Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  If she would turn her head to look at someone once in a while, he might catch her then.

  “Moi? Oh, là là.”

  She cleared her throat and sat up straighter, if that was possible. Maybe this wouldn’t work after all. He hurried to mix colors and have a brush ready with her skin tone, another for the blue stripe, another for the white.

  She turned to look at the group and struck her fork lightly against a glass. Three pings. “As Sovereign of the Convocation of Flâneurs, our gentlemen social observers, and Flâneuses, our lady observers, of the Maison Fournaise, I declare the first session open to undertake an examination of la vie moderne.”

  He got in a few strokes on her bodice before she remembered she didn’t want a profile and turned back to face forward. He indulged himself by working on the stripes of her dress falling in folds.

  “I call on Monsieur Ephrussi,” she said.

  The staid and proper Charles Ephrussi tipped his head, the gesture of un homme galant. “With pleasure, mademoiselle.”

  Auguste had noticed him eyeing her. Maybe because of her this painting would hang in his rue de Monceau mansion. After the Salon, of course.

  “On Thursday, the air was so heavy I thought it might be pleasant to take a ride on the upper level of an omnibus, just to feel a breeze.”

  “That’s it? Just that omnibuses are part of la vie moderne?” Circe turned to look at Charles. Too far.

  “Patience, mademoiselle,” Charles said.

  “Circe, keep your pose.” Poor, nervous wisp of a thing, unwilling to yield the center of attention. Her need to interact battled so prettily with her determination to be painted full face.

  “I took a seat on the roof. We stopped at Rond Point and the paperboys lifted their poles with newspapers attached to the clips. I put my coin in the cup on one pole and took Le Temps. My eye fell on this curious notice.”

  Charles pulled a clipping from his breast pocket and read.

  “An old man nearing life’s end wishes to ask forgiveness from one known as Le Balafré, a frequenter of Montmartre cabarets. The lie about him told to Madame Marie-Pauline under the gas lamp on the corner of rue de Rochechouart and avenue Trudaine on the night of June 13, 1864, has never ceased to haunt the mind of him who now confesses it and who wishes to die with a clean soul. Monsieur Le Balafré, pardon it, and give peace to a troubled man.”

  “Le Balafré. The Scarred One. Scarface! I know him!” Angèle said.

  “You can’t be serious,” Charles said.

  “He’s got a gash from his mouth to the top of his ear. Give me that clipping when we’re finished. He’s blind now, and just sits under the acacia trees in place du Tertre on the Butte telling stories for a sou. I’ll have someone read it to him. It might make a world of difference to both of them.”

  “No comments after each one,” Circe said primly. “When we’re finished we’ll have a vote for whose observation is the best.” She tapped her chin. “Hm. Whom shall I call on next? Ah, you. Gustave.”

  She looked at Gustave a moment. Time enough for only one rushed stroke for her throat.

  “Mine is a Left Bank story,” Gustave said. “I found a crowd gathered in place de la Sorbonne listening to a woman on a makeshift platform. ‘No duties without rights, no rights without duties,’ she was saying. ‘Perfect equality of the sexes before the law and in customs and moral codes. We must not timidly beg for a little more education, a little more bread, a little less humiliation in marriage. No. We must firmly declare our natural rights.’”

  “Hubertine Auclert, most likely. A radical Amazon on crusade,” Charles said.

  “She went on and on about universal suffrage, legal separation of wealth in marriage, the right to run for public office.”

  “The right to scrub the floor,” Auguste put in. “If women did that domestic exercise, they’d make better lovers. The generations to come won’t know how to make love worth a damn, and that would be very unfortunate for those who don’t have painting.”

  “Don’t be beastly, Auguste. It’s not a scrub job that makes a woman cut capers, and you know it,” Angèle said.

  He snickered. “Well, I can’t see myself getting into bed with a lawyer, if there are such female monsters. I like women best when they don’t know how to read, and when they wipe their babies’ bottoms themselves.”

  “You can’t mean that,” Ellen said. “Words, language, they’re as important to women as to men.”

  “For a man who paints la vie moderne, you’re a century behind the times,” Angèle said.

  “But why teach women such a boring occupation as law when they are so perfectly suited to do what men can never dream of attempting—that is, to make life bearable?”

  “Let Gustave finish,” said Circe, turning to face forward.

  A will of her own. It was maddening.

  “One man in the crowd shouted, ‘Women don’t know how to vote.’ The speaker gestured to the Sorbonne behind her and said, ‘Then open the university to us.’” Gustave shook his head. “She had an answer to everything.”

  “Because she’s no clod-knocker,” Angèle said. “She’s smart and she’s plucky and she’s right.”

  Paul nudged Pierre. “Ho-ho! Angèle’s an Amazon herself.”

  “Who would have known it under that pretty face?” Pierre said.

  Alphonsine said to Alphonse, “It looks like Papa is going to take out the steam launch. You’d better go down.”

  Alphonse looked over his shoulder.

  Circe turned around completely and touched the muscle of his forearm.

  “Circe, hold your pose, please.”

  “First Alphonse has to give us his contribution.”

  “Just this.” He gestured with his thumb toward the promenade. “These office clerks in new striped shirts trying to act like oarsmen, strutting around here with an oar on their shoulder—they’re only weekend pretenders. They buy their canotier in Paris instead of on the river, wear a cravat by la Coline, and smoke their fancy Chacom pipes from Saint-Claude. Take a look at the ones in frock coats tapping silver-tipped canes on the dirt of the promenade. They steal glances at how other men dress. They’re afraid of getting their white trousers dirty, afraid of sunburn, afraid of blisters, afraid for their liver. They don’t really care about the river. They care about putting on a show.”

  “Then you think leisure is turning into a performance?” Jules asked. “That all the island’s a stage and all the men and women merely posers?”

  “Something like that. I’m sorry, Auguste. I have to go,” Alphonse said.

  Auguste nodded and Alphonse went downstairs.

  Looking right at Circe, Jules said, “People pose in order to make spectacles of themselves. Thanks to Haussmann’s public places, we’ve become a nation of stage players, and the play we’re performing is class.”

  She of the articulated wrists flapped and fluttered to make Jules stop. “It’s not your turn. Right now it’s Antonio’s turn, our foreign correspondent.”

  She turned to flirt with Antonio, but Auguste missed his chance. Damned infuriating.

  “Con piacere, signorina,” Antonio said. “The women of Paris, that’s the subject of my little report. Everyone from laundresses at two francs a day to Mademoiselle Zénobie, star of the Folies-Bergère who had the soles of her dancing shoes paved with diamonds.”

  “Glass,” Ellen said. “Just glass. She’s trying to imitate Cora Pearl in Orpheus and the Underworld. Hers were real, but that was during the Second Empire.”

  “You didn’t start low enough,” Angèle said. “Two francs a day is too high. You’ve left out the wakers-up. Ragpickers’ daughters in the Maquis who work from midnight to four in the morning making the rounds of the merchants of Les Halles vegetable stalls and the poor devils who fold newspapers. Five centimes a wake-up. Millionaires of the profession have as many as thirty clients. That gives them one measly franc fifty by dawn.”

  “How is it that you know so much about
the riffraff?” Circe demanded.

  “Because I was one, princess.” Softly at first, Angèle sang Rosa Bordas’ rousing song, “La Canaille,” famously sung at the Hôtel de Ville the night that ignited the Commune.

  “J’en suis! J’en suis,” Angèle sang in Rosa’s raspy voice, declaring she was also canaille, riffraff.

  Pierre joined on the mesmerizing, mounting refrain. Promenaders stopped to listen and the Palais sailboat crowd came out from under the arbor. Paul stamped his feet, and Angèle, her arm raised aggressively, belted out the last victorious note. Applause came up from below.

  Paul raised his glass. “Vive le peuple!”

  “Bravo, Angèle!” Ellen cried. “You do Rosa proud!”

  “You’ll have the stinking mouchards reporting us,” Alphonse called out from the dock.

  “And the Maison will be shut down!” Alphonsine wailed, which made everyone laugh, especially Paul with his deep-toned horse laugh.

  Circe had lost control of the group. Or Auguste had. Bewilderment flushed her cheeks. Finally some color to them. A few strokes on her face.

  “Antonio, are you finished?” Circe asked.

  “No. I’ve hardly begun.”

  That brought on the laughter again. How could he paint with all this going on?

  “I’ve been studying your social classes as they pertain to that oldest of female professions. As a foreigner, I find the nuances fascinating. At the bottom, you have the ladies of the pavement, hatless Montmartroises posing as milliners’ delivery girls with the most piercing, desperate eyes that chide you for not buying what they’re selling.” Antonio shuddered, which made Alphonsine snicker.

  “The next lowest, I believe, is the dancer of the chahut in Montmartre dance halls. Not professional performers, just women who come to be picked from the promenoirs.”

  “Girls who have an intimate acquaintance with a washtub during the day,” Jules added, then took a puff on his pipe.

  “Unbelievable, their kicks and contortions. We have nothing like it in Italy. Their catcalls advertise wild frenzied sex.”

  “Among the French,” Charles said, “it rarely happens that a taste for anything is not carried to such an extent as to become folly. The chahut began as an orderly quadrille des lanciers. In its extreme, it’s the cancan of the finale at the Folies-Bergère ending in a row of chorus girls falling forward in the splits, like dominoes each knocking the next one down. That too is la vie moderne, splintering women’s bodies for entertainment.”

  Looking into her wine glass, Ellen said, “You surprise me, Monsieur Ephrussi, that you would attend an entertainment of le peuple.”

  “As a foreigner myself, I must learn all aspects of my adopted culture.”

  Auguste chortled, and Charles tried to recover himself. “In my opinion, the elasticity of the leg in the chahut and cancan leads one to suspect an equal flexibility of morals. So continue, Antonio.”

  “Then there’s the shockingly young amateur, the trottin, flowers of the rues hiking up their skirts while sizing up their potential customers.”

  “Mere buds,” Pierre cut in. “They’re a gamble of inexperience.”

  “Take a closer look, Antonio,” Paul said. “There’s a difference between how the women lift their skirts on the Right Bank and the Left.”

  “I see I’ll have to continue my study,” Antonio said.

  “Use caution in your investigations,” Raoul said. “There are dangers.”

  “I understand. A step above, if I’m not mistaken, is what I believe you call the demi-mondaine, older than a trottin, and more expert. Dressed in finery that would admit her to a higher-class café, or a theater loge.”

  “Or the Jockey Club or the Hippodrome at Longchamp,” Raoul put in.

  “Or the Château Rouge or the Valentino,” Charles added.

  “And finally,” Antonio said, “the courtesans.”

  “Deriving their name from serving the royal court,” Charles interjected. “They participate in the arts and the finer things.”

  Amusing how Charles was taking part with such enthusiasm.

  “The most exquisitely dressed,” Antonio continued, “the most jeweled, the most intelligent, the most—”

  “Expensive,” Pierre said.

  Circe raised her chin. Zut! A mind of her own. He gave up on her for the time being and mixed darker shades for the shoulders of Raoul, Jules, and Charles, positioning them in relation to one another, breadth and height.

  “You’ve certainly been busy this week, Antonio,” Circe said.

  “Oh, no, mademoiselle. These are the results of a month of observations.”

  “Don’t think you have it all wrapped up,” Angèle said. “It takes a keener eye than yours to cut respectable from loose. Take a squint at the size of her bows, dear boy, not her bosoms. See where she places her chignon—high like a crown or low like a bunny’s ass. Watch how she lifts her skirt at a curb, how long she holds it up, whether she lowers it gracefully or drops it with a flump, whether she looks you in the face—them’s the things will tell you she is or isn’t a femme de la rue. Back to the streets you go, and do better, or you’ll make a blunder that will land you in the cells of Rochefort.”

  “And your conclusion?” Jules asked. “So far, that is.”

  “That Montmartre is indeed the seat of democracy. The poor are offered the same treats as the rich, only the dressing is different.”

  “Caution, my friend,” Jules said. “Dumas fils said to go to Chevet’s and look at the peaches at twenty sous. Perfect, fresh, juicy. Then look at those for fifteen. Each one has a flaw, hidden until you take a bite.”

  Auguste cast a glance at Gustave. He had said nothing during all of Antonio’s report, the only man not contributing. His expression was inscrutable, his pose leaning away from the table was exact. He must have shooting pains in his back. They’d been posing for nearly two hours.

  “Time for a break,” he said.

  “But we haven’t gone around to everyone,” Circe said.

  Ellen shook out her arm. “And you haven’t called on any women.”

  Pierre gave his beard an energetic scratch and made good on his promise to massage Circe’s neck and shoulders, then moved on to Ellen, and asked her about bringing Émile again. She gave him a guarded answer.

  “I thought I was the quatorzième, brought in to save the day,” Charles said. “Today we have a dozen. Why make it worse?”

  “One woman not here today is already in the painting, which makes thirteen unless Émile comes back to fill his space,” Auguste said.

  “Then if I might say so, prevail on him to come, mademoiselle,” Charles said to Ellen. “It is essential, for the sake of the painting’s reception.”

  “Otherwise,” Pierre said, “we’re subject to dire consequences. Thirteen gathered in an upper room for the Last Supper. This is an upper terrace.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “If Émile doesn’t come back, your painting will suggest a different story than you intend, Auguste,” Pierre said.

  “I don’t intend any story.” He resolved not to think of it for a while, and just keep on painting. He couldn’t allow one more worry to set in.

  Circe patted her bosom. “Don’t all paintings tell a story?”

  “Not this one. If I had wanted to tell a story, I would have used a pen. Choose a history painting if you want a story. The important thing here is not what’s going on, but how it conveys what’s going on.”

  “You’re trying to confuse me.”

  “Painting, the act of it, that’s what’s important. Let them see paint—thick, thin, smooth, rugged, one color brushed wet into another, or lying alongside another, distinct. That’s what modernity is to me.”

  “This will be famous, won’t it?” she purred.

  Her eyes were alive with light like wet sapphires washed with lavender.

  “Ask me in ten years.”

  She was perverse, yes, irritating, yes, but, confound it, he
felt himself slipping into her aura.

  “You’ve enjoyed leading the conversation, haven’t you?” he said.

  She dipped her head in a movement of bashful pride, the practiced gesture of a coquette. Over her shoulder he saw Alphonsine wag her head just enough for him to notice, as if to say, La-di-dah. Alphonsine, the hostess of the Maison Fournaise, was the true flâneuse, missing nothing.

  Soon Circe clapped her hands like a schoolmarm. “It’s time. Places, everyone.”

  At this, Alphonsine glared at her outright. He had to laugh at that.

  A sick feeling came over him as he compared his friends to the painting. On the canvas, Circe was an ambiguous mess. Her torso and shoulders faced forward, her head was sketched in to face sideways like an Egyptian queen painted flatly on a wall, and the stripes of her bodice didn’t connect with those on her skirt. And Charles was as stiff and out of place as Circe. Auguste drew his broad-bladed scraping knife across the canvas from Charles’s top hat to his waist until he was only a ghost image.

  Seeing him scrape, Jules cried, “Out, damned spot! Out, I say.”

  “The second session of the Convocation of Flâneurs and Flâneuses is about to begin,” Circe said. “I call on Jules.”

  “Oui, mademoiselle. To me, modernity consists—”

  “Just a minute,” Auguste said. “Charles, I’ve changed my mind. I’m sorry, but I have to have you turn more toward Jules.”

  “Whatever you’d like. How far?”

  “More. More. That’s good.”

  Alphonsine’s beady-eyed look bored into the back of Circe’s head, as if to say, That’s how a model should behave!

  “Go ahead, Jules,” he said.

  “To me, modernity consists of new forms in all the arts. I went to Stéphane Mallarmé’s house this week to hear and discuss the new poetry.”

  Alphonsine raised up slightly.

  “Were the poems about love?” Circe arched her back and thrust forward her breasts. “All poems should be about love.”

  “I can’t rightly say. These were les Symbolistes. A mood was more important than a clear meaning. But I can tell you the feeling they gave me. They made me keenly conscious of mystery in life.”