Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  Not that the Seine in Paris didn’t have its own pleasures. For six years, she and Louis had enjoyed them when they lived there as a young married couple ambling along the quays watching sunlight dance on water, or cooling themselves in the shade of the towers of Notre Dame stretching to the opposite bank in the afternoons. She loved the flower sellers on the Île de la Cité, the Sunday bird market with hundreds of beaks twittering at once, the floating bathhouses, the café-concert barges sending intoxicating music across the water, the roasted chestnut sellers standing over their braziers in front of Notre Dame in winter, the bouquinistes tending their green metal display boxes attached to the quay walls where she had bought used books—Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Guy de Maupassant, George Sand. Life was full then, with theater, opera, the Universal Exposition, the annual painting Salon, the Salon des Refusés of new painters, scores of journals and fashion magazines, and Louis.

  One day along the Quai du Louvre, she had pinched off a three-pointed leaf from a plane tree. “It’s an amphibian’s foot,” she had said, and walked it up Louis’s arm. On Pont Neuf, she had leaned over a rounded parapet and dropped it. She darted across to the other wall of the bridge to watch it appear and float downstream.

  “How long do you think it will take to float the loops and crawl up on the bank at Maison Fournaise?” she had asked.

  Louis had laughed at her notion, and drew her tight against him, and said, prophetically, it seemed to her now, “There’s no guarantee, Alphonsine. One can never be sure of arriving home again.”

  She’d kept her fantasies to herself the rest of the afternoon. They were the stuff of books, not to be shared. Darkness came over her as it came over the city and the river. The light of the gas lamps quivered double, once on their street posts on the Quai des Tuileries, and again in the water, more violently, flame-colored strips of silk blazing the river. Or giant golden fish angrily lashing their long tails, she’d thought, but didn’t say.

  She had arrived home again, to the island of Chatou, after the Prussian Siege of Paris, after the Commune, after she had sold the shop. She’d had enough of looking across the dinner table at an empty chair. On the bank in front of the Maison Fournaise, she had put her hands in the river, hands that had sewn flesh, washing them.

  And the day before yesterday, she had washed Auguste’s raw flesh. A woman couldn’t do that for a man without feeling an intimacy. His was the same inside, oozing red, and when she daubed it, for a second that fish-white raw skin was clean, and then the pinpricks of red came again, and spread until they joined. Auguste had a touch of that same helplessness too, the same endearing surrender. She had felt the possibility of being close to him then, close and needed, just as she had felt during the Siege before she knew him. She would do all she could to feel that again.

  Now, alongside the périssoire, she spotted a spread of peppermint with pale lilac flowers just out of reach. She took off her canvas boating shoes and tied up her skirt. As she stepped onto the cool mud, a tug pulling a coal barge tooted. The sound vibrated through her chest, startling her. She slipped on the gooey mud and righted herself with a splash that dirtied her skirt. “Idiot! Now look what you’ve done!” she yelled. She could see the pilot laughing. He’d done it on purpose, just to let her know he was watching her.

  She picked her way to the peppermint clumps and yanked. Two small green frogs jumped away. Several plants came out, roots and all. Plenty for a wreath.

  On the far bank beyond a sawmill, asparagus fields alternated with chalk quarries cut into the hillside in yellow squares like a patchwork quilt. And there, just what she was hoping for, the orchardist’s little boy was playing by the landing. She paddled diagonally across the river and got out.

  “Bonjour, Benoît. What are you doing this morning?”

  He knelt alongside a gurgling rill, his small hands and pant legs muddy. He stood back and pointed. “I’m making a dam and a lock.”

  “Aha. You are an engineer! And when you finish, what will you make?”

  He pointed to a cleared patch near the rill. “The locksman’s house.”

  “Then you are an architect. What will it be made of?”

  He gave her a look as though he couldn’t imagine that anyone could be so dumb. “Mud.” He packed some into a square to show her.

  Here was a child who could surely look at a leaf and see the foot of a frog. “And then what will you make?”

  “A factory.”

  “Ah, you are a man of the modern age.”

  He scratched the side of his face in perplexity, leaving a muddy smear.

  She showed him three twenty-centime pieces. “May I pick some pears? Will you give these to your papa? Here, let me put them in your pocket.”

  He thrust out his little chest. She picked according to beauty as well as ripeness, filling her basket.

  “Don’t forget to give your papa the money.”

  “I have to finish the dam first.”

  “Don’t go too close to the river. It goes faster than it looks.”

  “Only on the top, my papa said.”

  She paddled on past the laundry barge at Bezons toward Argenteuil, where the sailing regattas were held. A dark blue sailboat with a red horizontal stripe cut through the water at a tremendous speed. Le Capitaine, she read on the stern. She didn’t recognize it, but the marina at Argenteuil had two hundred boats. This one would be a tough rival for Gustave. She kept a sharp lookout for his boats, the Iris and the Inès. It would be a stroke of luck if she saw him.

  The clanking and screeching of the tall steam dredge disturbed her. It was an ugly machine, looking like an enormous, relentless praying mantis. The chain crawled up the framework, hauling up rectangular buckets of sand and depositing them onto heaps on the bank in order to deepen the channel. She looked away from what that mechanical monster might be dredging up.

  She passed the rubber factory that looked like her school in Paris if it weren’t for the smokestack, and the Joly iron foundry that made parts of railroad bridges and their own decorative half arches that held up the terrace of Maison Fournaise. Alexander, the Russian engineer, had asked her to go with him and her father to see the first one being made here. His excited eyes had looked at her for approval as much as at her father. And now Auguste was going to paint on that terrace. Strange how a dead man was part of the painting.

  Up ahead, the Iris was sailing her way. She raised her paddle above her head with both hands to hail him. Gustave saw her and let the sails luff.

  “Did you see that dark blue sailboat with a red stripe? Le Capitaine?”

  “Yes, I saw it,” he said.

  “Will you be able to beat it in the regatta?”

  “Depends.”

  His boat was passing her. She turned. “On what?”

  “On whom you’ll be cheering for.”

  “You, of course!”

  Gustave grinned. “Then that settles it.”

  He sheeted in, his sail filled, and he was gone. Surely he’d be in the painting.

  Her arms were tired now so she tied the boat to a tree and walked, looking for the weeping willow that marked the way to the secret place where there would still be raspberries to pick. They grew over the ruins of the convent where Héloïse was taken by her secret lover, Peter Abelard, seven centuries ago.

  She had bought an old book of Héloïse’s letters at a bouquiniste along the Seine. Héloïse addressed him as my only love. What an inconceivable promise was contained in that. Fifteen years without a word from him and she still affirmed her devotion, her need for his affection, and even for sexual intimacy despite the vows she’d taken at this very convent. To him who is specially hers, from she who is singularly his, Héloïse had written. When she was younger, she had thought Héloïse’s fidelity honorable, but was fidelity to a memory as important for a widow now as it used to be? This was la vie moderne.

  There was the willow with its reverse image in the water. Behind the green veil of its trailing branches, mallards
quacked at the intrusion, a loud hoarse quack, followed by softer sounds diminishing into a muttered “qua,” as if grudgingly resigned to her presence. She walked up the incline. Hidden behind a thicket of hedge nettles, the ruin wasn’t known by Sunday crowds. The raspberry vines had threaded themselves like a net over the remains of a stone wall she imagined to be the wall of the refectory where Héloïse and Peter had stolen away between the offices of compline and vigils for their mad, happy feast of love.

  She plucked a raspberry. Sweet juice, sweet pleasure. Within that tangle of tendrils, inside a blossom, a tiny bead was kissed and blessed by the sun, from which it took in light and warmth and heaven’s rain imbued with the richness of the soil of France. All of the elements of the river world helped that bead to expand and multiply into sheer casings for sweet pulp, wedged together in a knobby globe until it released its juice in her mouth.

  The urge to gorge herself flooded her. She plucked and ate until her fingers were red from juice and the backs of her hands were scratched with a web of red threads. Plenty for two feuilletés aux framboises, one pie for each table on Sunday. When the models would eat them, they would be blessed with all of the elements of earth and sky and water, all the goodness of this river world. The sweet, sharp taste would kiss their tongues, and that would be Héloïse’s blessing on them, but it would be her own blessing on the painting.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Colors, Credos, and Cracks

  La Crémerie de Camille was crowded with young women chatting over their café au lait before heading to work at milliners’ shops or dressmakers’ lofts or laundries. Auguste greeted Aline, a seamstress with a Burgundian accent and a creamy complexion, and Géraldine, a pork butcher’s assistant with a meaty fragrance but with a silk rosebud pinned to her gray frock. There was no room at their table, so he sat with a plasterer downing a mazagran, cold black coffee and seltzer water, remedy for a hangover. His painting still hung on the wall. He drank his café slowly, planning. Colors, canvas, and Gustave.

  If he had to pay for his paints he wouldn’t be able to pay for his models. If he paid his models, how would he pay for Mère Fournaise’s luncheon and the wine that would make them relaxed and convivial, the mood he wanted to paint? If he paid them this Sunday, he couldn’t pay them the next Sunday. What would it cost to feed a dozen people and let the wine flow? Eighty francs? Ninety? He had seven weeks to do the painting, if he counted the Saturday before the Fêtes. Six hundred francs for their meals, eight hundred more in models’ fees, maybe three hundred in supplies. Impossible! He’d have to go to Tanguy for his colors even though Mullard’s colors were truer, but Mullard wouldn’t let him buy on credit.

  Aline giggled. “You look like a gander worrying after his goose.”

  “Better that than a porcupine cozying up to his porcupinette,” he said. Outside, he fell into step with Aline and Géraldine.

  “Where are you going this fine morning?” Aline asked.

  “To Père Tanguy’s on rue Clauzel.”

  “That funny little man in the painters’ store?” Géraldine asked.

  “Funny only on the surface. Julien Tanguy is the patron saint of every poor artist in Montmartre. You’re too young to know this, but Julien was on sentry duty up on the Butte during the Commune when a squadron of Versaillais descended on his post. He dropped his musket and held up his hands in surrender. He just couldn’t fire on another human being. He was imprisoned for treason for three years. That’s what gave him sad eyes and a soft heart.”

  “Who would have thought?” Without a hint of interest, Géraldine turned into the butcher’s narrow courtyard overgrown with Virginia creeper. A pig, still dripping, hung by its hind legs. Géraldine picked a sprig of yellow blossoms and poked it in the creature’s anus before she went into the butcher shop. Now, that was something Gustave would paint—an oddity of Parisian life.

  “It must have been awful, being in prison,” Aline said. “He’s always nice to us.” She dodged a troop of girls coming out of the school across from Julien Tanguy’s shop.

  Auguste said goodbye to her and opened the door. A bell jingled merrily. Tanguy turned toward him, buttons straining, and screwed up his puffy face. “Auguste! Whatever happened to you?”

  “I fell off my steam-cycle.” Auguste looked around the walls above the shelves hung with paintings edge to edge all the way to the ceiling. “I see Cézanne sent you some new paintings.”

  Julien pulled him deep into the narrow shop. “Look at this one! Montagne Sainte-Victoire on a spring morning. Magnificent. Cézanne’s a genius.”

  “How many of his Sainte-Victoires do you have now?”

  “Four. One for each season of the year.” Tanguy spread his arms wide, and the furrows stretching down from his round nostrils curved into a euphoric smile above his stubby yellowish beard. “I have the best job in the world. How else would a poor man be able to live with paintings like these?”

  “Seven!” Madame Tanguy said, pushing aside the curtain of the back room. She yanked her crocheted shawl across her ample figure. “The man’s crazy.”

  “Who? Cézanne or Julien?”

  “Both of them. Grâce à Dieu, I only have to live with one of them.”

  “And a very fine man he is,” Auguste added, winking at Julien.

  “So there!” Tanguy gave a sharp nod to his wife and turned back to Auguste. “What can I do for you today?”

  “I need a roll of fine-weave linen, primed. As wide as you’ve got.”

  “One hundred thirty-five centimeters. Widest standard.”

  “Give me a hundred ninety centimeters of it. And stretchers.”

  “The largest I have is a number one-twenty.”

  “For one painting?” Madame asked. “That’s nearly as tall as you are.”

  True. He could hardly believe what he’d said. “That’ll be the width.”

  “You’ll need cross braces for a painting that size,” Tanguy said. He took off his straw farmer’s hat and scratched his head, motioning to the cast. “How can you paint?”

  “I can paint. I’m ambidextrous.”

  “Never heard of a painter who could paint with both hands. Show me.” He pushed paper and pencil across the counter where Auguste sat on a tall stool.

  “Anyone who writes with his left hand is the devil’s accomplice,” Madame said. “What’s your hurry? Why don’t you wait until you get that thing off?”

  “The light. It’s a painting of canotiers on a riverside terrace. In two months the good light on the Seine will be gone by four o’clock.”

  The bell jingled and a young woman came in with three girls trailing behind her. Auguste jerked to attention. Blond hair hung loose from her chignon, and her slender neck had a patrician quality. Using his left hand, he drew her in profile as she looked at a display of colored chalk.

  Madame Tanguy pursed her lips as he worked.

  “It’s amusing to draw left-handed. My strokes go the opposite way. Hm. This might even be better than what I could do with my right.”

  “Sign it,” Madame commanded, tapping the paper with her fingernail stained green from grinding pigments. “Someday, when you’re famous and we’re on our deathbeds, we’ll sell it, and get back a fraction of what you owe us.”

  He signed it, “The Devil and A. Renoir.”

  He held the roll of canvas taut for Julien as the big shears opened and closed, advancing toward him with a rasping noise like a mechanical fish about to bite his fingers.

  “That’s twenty francs fifteen,” Madame said. “You’re going to need a lot of paint for a canvas that size. I don’t see your pocket bulging.”

  “Never mind, Fionie. He’ll die if he doesn’t paint,” Tanguy said as he rolled the canvas around the stretchers and tied it with a cord.

  The young woman chose her chalk and a colored pencil for each of the girls, and approached the counter.

  “You’re a teacher at the girls’ school, aren’t you? Here, look at this.” Madame showed her
the drawing. “Monsieur Renoir is a very famous painter. Everyone in Paris knows him. Wouldn’t you like this?”

  The girls crowded around to look. “Buy it. Buy it,” they chorused.

  The young woman couldn’t keep back a modest smile.

  “Ten francs,” Madame said.

  “Oh.” She shook her head. “Just the chalk and the pencils, please.”

  “Five,” Julien said.

  The girls hopped up and down.

  “Three,” Julien said.

  She blushed modestly, looking at her image. “I suppose.”

  One girl tugged at her arm and whispered something to her.

  “Would Monsieur draw the girls too?” she asked. “One franc each?”

  “Yes, he will,” Madame snapped, and laid out three pieces of paper.

  Amused, he said, “There’s nothing I’d like better,” and went to work.

  “Please, if you would just sign them ‘A. Renoir,’ that would be lovely,” the young lady said.

  When he finished, the teacher slid the coins across the counter and Madame scooped them up, dropped them in the cash box and slammed the lid. “Come in again, dear. Bring in your other pupils.”

  Julien smiled with his wide blue eyes, wide nostrils, and wide lips, a face in harmony with itself, elfish and pleased that he knew enough to set a tube of cobalt blue on the counter. “What other colors do you need?”

  “A far sight more than six francs’ worth, I’m afraid.”

  “Name them.”

  “Flake white, large.”

  “That’s six francs fifty already,” Madame said.

  “Two tubes?” Tanguy asked.

  “One for now. Chrome yellow, vermilion, rose madder, Veronese green, emerald, cobalt, ultramarine blue large, Prussian blue.”

  “No. I will not sell you Prussian blue.”