Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

“No one is questioning your art.” Charles flicked off a shred of tobacco on a lacquered Russian cigarette box on the table between them. “It’s your politics, I mean the group’s politics, that concern me.”

  Auguste waved his hand dismissively. “I have no politics. The world is big enough for all of us. I didn’t come here to debate about Raffaëlli. I came to ask you to be in my painting. You’ll have a spot center back, next to Jules, your top hat silhouetted against open air. Or you and Madame Ephrussi together there. I know you like to spend Sundays with her, so spend them at Chatou.”

  “Out of the question. To have her exposed to the riffraff of La Grenouillère? That’s monstrous.”

  “It’s not at La Grenouillère. It’s at Maison Fournaise.”

  “Not to mention exposing her to the crass eyes of the public scrutinizing your painting. No. I prefer to keep Madame for my own eyes. You’re from a different world, Auguste. You don’t understand the niceties required of people in our position.”

  “You mean you are from a different world.”

  Charles raised an eyebrow at that. “To sit for a portrait in one’s own home is one thing, but to be painted in that raucous environment, in a genre painting—”

  “All right, all right. Not Madame, then, but you.” He leaned forward again and tapped his fingernail on Charles’s desk, once for each word—“I want you in the painting. It’s only right, after all you’ve done for me.”

  “You’ve done studies already? An underdrawing to restrain your colors?”

  “No studies. I’m painting it directly on a blank canvas.”

  “That may be enough to lure me out there, just to see what you’re up to. For your own sake, don’t let any critic see you do that, or see it at all until it’s finished. You’ll be labeled a sensualist seduced by color, a chaotic painter.”

  “I don’t care what they call me.”

  “You care acutely.” He sipped his tea. “What’s your stand on Raffaëlli?”

  “Is your posing contingent on my stance?”

  “To a degree.”

  “That’s unfair of you, but I’ll tell you anyway.” Auguste tried his tea again, making him wait. Still too hot. “He wants us to expose misery. He spouts lists of character types we should paint, with ragpickers at the top. He even mandates locations. Let him paint what he wants, but we left the academy because subject matter was imposed on us there.”

  “He considers artists as social educators, and I commend him for that.”

  “Fine. Fine. So will this painting contribute to a social education, by showing that we’re enjoying our lives again. At least most of us. His concern for tramps and ragpickers is all well and good, if he likes to wallow, but birds sing even when they’re hungry.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that there’s a purpose for prettiness—to give joy. Besides, Raffaëlli is not an Impressionist.”

  “Degas is committed to him.”

  “Enough to risk the breakup of the group? I think not.”

  “I think so.”

  He could see by Charles’s pinched mouth that he meant it.

  “Will you come to pose or are you afraid you’ll be seduced by color? I might as well cut up the canvas to reuse the pieces if you don’t come.”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Gustave will be there. You can talk to him about Degas and Raffaëlli.”

  Outside, Auguste passed two women without even a glance.

  Prissy foreigner, protecting his good wife from wholesome riverside society, Auguste thought. No doubt he also protects her from the comtesse, or the likes of the actress in green who looked back at his office window. And to hang that dog of a Moreau painting! Charles was taken in because it has the color of gold in it. Moreau can’t even draw a foot.

  But if Charles didn’t show up, he might have to consider Jeanne’s dandy, if he dared to come again. Auguste hawked and spat in the gutter. No, he wouldn’t. He would pose some ragpicker first.

  He dashed out in front of a carriage and was cursed by the driver. Auguste cursed him back.

  He knew where he had to go next, but Gustave’s two hundred and fifty francs for Sunset at Montmartre was already depleted by yesterday’s posing fees, the doctor, his rent at Chatou. The rest ought to go to Père Tanguy.

  When the bell jingled, Madame Tanguy teetered on a chair reaching for a box on an upper shelf. Auguste rushed to her.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that. Here, let me.”

  He offered her his right hand. She took it with a momentary look of distrust, and stepped down.

  “That box of palette knives marked trowel,” she said, pointing.

  He reached it easily without the chair, helped her reach a few more things, and carried them to the counter.

  “Where’s Julien?”

  “At the café around the corner, but he’s shorter than I am. I have to fill this order and take it to the bureau de poste by two.”

  “What do you notice about me?” He stood with his arms out, palms up.

  “That you have no money in your hands to give me.”

  “Aha, but I do!” He made a broad circular gesture with his right arm and patted his breast pocket conspicuously. Grinning, he said, “That’s why I came.”

  She gave him a squinty-eyed look.

  “Now, don’t pretend that you loathe me. I know it’s an act. I know it was you who slipped in that tube of Prussian blue.”

  She pressed her lips together, trying to appear stern.

  “And I want another one, quick, before he comes in. And flake white, ultramarine, and cobalt.” He snapped a fifty-franc napoléon on the counter.

  “Oh, là!”

  “How much do I owe?”

  She thumbed through a stack of papers tied with string. “If you see that Cézanne, tell him he owes us two thousand one hundred seventy-four francs.”

  “Minus the paintings of his you have.”

  “You owe a hundred and forty-one francs, eighty-eight centimes, plus twenty-one francs forty now.” She dropped a slim tube into his chest pocket.

  He felt his shoulders drop. He had intended to stock up on colors he knew he would deplete soon, but that would have to wait. He had his models to pay again in three days.

  “Will you take eighty for now, until I get more?” He laid out three ten-franc coins next to the napoléon. She slapped her hand down on them, stubby fingers splayed.

  “I guess that means yes.”

  “I guess I’ll take what I can.”

  He blew her a kiss. “You know, that blue dress looks lovely on you. It brings out the color of your eyes.”

  She shook her head, hands on her hips. “Monsieur le Flatteur.”

  “Have you enjoyed your pâté de foie Julien?”

  He patted the contraband tube, then backed to the door waving both outstretched arms to his sides like a bird, trying not to smile.

  “Ah! Your arm. No cast!”

  “Bonne journée, Madame l’Observatrice.”

  Down to thirty francs again. He headed toward Camille’s crémerie. May be she had some luck with the painting of the girls juggling oranges.

  He opened the door and saw the wall bare. “Ha!”

  Camille’s plump face spread wider in a doughy grin.

  “Sold?”

  She didn’t say yes or no. She just ladled out some potage crème de légumes, set it on a round table in front of him, and sat down opposite him.

  “Eat.” She pointed to the bare wall with her thumb. “You have my daughter, Annette, to thank for that. The shoe shop girl. She ran into that clown Sagot outside the Cirque Fernando and told him she had a painting she knew he’d want. ‘By Renoir,’ she said with awe in her voice. ‘It’s of two circus performers.’ She dragged him here right then. He offered thirty francs. ‘C’est ridicule!’ she said. ‘Won’t you be sorry when I tell you I sold it to a man for fifty!’ ‘Then why is it still here?’ the man asked. ‘The buyer’s coming for it tomorrow,’ she sai
d. She was lying through her teeth, but I let her operate and just watched. She was so pretty with her dark brown hair piled up, and he was looking at her as much as at the painting. In the end, they settled on thirty-five.”

  “Bravo!”

  Camille sauntered behind the counter in a rolling motion, opened the cash drawer, and clicked the coins together in the air like a Spanish dancer.

  “That’s the wife you ought to have. Annette did it once, she can do it again.”

  Just this once, he’d promised himself, as a leg up for his Chatou painting. Never again.

  Titters came from the next table—Géraldine and Aline, the girls of the quarter, regulars at the crémerie.

  “She’s got you under her thumb now, pardi!” Aline said with her pert little nose in the air.

  Pardi. Interesting that she didn’t say by God. Pardi was archaic and countrified. A country girl by choice. He liked that about her. She had a freshness that neither the lorettes with the hatboxes nor the femmes de la grande bourgeoisie on the boulevards nor even the actress in emerald green possessed.

  “Next thing you know, she’ll want you to paint her daughter,” Aline went on with a lilt to her voice. “That’s how it starts. Then she’ll have Annette deliver cuisine de campagne to your studio every night, and that will keep you from going to the Café Nouvelle-Athènes…”

  “…So you won’t meet other women,” Géraldine added.

  “And soon you’ll give in, leastways out of gratitude as much as out of the itch of the flesh, and hélas! You’ll find yourself married, and all your bachelor soirées will go up in a puff of smoke.”

  “How do you know that I’m not married already?”

  At this, it was Géraldine who laughed, while Aline flushed a deep rose.

  “Oh, she knows,” Géraldine said brightly. “We have our ways.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hats on Sunday

  Alphonsine took special care winding her chignon. In the glass, her face was rounder than she wished it, but joyous with the expectation of the day, her face never revealing on Sundays what it sometimes showed on other days.

  In the back garden, she clipped three roses, a pink, a dark red, and a floppy cream one, the color of fresh Brie. Flowers are ideas, Gustave had said. Ideas of what? She was going to ask him. She put them in a small vase, and brought them up to the terrace.

  Anne, one of the waitresses, was about to whisk off the tablecloth.

  “Stop. Don’t do that.”

  “But the leaves and twigs—”

  “I’ll take care of it. Set all forty tables downstairs today.”

  How would she get fresh linen on without disturbing the position of the bottles of wine if he’d already begun to paint them? And the napkins too. Angèle’s was bunched up tightly like a bouquet of lilies. Gustave’s was hanging over the table like a tousled bedsheet after a night of love. She studied the arrangement, then set the bottles one by one in the same relationship on another table and scooped up Gustave’s napkin as though it were something precious and alive. She lifted Angèle’s napkin, changed the cloth, put everything back, and placed the roses in front of Gustave’s seat.

  Auguste came up the stairs. “You really think people aren’t going to move those bottles?”

  “I just wanted to have everything how you left it.”

  “There’ll be new bottles, but we’ll have to leave the old ones in place.”

  “They can use new napkins and leave the others just as they are.”

  Guy de Maupassant scurried down from his top floor room and ducked his head out the door to the terrace. He saw Auguste and they gave each other the briefest of greetings.

  “I’ll take my café downstairs, if you don’t mind,” Guy said.

  “Anne’s there. She can serve you,” Alphonsine said. “But first, tell us which of your boats you are going to take out today.”

  “Before it gets too hot, a little exercise in the as, my smallest périssoire, Frère Jan. Then I have friends coming out for lunch and a promenade on the water. I’ll use L’Envers des Feuilles for that because it’s bigger. Later, I’ll practice with my team in my triplette.”

  “Why do you call it that, The Undersides of Leaves?” she asked. “It’s a silly name.”

  Guy smoothed his bushy mustache, scrutinizing her. “Haven’t you ever lain with a man on the bank under trees? What do you see when you look up?”

  “It doesn’t take lying with a man to see that,” she said.

  “But it might be more pleasant with a man,” Auguste said. “I like the name. It’s clever.”

  Guy turned to him. “I understand you’re going to do another painting with blinders on, like you did at Moulin de la Galette. You’re out of fashion, Renoir. It’s realism, the grit, that’s current now, la vie moderne, not la vie en rose. You’re an escapist.”

  “Then society is too. How do you account for the whole working class of Paris escaping to every river town from Asnières to Bougival every Sunday, you included? Is that what you’re writing these days, grit? Like Zola? He thinks he portrayed the people of Paris by saying that they smell.”

  “I’m not writing. I’m boating. When the weather turns bad I’ll write.”

  “Well, there you have it. Escapism.”

  Guy smiled with a touch of chagrin. “Flaubert used to tell me, ‘Young man, you must work more. You spend your life with too much exercise, too much canotage, too many prostitutes. You were made to write. The rest is vain.’”

  “Too much gazing up at the undersides of leaves,” Alphonsine said, and dodged Guy’s arm which shot out to grab her.

  After Guy left, she asked Auguste, “Why aren’t you and Guy more friendly?”

  “Oh, we like each other well enough, but we have nothing in common.”

  “Yes, you do. He loves the river just like you do.”

  “Every time I see him, he’s in a different boat, or he’s bragging about owning a small fleet, one of every kind. I’d consider myself fortunate to have just one.”

  They watched Guy maneuver the as, the narrowest, most precarious style of canot on the river.

  “He’s a better oarsman than I am,” Auguste said.

  “You’re a better painter than he is.”

  He dismissed that with a jerk of his arm. “I told him once that he sees everything in black. It has to do with the size of his mustache. It’s a veritable hedge. The weight of the thing pulls down his lower eyelids which affects his vision.”

  “You’re being silly.”

  “He told me I see everything through rose-tinted spectacles. He keeps it up every time we run into each other, the same as Degas does. They have a conspiracy, le misérabilisme. Guy thinks I’m mad. I think he is. We’ve reached an equilibrium.”

  “Well, I don’t like le misérabilisme either. Who wants to be in a room with Victor Hugo’s wretches and scoundrels?”

  Two short whistles announced the train from Paris at the Rueil station. Soon working girls in pairs or on the arms of their beaus, picnicking families with baskets and quilts, fishermen with poles, children with butterfly nets paraded across the bridge.

  So many things she loved about summer Sundays on the Île de Chatou—the red and yellow omnibuses from Rueil taking people to ferry docks, the flat-bottomed bachots with their tinny bells ferrying them to the large guinguettes of La Grenouillère, where they could eat and swim and rent canots, or Le Bal des Canotiers at Bougival, where they could dance. Women in hats decorated with flowers and feathers, men in top hats, the wee ones in cotton bonnets toddling after ducks, their sunburned arms outstretched, dogs frolicking, even a monkey once. Guitar and accordion music at the small guinguettes under the trees, the river dotted with swimmers’ heads, the flapping of sails and rattle of rigging against the masts of the sailboats, the water in the channel cut by canots of all types—racing sculls, périssoires, rowing yoles, even an as occasionally—bringing songs from one bankside café to another—she loved it all, loved he
r part in it. She, the hostess, mingling with the guests as though she had invited each one to her own party, loved to say: “Look what we’ve got. Enjoy, taste, bask, and go back to Paris refreshed.”

  “None of the people arriving know what an important thing is happening here today,” she said.

  “What important thing?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Sometimes you act like your head is made of wood.”

  “Weathered wood, you mean.”

  Ellen arrived, the one who had posed with a glass to her mouth. Auguste had said she was a mime from the Folies. “Her beau isn’t with her.”

  “Maybe it was a mistake to include him. He has no loyalty to me.”

  “So now it’s only twelve. Poof. Your problem just vanished.”

  She watched her brother move right in and offer to take Ellen out in a yole. How careful he was, one foot anchoring the boat to the dock, extending both of his hands as she stepped in. He was giving up time when he could be renting boats.

  Angèle came with Antonio and sat at a table under a maple tree. The two men who had been in the back of the painting were busy trying to attract the attention of some young women on the promenade.

  “Which is which?” she asked.

  “The one doffing his hat to that lady is Pierre Prophet-of-doom Lestringuèz. A regular at Café Nouvelle-Athènes suppers along with Paul. Pierre’s mad about that bowler, thinks he looks dashing.”

  “A bowler isn’t dashing. A bowler is merely respectable. A yachtsman’s boater like Gustave’s is dashing.”

  “Paul Lhôte is the one wearing glasses. Blind as a bat. He always whispers to Pierre, ‘Which one is prettiest?’ and then goes to work on her. Of course, Pierre never tells him the truth.”

  “You shouldn’t have told me. What am I to think now if Paul compliments me?”

  Auguste chuckled. She loved it when she could get him to laugh. It wasn’t often enough.

  A tall man in a black frock coat and top hat came across the footbridge in a clipped, impatient manner, and paused at the steps down to the bank, as though he wanted to assess the firmness of the ground before he placed his foot down. He looked toward the Maison curiously.