Luncheon of the Boating Party

by Susan Vreeland

  “Not by choice.” Paul ate another bite.

  “So you agreed to this encounter?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. It’s just better to have half a chance than be bludgeoned to death in a Montmartre alley.”

  “He’s threatened that?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Several times. Once when I was with Auguste.”

  “Then what makes you believe he’ll actually do it?”

  Paul tapped the parchment. “This is the first written cartel.”

  Pierre read it again. It was written in flamboyant calligraphy.

  Monsieur Paul Lhôte,

  Being that you have compromised Mademoiselle Gabrielle Carême by giving her the lie in the public press, be prepared to engage in an encounter to justify your words Sunday noon in a closed field at Résidence Balfour, hard by Epinay-sur-Seine on the road to Villetaneuse.

  Robert Douvaz, Appellant.

  “Puh! This is ridiculous!” Pierre blurted. “That article is long forgotten.”

  “It’s just an excuse. He hates me because he thinks she loves me. I don’t give a damn about her.”

  “But this is the modern age, not the ancien régime.”

  “Not for him. Not for plenty of men from his class.”

  “Can’t you take it to the authorities and have him arrested?”

  “They would never do anything about it. Currently there’s no law against dueling.” Paul chewed on his bottom lip. “It’s wearisome to second guess every man approaching on the street whenever I go out at night.”

  “You’re too bloody calm about it.”

  “Fascinating word choice, Pierre.” He finished the bread and sipped his café crème. “I’ve been taking exercise with a fencing master.”

  “Little help that, if he chooses pistols.”

  “It’s not his choice, if he goes by traditional rules.”

  “And if he doesn’t, you can’t see worth a rat’s ass, and here you sit eating your breakfast just like you were going on a little boat ride.”

  “Douvaz is a big target.”

  Pierre glared at him. “Your humor is ill-timed.”

  “I saw well enough during a sandstorm in Algeria. The Zouaves taught me some maneuvers.” Paul folded the letter and put it in his breast pocket. “What’s so awful about dying is that you don’t get to do anything anymore. No more roaming under the streets of Paris. Just lying there. I hate sleeping on my back.”

  “Stop. I can’t stomach it.” Pierre bolted out the door and around the corner.

  Paul lit a cigarette and waited, giving him his privacy. Sweat trickled down his neck, irritating him. He mopped it with his handkerchief, and lay his palms on the table to feel its coolness. Coolness had saved him on his third escape from the Prussian camp. And again when some urchin pulled a knife on him in the bazaar in Algiers. The greater the danger, the greater the icy calm. He wanted it to be over, regardless of the outcome, but the only way for it to be over was to go through it.

  In a few minutes Pierre returned, and wiped his mouth and chin on a napkin. Paul shoved his café toward him and Pierre finished it off.

  They went about the grim task of hiring a hackney coach and securing a surgeon to accompany them, and the three of them arrived at Epinay-sur-Seine, on the loop north of Argenteuil, well before noon. On a Sunday morning no shops were open. At the peal of a bell, villagers came out of the church. Pierre inquired after the road to Villetaneuse and the location of Résidence Balfour. The driver found what fit the description in open farmland far away from other dwellings, a large derelict country house overgrown with vines reaching up to the mansard roof. One of the four chimneys had been damaged and several of the upper windows were missing glass. Apparently no one lived inside. There was an unkempt orchard on one side and a broken stone path on the other that led to the rear of the house. Two closed carriages were already there.

  Paul instructed the hackman to wait. He took the path. Pierre followed with the surgeon carrying a case. At the rear of the house was a crumbling stone enclosure with an iron gate. Pierre opened it for him. Inside, what had once been a garden was now grown rank and weedy except for a swath freshly scythed stretching down the length of the enclosure. The reality of it made him suddenly aware of his pulse. La piste, it was called, according to his fencing master, with tables at both ends. At one of them, Robert Douvaz stood with a number of men in top hats. Douvaz and three others approached.

  “I am heartened to see you’ve arrived, and in good time,” Douvaz said.

  Jesus! The bastard was going to play it for all its worth.

  “I am glad to see you well,” Paul replied. Obligatory crap. He summoned the calmness that had saved him in the past, and it reassured him.

  Douvaz introduced one man as Monsieur Balfour, master of the field, another, Monsieur Roy, as his parrain, or godfather, and another as a second. “The gentlemen to the rear are my witnesses and a surgeon. I see you have brought your own.”

  “Have you a second?” Monsieur Roy asked.

  Paul looked at Pierre whose eyes opened wider before he nodded.

  “This is Monsieur Pierre Lestringuèz, who will be my second only in matters of preparation, not in execution.”

  “Understood,” Roy said.

  Monsieur Roy read the cartel and asked for his response.

  Paul cleared his throat. “The article which you deem injurious to the mademoiselle was intended as a generality in the tone of humor, Horatian, not Juvenalian, and was not directed at her. Nevertheless, I am prepared to proceed.”

  Roy folded the paper and clasped his hands behind his back. “It falls on me to state the conditions and procedure. The encounter is to be executed with pistols of equal weight, equally fitted with a hair trigger, which have recently undergone thorough and equal cleaning of parts.” He nodded to the second who retreated to the table and brought the pistols on a tray. “However,” Roy continued, “only one of them will carry a bullet.”

  Pierre looked at him in astonishment.

  “Combatants shall stand back to back and take ten paces,” Roy said, “then turn to face each other and fire at the call. Only one firing shall constitute the affair, regardless of outcome.”

  Pierre indicated with a tilt of his head to retreat to their table. “This isn’t a duel,” Pierre said under his breath. “It’s a game of chance. You can’t be serious to go ahead.”

  “It’s no worse than fifty chances in a hundred.”

  “You infuriate me. I will not assist in this.”

  “Tell them we demand the right to choose a different weapon. It’s custom that the challenged has the right to choose.”

  “It’s a farce, and you know it. You’re a fool if you let it go further.”

  “Do what I say.”

  Paul and Pierre approached the other men in the center of the field.

  “Your proposal, and it is only a proposal, is highly irregular,” Pierre said. “To be an honorable duel and hold any meaning in society, both parties must be equally armed. We demand our right as the challenged to the choice of weapon, as is customary.”

  “You have no parrain,” Roy said. “If you had, he could negotiate. Negotiation is not the role of a second.”

  Pierre turned to him and murmured, “How about Raoul?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Hold off. I will find a parrain,” Pierre said.

  “We will give you one hour.”

  “I need two. Our godfather will be the honorable Baron Raoul Barbier, ancien Capitaine de la Cavalerie de France.”

  Roy and Douvaz exchanged a grave look. “One hour and a half, with five minutes’ grace period,” Roy said.

  Paul and Pierre clasped hands and Pierre ran out of the closed field, yelling at the hackman to get in.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Not One Canotier Song

  Auguste watched Gustave’s larger boat, the Inès, come into the dock too quickly and at the wrong angle. Alphonse had to push away with all his for
ce to keep it from slamming into the pilings.

  “I’ve been out to see Claude,” Gustave called out and stepped off the boat. “He says he’s through with Impressionist exhibitions.”

  Gustave plopped into the closest chair on the lower terrace. Auguste sat down opposite him so they could speak quietly.

  “He says he’s distraught by the arguments and hasn’t sold enough at our shows for him to continue there. What’s worse, he’s demoralized about his painting. He admitted that he could hardly bring himself to finish canvases that don’t satisfy him and only please a few people. He even talked about giving up painting and trying something else.”

  “Trying what? All we know is painting.”

  “He told me that even though he’s hurt by Degas calling him a turncoat, he’s going to submit to the Salon again next spring.”

  “So am I!” Auguste said. “Don’t you see? If the jury admits us, it will be a triumph for the whole group.”

  Gustave opened his hands in a gesture of not knowing. “I wrote to Pissarro to persuade him to join in an exhibition of the original group without Degas’ new tribe. It would show us the public response to our work, separate from theirs.”

  “With Degas?”

  “No. He’ll refuse a show without his friends. We’ve fallen into two camps. Irreversibly.”

  He let Gustave’s sentence hang in the air. No response could mend the crack in Gustave’s hope. “What did Pissarro say?”

  “He said that no matter how great the difficulties, he was going to stick with the Impressionist exhibitions.”

  Auguste shook his head slowly. “With a wife and four children to support? There’s a point of being too noble.”

  “He even wants the Impressionist group to grow, so he’s not opposed to more of Degas’ followers joining. Or to Raffaëlli’s prescriptions of subjects.”

  “Is that any surprise? He’s a socialist.”

  Gustave hunched over the table, his cheek on his fist. “He’s making a mistake.”

  “What about Berthe Morisot?”

  “She’ll stay with the original group, but Mary Cassatt won’t.”

  Auguste was almost afraid to ask. “Sisley?

  “He’s been evicted. With his wife and children. The Charpentiers came to their rescue to move them to another lodging.”

  Auguste leaned back in his chair. “Well, you’re just a bundle of good news, aren’t you?”

  “Sisley says we isolate ourselves too much, and that we’re still far from being able to do without the prestige of the Salon. So he chose the Salon for next year.”

  Auguste felt responsible for some of this. He was the one who had convinced Claude that if they showed three years running at the Salon, then up-and-coming progressive dealers like George Petit might take their paintings. Maybe he’d been wrong to sway him. He hadn’t meant to cause such a schism.

  Gustave scratched at a spot on the table. “The group isn’t ours anymore.”

  Auguste lay a hand on Gustave’s arm. “No. It isn’t.”

  Under his canotier, Gustave looked a little pale. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “So-so.”

  “The models are already upstairs, except Pierre and Paul. Ellen came.”

  “With Émile?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got to do something about that.”

  “I know.” Auguste stood up. “Are you coming?”

  “After lunch. I have to go over the rules for the jousts with Alphonse. I’ll try to eat a little something with him.”

  Anne served the duck pâté to only seven people. Aline was here, this time with a white ruffle around the neckline of her dress. A lovely detail to paint. But no Charles. No Émile. No Jeanne. And now, most worrisome, no Pierre or Paul. Paul would have told him if something intervened.

  “You look perky as a bluebird with that ruffle,” Angèle said to Aline.

  “The Marché du Temple, just as you said. Sacrebleu, but it’s a confused tangle of alleyways. I got lost getting out of there. I nearly cried going around and around until a crippled man selling old shoes set me straight.”

  “It’s a fine ruffle, and I’m going to like painting it,” Auguste said.

  “I showed the dress to the dressmaker I work for. She raised my pay by fifty centimes a day and is going to give me more work.”

  “Not quite a gold earring, but we’re right glad,” Angèle said.

  “It meant a fair something to me.” She let her country speech spill out a touch of defensiveness.

  Her simplicity appealed to him. She was at the stage when a young woman feels some latent power in her beauty but is unschooled in how to use it.

  Anne and Alphonsine brought the main course, veal this week, and Alphonsine sat down in Paul’s place to eat with them. “We’re so glad you’re back,” she said to Ellen in a proprietary way that amused him.

  “I’ll be here from now on. I can come on Saturday too.”

  “No matinee?” Auguste asked.

  “I quit the Folies.”

  He choked on his seltzer water. Angèle put down her fork. Alphonsine’s hand went up to her mouth. Everyone turned to look at Ellen, stunned, realizing the risk she’d taken. It could mean the crashing finish to her career, or it could signal a leap upward.

  “You’re really a Folies girl?” Aline asked.

  “I was.”

  “A dancer?”

  “A mime.”

  “The best mimeuse Paris has ever had,” Auguste said.

  “Why did you quit?” Aline asked.

  “The audience at the Folies doesn’t care about the nuances of pantomime. They applaud more for dancing blue poodles than for human emotion. They laugh at farmyard noises of animals in heat, at songs picked out of the gutter, not songs of wit. I’ll sell flowers on Pont Neuf if I have to.”

  “You’d better think twice about that, dolly,” Angèle remarked.

  “What was it like, working there? All that dazzle and glamour.” Aline waved her forkful of veal back and forth on her last words and Jacques Valentin followed it, mesmerized, swaying his head.

  “Huh! I wouldn’t call cramped underground cells dazzling. Freezing in winter, stifling in summer, so hot that your makeup slides down your face before you ever get onstage. Your skin chapped by cake white. Callers cueing you too late. Congestion in the corridor, your costume torn by a passing sword. Gruff, lecherous men. Unpaid rehearsals that go on till dawn. Only enough time for a croissant and an apple before performances.”

  “Oh,” Aline murmured.

  “I hated my new mimodrama, The Siege. The indecency of showing breasts and derrière I can ignore, but this was indecent in a hurtful way. We had to fall forward like boards at the boom of drums imitating Prussian guns. People breaking their noses to take cover was supposed to be funny. The producer thinks it’s a way to show that Parisians have put the Siege behind them. I see it as a disgrace to those who died.”

  Auguste checked Alphonsine’s reaction. She was stricken for a moment, but recovered and managed to say, “I agree.”

  “What made you stay, then?” Antonio asked. “Money? Curtain calls?”

  “Catcalls, you mean. I was just hoping that someone would notice me.”

  “Un amoureux?”

  “No! A chance to act in a legitimate theater where people come to see performances of real literature and not just to prowl the promenoirs for a thirty-franc whore. I want to be in a play instead of in a trivial entertainment. I want to say beautiful words, brave words, unforgettable words. Like Sarah Bernhardt gets to say in Phèdre. Words of wit and passion and truth. I want to be a human being onstage, not a cardboard cutout.”

  “Commendable of you,” Jules said solemnly. “To Ellen!”

  They raised their glasses. Ellen blushed at the outpouring of support.

  “I’ll be first at the ticket window to see your debut,” Raoul said. “I love theater. Maybe I’ll become a critic so I can write rave reviews of you.”
>
  “We all wish you well,” Alphonsine said.

  “I’m glad you’re free of it,” Auguste said. “The Folies are too tawdry for you.”

  “Don’t say that to my face, Auguste. It was my life. I loved it.”

  An awkward moment. Angèle stepped in with, “Of course you did, and rightly too. And now we’re going to love to model.” She signaled to Auguste and Antonio to bring out the painting.

  While he was still wheeling it, Ellen cried, “Oh-h!” gliding up and then down the scale. “It’s so far along.”

  “It better be,” Auguste said.

  “I see the real bottles and glasses on the table,” she said, “the real people, but the painting is so much more intense and beautiful.”

  “Mm,” Jules murmured. “Translated into art, at least Auguste’s art, we are all more beautiful. That’s why we come. To feel beautiful.”

  He heard heavy footfalls on the stairs and swung around to look, but it was only Gustave and Alphonse, not Pierre and Paul. They weren’t just detained. They weren’t coming. Paul’s reckless side meant he could be anywhere, doing anything. Auguste hoped to God Paul hadn’t antagonized that bruiser at the cabaret again.

  Just as everyone took their places, Alphonsine ran down the corridor. “Don’t start!” she called back to them. She reappeared wearing a strained smile and was holding something covered by a tea towel. Standing by Aline, she flung off the cloth like a magician and revealed a canotier decorated with a clump of red-orange poppies in front, tulle around the brim, and white rosebuds in the back.

  “It’s for you,” Alphonsine said. “To wear in the painting. And to keep.”

  “For me? I can’t believe it.”

  That instant with both women, flushed and glowing, Aline’s pretty mouth a perfect O, Alphonsine about to burst, with the hat between them, all four hands on it, what a picture. What a moment. He felt responsible for it, which made him both happy and sad. Not exactly sad. Concerned. There was only one of him.

  “Thank you!” Aline said.

  Alphonsine tipped him a glance that had something more pointed in it than the joyful complicity he had come to know. It issued a demand. She deserved more than Aline’s quick thanks.