Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “The whole terrace, then. Until my Fêtes and the sailing regatta.”

  Not quite two months. It would be tight. “Fair enough.”

  “You’re crazy, you know. You with a broken arm.”

  True. How was he going to stretch a canvas that large, or even carry it?

  “I can paint left-handed. And this cast will come off soon.”

  “Not if you keep falling on it.”

  Fournaise called down to his son, “Alphonse, lay off of that.”

  “I think I can fix it.”

  “Don’t. Wheel it into the boathouse and lock it up.” He turned back and put his hand on Auguste’s shoulder. “You’ve got too important a hand to be taking risks with that engin de mort.”

  Auguste reached in his pocket for his wallet, knowing there was precious little in it. Fournaise’s hand shot out against his wrist. “Put that away.”

  Fair enough. Today Père Fournaise was his host. But what about tomorrow?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Paris on the Run

  Moments later, he looked back from the pedestrian bridge and saw Alphonsine on the terrace watching him. He waved, and she called out, “I knew I had a good idea.”

  It would do her good to think she had conceived of it herself. “Good only if you’ll be in it,” he called back.

  She clapped her hands over her mouth.

  The train lurched forward, throwing him back. The half-hour ride from Rueil into Paris always struck him as a phenomenon of speed. He rode in an open-air car in the rear, third class, squinting his eyes against flying soot. The squinting and the speed made the countryside whiz by, transforming market gardens and houses into blurred shapes, momentary sensations of color and light without detail. No wonder he and Monet and Sisley had developed Impressionism. Trains had introduced them to the flash of vision.

  Tuesday already. Madame Charpentier’s salon day. A few of the people on his models list were sure to be there. Most were working people only available on Sundays. If he didn’t get commitments from them for this Sunday, he would lose a week.

  He stood up long before the train finished its ten-kilometer run, and was the first one out the door at Gare Saint-Lazare. He went straight to his studio on rue Saint-Georges, where Paris proper gave way on the north to the lower reaches of Montmartre, Montmartre d’en bas. He poked his head through the concierge’s wicket. Victor, a former cavalryman now peeling potatoes in his undershirt, twitched his bushy dragoon’s mustache. “Fresh out of the meat grinder, eh?” He slapped the key and a notice into Auguste’s palm.

  Aching, Auguste climbed the six flights to his studio under the chimney pots. The notice was the landlord’s new rule that painters had to pay quarterly in advance. Four hundred twenty-five francs. He yanked books off his shelf and found the jar where he kept some money. Disappointing. What was he? A fool? One tiny consolation. In another jar there were plenty of stretcher tacks.

  If he stood on place Pigalle in his homespun painting trousers and canvas shoes, he might look pitiful enough with his broken arm that someone would buy a painting right out of his hands. The people of Montmartre were used to such things. He picked a study of two circus girls juggling oranges.

  He took avenue Frochot, a one-block haven of rosebushes and villas, because Jeanne Samary lived there. Someone singing the Amours divins aria from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène made him pause. It was so lovely that he was tempted to call on her to come outside and hear it too, but thought better of it. He used to be welcomed anytime, by Jeanne or her mother who stuffed his cheeks with sweets, but that was last winter. Liaisons in Montmartre changed quickly.

  In place Pigalle he greeted old Père Cachin, the charbonnier with blackened skin who squatted by his hole in the ground where he sold lumps of heating coal, grilling charcoal, and artists’ charcoal.

  “See? I still have your sign,” Cachin said and pointed to the cardboard drawing Auguste had made showing him in front of his hole with the words Boutique de Charbon in fancy script.

  “Has it brought you good business?”

  “Not so much in summer. But autumn will come.” The man grinned his toothless grin. “Days will get shorter.”

  “That’s the last thing I want to hear right now.”

  At boulevard de Clichy, the southern boundary of Montmartre, he turned left so he could use his left hand to hold his painting outward, sign of its availability. Passing La Libération, Pascal’s grim junk shop where the half-blind old man sold used canvases to penniless painters to reuse, he whistled a lighthearted tune to attract attention. An elderly gentleman wearing a bowler, a habitué of the Café Nouvelle-Athènes, gestured with his walking stick for him to stop.

  The man glanced at the painting. “Charming. But you’re too late. Pissarro has been here already. I just bought a painting from him.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I had to. He has such a large family, poor chap.”

  “So, because I’ve been careful to be without children, I have to starve? I’m in as bad a state as Pissarro, but no one ever says ‘poor Renoir.’”

  What if someone from the Salon jury saw him peddling? He’d be mortified. It would get around. They would think him pathetic, and they would be right.

  He turned the painting inward and headed toward seedy rue Rochechouart and the Cirque Fernando, a wooden tent-shaped pavilion painted in garish orange, green, and violet, and smelling of hay and horse manure. Inside, a ballerina was practicing her balance on a horse circling the ring at breakneck speed. He inquired after Clovis Sagot, a clown who dealt in paintings on the side.

  “He’ll be back in an hour,” Mademoiselle La-La said.

  He hardly recognized the well-known trapeze artist sitting on a bench, knees splayed open, in a nondescript dress instead of hanging by her teeth in an orange tutu the way Degas had painted her, like a slaughtered pig in a charcuterie. Damned rotten way to make a living.

  “You can wait right here.” She thrust out her breasts, patted the bench next to her, and made sloppy kissing noises, pointing with her nose to his face. “Kiss, kiss, to make it all better?”

  What a tart. Her frizzy black hair, drawn into a puff like a bath sponge, wobbled on the crown of her head. He darted out the door, disgusted with her, disgusted with himself for being a cheapjack. Even Pascal, the junk dealer, didn’t cart around his secondhand wares on the street.

  He had an idea, one step up from peddling—Madame Camille’s crémerie across the street from his studio. Once, just this once he’d lower himself, in order to buy colors for this painting that would change everything. And then he’d never have to do this again.

  He went in. Camille looked up from drying a cup. “Auguste! What a nasty scrape. You’d think you, a painter, would have a steady hand when you shaved.”

  “I was in a hurry.”

  “And when aren’t you?”

  He sniffed the air. “Patchouli. Don’t let your daughters wear it. That perfume makes every floozy in Montmartre smell like rancid pork rind.”

  “I’m sure they’ll appreciate your kind advice. I have some Brie left from lunch, soft but not too runny—just the way you like it.”

  “Oh, no, thank you.”

  She leveled a look of exasperation at him. “You can’t forget to eat. You’re such a beanpole it breaks my heart. It won’t take but a minute. Sit.”

  He lowered his aching body into a chair. It was amusing to watch her ratcheting herself around in the small space behind the counter to work at the stove. Nature had blessed Camille with a rotundity that was ample advertisement for her cheeses and omelettes.

  “I know why you came in,” she said, her back to him. “It’s because now that things are more difficult, with your arm I mean, you’ve decided to take me seriously and marry one of my daughters.” She turned around with a broad grin on her face. “Which one do you want? Marie, the seamstress, or Annette, the shoe shop girl? Either one would be a big help to you,” she said in a singsong voice. �
��It’s my dearest hope. Not because you’ll secure her a prosperous future, mind you—you’re a painter first, last, and always.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because you’re so irritatingly lovable. Bohemian to the core, but someday you’ll outgrow that, and then you’ll be a proper husband, as solid as a paving stone.” She set down a heel of bread, a plate of cheese, and a café crème on the tin-topped table. “Stop rubbing your nose like that. It’s a bad habit. It makes you look like a bundle of nerves. Who’s the painting for?”

  “Anybody. Would you hang it and see who might come along and want it?”

  “Anything for you.” She glanced at it. “So sweet. They remind me of my girls when they were that age. How much should I say?”

  “If someone offers fifty francs, take it.”

  “Forty?”

  “Take it. Even thirty. It’s only a study, but don’t say that.”

  Camille chuckled. “Just think. Me, an art dealer.” Her hand rested a moment on her motherly bosom before slinging wide her arm, the flesh under her upper arm jiggling. “La Galerie de la Crème.”

  “I like it. I could paint a sign for you. Crème de la Crème.”

  He finished the cheese and café, kissed her round cheeks, and ducked out the door. “Au revoir, ma reine de la crème.”

  He left her laughing and jiggling at the doorway.

  By God, he deserved a better showcase for his work than a little neighborhood kitchen. And he’d get one too, in the Palais des Champs-Élysées where the Salon was held. He was not destined to end his days as a nobody.

  Up the stairs to his studio to change into the gray pin-striped suit his father had tailored for him seven years earlier. He wanted it to last forever now that his father had passed away. He remembered his father’s insistence on the highest-quality fabric, and his careful fitting. Putting it on was like donning another self for Madame Charpentier’s salon, proper and elegant, someone whom his father would be proud of.

  Onward to the Louvre. He bumped into people who looked aghast at his face, swerved into the street around slow walkers, dodged omnibuses, darted in front of mounted gendarmes. Pain shot down his leg. The Louvre, the Louvre.

  On the way, he rang the buzzer at the office of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts to ask its director, Charles Ephrussi, a friend and collector, to pose. No one answered. He left a note.

  He headed toward the river, passing the spot where his family used to live and have their tailor shop, next to the Roman well. As a child he loved to touch its smooth stones and imagine life in Paris so many centuries ago. Gone. Medieval Paris gone too. Razed to lay out Baron Haussmann’s grand boulevards, begun under Louis Napoléon as a display of prosperity of the Empire. The new Paris was glorious, yes, but someday people would forget the crooked medieval streets, the Roman well, the history in those stones, just as people in the future would forget how Parisians lived now, and how, in spite of bad times, Paris made itself happy again. That’s what he wanted his painting to be. A painting of happiness in his time.

  At the Comédie-Française, the concierge recognized him from his many visits to see Jeanne, and let him in the performers’ corridor. Auguste wiped sweat from his forehead. Maybe his skinned cheek and broken arm would soften her heart. He knocked at the door of her dressing room and it opened a little.

  “Jeanne?” He opened it more.

  A man in a crisp linen shirt lounged on the divan. His waistcoat had been flung over Jeanne’s rose silk dressing gown on a chair. The memory of its coolness as he’d once slipped it off her shoulders swept over him. The man yanked a fan off the wall where Jeanne had pinned it as a decoration with dozens of others.

  “She’s not here. Who are you?” the man demanded, fanning himself.

  “Pierre-Auguste Renoir. I’ve painted her many times. Even here, with that fan.” He hated having to justify his presence.

  The man tossed it onto her marble-topped dressing table and rummaged through her jumble of cake makeup, creams, powders, puffs, and brushes, shoving them about as if he owned them until he found a nail file and went to work on his thumbnail. “I wouldn’t wait, if I were you. She doesn’t want to see you.”

  He didn’t want to get into a confrontation with this presumptuous parasite. He would not allow himself to be distracted from his focus. At the concierge’s wicket, he wrote a note.

  Chère Mademoiselle,

  Please come to Chatou on Sunday by noon, or earlier, to Maison Fournaise on the island. If you are willing, I have a painting in mind that begs for your charms, a souvenir for future ages of life as it was lived in the summer of 1880. It is of crucial importance to me, but I can’t begin it without you. The time of year forces me to start immediately. Please wear a dark blue dress for boating, and a pretty hat. Do you still have the one you wore at the Promenade de Longchamp, the felt one with feathers and gold braid that makes you look so lovely? We will be outdoors. If you have any feeling left for me, if only the fond remembrance of times past, come.

  Je t’adore toujours,

  Pierre-Auguste

  On the bottom, he drew the hat, and folded the paper in thirds.

  “Please see that Mademoiselle Samary receives this privately.” He pressed a fifty-centime piece into the concierge’s waiting palm.

  He loped into the vast place du Carrousel surrounded by the arms of the Louvre, sacred ground for him. He’d played marbles here as a child, living in the slum of old guardhouses within the arms of the Louvre until Haussmann demolished the eyesore and moved the working class out of the heart of Paris. It grieved him that the house where he’d drawn his first real pictures, on the floor, was no more. But he had lived there long enough to know every inch of the Louvre.

  Entering the ground-floor galleries, he felt the calm of the classical marble faces he had drawn as a youth, as familiar as family. He climbed two flights of stairs to the Salon Carré, hungry for what he’d come to see. Not his favorites, Ingres and Fragonard, not even Watteau, whose paintings of fêtes galantes, aristocrats of the last century enjoying a day of love on the wooded isle of Cythera, conveyed the mood he wanted. He had painted hundreds of ladies’ fans with Watteau’s romantic images of Cythera in his younger days. He didn’t need to see them again. It was Veronese he needed now, to study his technical achievement.

  There it was, The Marriage Feast at Cana, ten meters wide and nearly seven meters tall. He studied the angles of the U-shaped table positioned broadside in an outdoor pavilion with richly dressed figures balanced right and left according to the Renaissance ideal, gesturing, talking, leaning toward one another. And surrounding them—musicians, jesters, servants, even dogs. The end of the meal, the table opulent with goblets, grapes, sugared fruit. The wine having run out, Christ performs his first miracle, turning the water into wine, and it pours out ruby red from the urns. The festiveness, the wealth of ornament, the splendor of the silks in aquamarine, emerald, carmine, yellow ocher, had always astonished him.

  His would use just one angle of tables. He would emulate the close overlapping of figures, several conversations going at once, and the foreshortening, the most difficult perspective to achieve. He would honor Veronese, and he would vie with him—and Watteau and Ingres and Rubens and Fragonard and Vermeer to boot! And he would do it all in two months. He felt hot with the pressure to get started, and to make it the greatest figure painting of the whole Impressionist movement.

  Only four more days to prepare. He needed to perform his own miracle.

  CHAPTER THREE

  To the Left Bank and Back

  Crossing the river on the Passerelle des Arts, Auguste was seized by a thought. He was straddling more than just the Seine. The iron and wood footbridge stretched from the Louvre on the Right Bank to the formidable, gold-ribbed dome of the Institut de France housing the Académie des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank. The new art was a Right Bank school growing out of ragtag Montmartre and the suburban riverside to the west, as far from the classical, tradition-bound Left Bank A
cadémie as it could get. Yet the painting that swirled in his mind, even though modern in subject, required the skill of the classicists. He felt as giddy as he had as a youth the moment before touching the first breast offered to him.

  With long-legged steps, he strode through shaded streets of traditional galleries huddled around the Académie, their windows assaulting him with huge battle scenes, teary-eyed Mary Magdalenes, and Roman temples crowded with men in togas. He stopped on rue de Grenelle in front of the Charpentiers’ hôtel particulier, a mansion eight windows wide and six stories high, all theirs, Monsieur Charpentier’s publishing house on the street level, their living quarters above. Open-jawed bronze lions’ heads supporting stone pediments roared their displeasure at anyone not invited. Up the marble stairway, he sounded the heavy brass knocker, another lion’s head, and noticed that his right hand and wrist had swollen.

  “Control your arms,” his mother used to say. “Don’t slouch. Tall men should use their height to advantage.” He put his left arm through the sleeve of his coat and tried to drape it smoothly over his right shoulder.

  Salons were a strain on him. There was an annoying proliferation of them lately, most of them hosted by Madame de-This or Madame de-That. He disdained the pretension of names with de or du, as if they were announcing their owner’s pedigree like a racehorse naming his sire. Such women hosted political salons, academic salons, literary salons, romantic salons, obsequious salons, critical-of-everything salons, and salon-commentary salons.

  Madame Charpentier’s tended toward the theatric and literary because Monsieur Charpentier published Zola, the one man Auguste didn’t want to see on the other side of this door. Conversation would veer toward Zola’s review, and that could get ticklish. Madame needed to round out the arts with a painter of la vie moderne, the name of her husband’s journal supporting the new art movement. Manet had a salon of his own, Monet was living in the country, Cézanne was in the South of France, Pissarro was too politically radical, so the position fell to him. He and Madame fed each other’s ambitions. Her rooms were full of potential clients, so he’d had to learn how to be witty and gallant among the rich and talented, despite his discomfort. He was a craftsman, first and last, and never wanted to be otherwise, but a poor man can’t afford shyness.