe had to be here, he thought, in the gardens, or perhaps hiring a cab. It seemed impossible that she could hide herself, even in this crowd, for she looked like no one else in Paris. Her beauty hypnotized: a bounty of raven hair pinned into soft waves that fell about her face, haunting black eyes that seduced despite her natural reserve, and a complexion so pale it startled everyone. People had been known to gasp when they first met her, an occurrence so embarrassing that she avoided parties and evenings where she might not know some of the guests. But he couldn’t find her. He made one last sweep of the grounds, hoping that his gaze appeared bored enough to convince anyone who knew him that he was merely exhausted from the day’s feverish throngs. And he was tired. His legs were bothering him. All day he had nursed them, shifting his weight from heel to aching heel, trying to assuage the dull numbness that had appeared
from nowhere. The doctor had recommended water treatments, which his wife was eager for him to take because it meant a summer in Austria, which suited her idea of how a summer ought to be spent, but Édouard did not like leaving Paris, even though he had once begged Berthe to.

  Placing his hat on his head, he limped toward the Champs-Élysées and the long cab line, where he hoped he might find her. He would feign astonishment, offer his protection, which, in public, she would have to take, for fear of fostering even more rumors. But the snaking queue yielded nothing of Berthe, so he waited for his own cab to the Nouvelle-Athènes, where he hoped Degas, if he were still there, might favor him with more of his condemnation regarding his disloyalty and ill-placed aspirations, effectively stripping Berthe from his mind.

  • • •

  Berthe Morisot was seated at a little table quite distant from the palais doors when she saw Édouard weaving between the tables. She opened her parasol to hide her face and only lowered it when, peeking from behind its lace ruffle, she observed him hobbling toward the Champs-Élysées. She had worn a new dress for the opening, one he didn’t know, and she was grateful that her little disguise had worked. This morning, Eugène had wished her well, pretending that he didn’t know where she was going, saying how glad he was that they would go together to the Salon tomorrow, and ignoring the pink heat radiating from her severe cheekbones, which he had long ago noticed appeared only on certain occasions, usually Thursday nights, when they saw Édouard at his mother’s evening.