The Fountain of St. James Court; Or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  When I returned to St. Petersburg, relations between Julie and me remained the same, while the atmosphere at court had rapidly deteriorated into its own reign of terror. Aristocrats disappeared or were sent to Siberia for no reason other than the unreasonable suspicions of the new czar. Because I frequented the same social circles, I trembled lest some remark of my own might be construed as a threat. Quietly and properly, I asked for and obtained permission to leave Russia. I did not dare express my fear to Julie, but I perceived her and her husband to be safe enough.

  So great was my relief at escaping when my westbound carriage became stuck in mud for a whole day, I happily used the time and material at hand in a creative way—to fashion a little statue out of mud! My instinct for survival had once again served me well. During the final period of my stay in Russia, I was more terrified than I had been in France.

  XI

  VIGNETTES

  Italy (continued)

  PORTRAIT

  FROM THE GUILLOTINE, at least, I did save both myself and Julie. Her father, I am thankful to remember, had the wit to save himself. But I should have gone to Italy in any case, as so many French artists did, to study the great masters. That the Revolution forced him to divorce me as a disloyal émigré caused me no sorrow, for the marriage had long since ceased to hold sentimental value for me. It was a relief to become legally what I already was spiritually: an independent woman who defined herself as an artist and a mother.

  I never felt so free or triumphant as when first our stagecoach rolled over the Beauvoisin Bridge, the political boundary of France, into Italy. But the landscape was not reassuring. The high peaks of Savoy overwhelmed us, for they towered into a thick dark gray cloud melding the disparate elements of stone and sky. I had not imagined a world so massive or darkly unified. We were terrified by the upreared earth and feared it could fall and crush us. Of course it maintained its posture. As our initial terror resolved itself, the steep brutality of the mountains began to inspire awe and admiration. What we were witnessing was a manifestation of the sublime. With my hand on little Julie’s shoulder, I could feel her body modulate as her own fear turned into inspired wonder.

  In Italy we were to discover not only immense mountains but also roaring cataracts, and when we rambled beside them the overwhelming force and movement of the water coursed through us. Once I hired donkeys and guides through the Apennines so that we might visit the Terni waterfall, which from a distance looked like a great white cloth hanging from a precipice. Even more spectacular was our visit to Mount Vesuvius, the great volcano. The earth itself twitched as we ascended the flanks of the sloping cone, and we were instructed of nature’s power to destroy and of the unbelievable heat that lives within our earth. I said to Julie that it was no wonder the ancient Greeks and Romans associated some of their gods with the awesome sovereignty of nature.

  Julie grew accustomed to the idea that the natural world was full of wild wonders. Since I felt safe, so did she. With equal confidence we entered a new social world where new friends, and old ones met again (many had fled the Revolution), extended to us consummate courtesy and treated Julie always as though she were a small adult, a little person whose strong feelings and thoughts and talents were to be respected. How adept and eager she was then with paint and brush, with charcoal, with the pastel crayon, but it was the quill, dipped in ink, that she loved to wield. I never told her I had named her for the heroine of Rousseau’s novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, but I did wish for her the virtues, advocated in those pages, of authenticity, self-knowledge, and autonomy, which I understand to be self-confidence.

  I could not foresee that Julie’s independence would become a kind of willfulness: to satisfy herself and to defy anyone who sought to guide her; she trusted her desires and wishes so strongly that they convinced her of their primacy.

  “You have made me what I am,” she once accused. “You kept me by your side and force-fed me your opinions as though I were a goose with feet nailed to the floor and grain funneled down my throat.”

  “I think not,” was all I could say, but my brain was flooded with images of her face full of delight when we watched and heard the cataract roar. Or of her awe in viewing Michelangelo’s paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “They aren’t pictures,” she said solemnly. “They are the truth.” Throughout her young life, she formed her own opinions, and I most willingly confirmed her pronouncements and offered her my respect.

  I am only trying to convince myself that I need not be ashamed of myself as a mother to my most precious child.

  Of course I made mistakes. I do not dispute that fact. Sometimes I acknowledge the truth: if I had been a capable mother, my daughter would be happy and alive today.

  PERHAPS IF HER IMAGINATION had not been so strong, Julie would not have imagined romance and believed in her fantasy concerning the nature of M. Nigris, a minor count, in whom there was nothing of either that high energy or generosity that are necessary if life is to realize its potential for glory. Here is the metaphor I might have used to instruct her: Does the landscape have a pleasant contour? That is not always the appropriate question. Do veins of silver and gold lie beneath the surface? Ask that.

  My thoughts are all a-scramble.

  Certainly I have failed to read the deep character of others. What men were they—my stepfather and my husband—to take without second thought all that I earned while begrudging me far less than a tithe. Of course they were taking what was their legal right according to the laws. But never mind, never mind. I have no need of such riches now. I have enough: my Louveciennes in spring and summer, and when the chill winds whistle through the wood, I have the velvet and fur of Paris, of my own snug rooms, of the opera and the concert hall, of the warmth to be found at the hearths of many friends. And while my stepfather and my husband spent my money, I learned how to paint better and better, and how to converse in society, and how to find pleasures in nature in small glittering moments. I knew I could rely on myself to provide. Sheerly because of my delight in my painting, I have had a rich life.

  WHEN JULIE AND I WERE IN FLORENCE, my eyes feasted on artistic treasures like any glutton’s on a groaning board. Not that on the rare occasion I did not secretly criticize the great masters, though little of that came tripping off my tongue when I dictated my remembrances to my nephew’s pen: Souvenirs, we called the memoir. In my Souvenirs I wisely refrained from presuming to note any critical thoughts about their magnificent achievements.

  And as for Raphael, now? How I rhapsodized over him in my memoir! There I fully entered into the way I felt about him when I was a young mother. Now I have had a sea change about his work, which only illustrates that the old are not so set in their ways as some would think. Now I believe his colors are too bold, too brash, almost unbelievable. Rather than representing nature faithfully, he chose to wave the banner of his own importance. He abandoned the truth of what his eyes surely told him for the puissance of his own hand. Though Raphael envied and tried to learn from Michelangelo’s paintings, Raphael lacked the truth of Michelangelo.

  Michelangelo did not even need color; his sculptures prove that. He understood form, which is the basis for all artistic achievement. People say some of his work is unfinished, but to my eye, even in those late sculptures, he had ideas to unveil about the relationship of rough and smooth. A work must contain its own tensions if it is to embody the dynamism that is the stuff of life.

  Such observations and ideas about art took root during those days of new-won independence, in Florence, and I also developed an eagerness for science. Would the art of painting be possible were it not for the miracle of the human eye? For much of my life, I have taken my eyes for granted, but in Florence I met a man who had an understanding, anatomically speaking, of how the eye worked.

  Naturally I was fascinated by his knowledge, which he generously made accessible to me and to others through creating wax models. As he spoke to me in a low and gentle voice, he explained how muscles a
re attached to the eyeball and how, like nearly invisible threads, these muscles cause the eye to rotate in its socket so that we might look up or down or to either side. This scientist had made a very large wax model as a tool for instruction about the structure of the human eye.

  Even more miraculous to know: the pupil of the eye is in fact a hole, a little, perfectly circular nothingness that allows light to pass to the interior of the eye, where it falls upon a kind of screen and activates certain nerves that convey an image to the brain. (Surely I am my father’s child, for did not D’Alembert dine at our table, and were not the encyclopedists chattering endlessly about not only anatomy but many new discoveries, ever amplifying our sense of wonder?)

  Though anatomical optic structures made of wax are not in themselves beautiful, I told myself, as I walked back to my Florentine apartment from the laboratory of M. Fontana, I must not be squeamish but take science on its own terms. What I learned inspired at least as much awe in me as revulsion, and I thought of how God had managed to make mere flesh marvelously effective and capable. We are amazing machines! That night after the insight and new knowledge made accessible to me by M. Fontana’s models, I spent a long time on my knees.

  In this posture, I thanked God for developing such mechanisms within us, and I thanked him that he had created in us the desire to use the wonderful optic instruments, our eyes, and also our intricate hands, built of intertwining blood vessels and bones and tendons and nerves, which communicated with the eye and the brain in order to create all the beauties of art. I felt humble and grateful.

  Some of this knowledge I shared the next morning over petit déjeuner with Julie, who responded rapturously, “I love my eyes, Maman”—and here she squeezed her eyes shut as she spoke, as though to assert her control over those amazing instruments—“but I love your eyes even more, and the way you look at me through the steam over your chocolate cup.”

  Never have I felt more happy. It seemed the perfect moment, that moment when we sat talking at table, our cups steaming, the flavor of warm chocolate still in our mouths: I had shared as quickly as possible what I learned with my child, who not only appreciated the wonder of the knowledge but also had her own thoughts, ones that bespoke our love.

  Then she added, “But suppose, Maman, that I could not see, and I could never never see your eyes, when they shine at me.” Then she proposed that she would go and write a story about a blind girl.

  For a moment, a black horror came upon me: the idea that my girl might not see, might not ever paint, or love the art of others, or simply drink in nature’s light. I swallowed down this terrible idea as quickly as I could, and I cheerfully told her a story about a blind girl in ancient days, in Pompeii, at the time of the deadly eruption of Vesuvius.

  “So thick was the ash in the air that all were blinded by it, but this young maiden, having long ago learned to make her way through the streets without seeing, was unimpaired by the ash, and she led many others to safety.”

  “I shall write that story,” Julie said, “and show how all those who had ignored her previously and thought her limited”—her speech slowed to follow her forming thought—“and less than themselves, now understood her value”—she suddenly plunged confidently ahead—“and her courage, and they all fell in love with her.”

  With an easy, graceful leap, my Julie had placed herself into the life of a legendary figure and into the frame of narrative.

  Now, all meditative, daughterless as I walk among the chestnut trees of beloved Louveciennes, I might ask what necessity compelled Julie’s imaginative leaping, and what realities or fears about herself and her world did she escape by passing so effortlessly into the realm of fiction?

  Not having had enough of the realm of science, during our sojourn in Florence, I rose from my tête-à-tête with Julie to return to my scientific mentor M. Fontana. Considering his name, I thought of him as a fountain of knowledge.

  M. Fontana’s laboratory, or cabinet, contained the wax body of a nude woman. During my first visit I had been so fascinated by the larger-than-life model of the human eyeball that I had lavished all of my attention upon it. But on my second visit to M. Fontana’s laboratory, I noticed the wax body of a woman, mostly covered. She lay in a reclined position and her body below the neckline was covered with a sheet; she seemed to be merely a representation of a woman with a pale face and flowing dark hair, and I took little notice of the figure, since it offered no new knowledge. I did note a pearl necklace, or a simulation of a pearl necklace, encircling her throat. Her eyes were closed as though she were sleeping. Perhaps because she was life-size, her presence was somehow vaguely disconcerting to me.

  M. Fontana noticed my glances to that part of the room and mistakenly construed them to be a sign of my curiosity.

  “Would Madame Le Brun like for me to lift the sheet?” he asked, already walking toward the wax woman.

  Reflexively, my heart stoppered up my throat such that I could not speak, but since I followed him across the room like a good student, the anatomist naturally believed I wished to see whatever was beneath the sheet. The white sheet was almost the same deathly hue as her pallid cheeks and neck. His hand hesitated on the top of the sheet. I almost reached out my hand to arrest his, but my vanity about not being squeamish held me back.

  Though I was not really of a scientific disposition, it seemed evident to me in that fleeting interval that either a woman or a man could perform scientific explorations; nothing but the customs of society prevented a woman from following such a career. Was not I a successful painter, the painter of royalty in fact, though I was female? I was playing a little with the idea of being a woman scientist in potentia.

  When he removed the sheet from the woman’s torso, I saw lying coiled in the open cavity of her body a replica of human intestines. My own stomach rose with such violent nausea that I covered my mouth, lest I vomit. The colors I saw, coral and pink, a yellowish tinge, white ligature material, a purplish red background, were the most repulsive I had ever conceived. Their arrangement, twisting around one another, corrugated and slimy looking, seemed as threatening as a large venomous snake. Also laid bare was what he pointed out with his finger and identified as her rather asymmetrical lungs, with a heart nestled between. I turned my eyes, my head, and my whole body away. He quietly replaced the cloth, without comment.

  I do not remember what excuse I offered or what thanks I may have fabricated, but I hastened from the laboratory clutching my stomach. Once outside I wanted to hide, but I knew the image was inside my head, and I could never erase it. I closed my eyes, leaned my back against the wall of a building, and instructed myself to imagine something beautiful. Florence’s sublime, seventeen-foot-tall David of Michelangelo came to mind, but no sooner did I envision the marble youth than my own mind removed the surface of the stone and there he was, skinless, the striated muscles in his bent arm and the tendons quite visible, and in hideous colors. Anatomic eyes set in their sockets looked out from David’s face at the world. Worst of all I imagined his intestines, and the shaft of his manly part which became a skinned snake.

  As quickly as I could, I hurried home, rushed past Julie and her governess, simply saying I was not well, and with all my clothes still on my body hurried into my bed, pulling the covers up to my neck and allowing my eyelids to slide down. From viewing the waxen woman of M. Fontana, I knew just how the curves of lashes on my cheeks might appear to an observer. In a deranged way, my fingers explored my neck as though to make sure I was wearing no pearl necklace. I cried, and I deplored the tears manufactured by my human body that oozed through their ducts down the sides of my face. Grotesquely the tears entered my ears, and I thought I was a mechanical doll or statue recycling its fluids, as a fountain might.

  I imagined M. Fontana looking at me through his clear spectacles, and his face that had seemed keen and kind now seemed fiendish. Though my chest heaved with sobs, I let no sounds escape lest they fall on Julie’s sensitive ears a few rooms away. I was
in a feverish state of anxiety. Portraits I had painted came to my mind, not lovely flesh or beautiful countenances but the garish anatomy lying beneath these lovingly re-created appearances. Even my friend the queen, whom I had painted many times, was stripped of her beauty, and I was forced to picture her mortal underpinnings of blood vessels, muscles, and even bones.

  And did I, as a painter, deal only in the superficial? I knew how stupid it was to paint clothing with no hint of the body that lay within, how untruthful and inept! But what of that next layer of reality? The rest of the body that lay beneath a radiant complexion? The body within the sheath of skin, the concealed, many-layered body of bones, fat, ropes of blood vessels, and binding tissues that comprise our form?

  Each terrifying visualization racked me till I fell asleep from exhaustion. When I awoke, I was not refreshed. Instead, melancholy permeated every fiber of my being.

  For two full days after, I suffered from what I had seen in M. Fontana’s cabinet. It was as though I moved and lived within a life-size bag made of gray gauze. When I walked to my easel or looked at the pigments on my palette, I wanted to vomit, and I pictured the most vile colors and terrible odors spewing from my mouth and all my orifices. I turned away from my work and any evidence of the artistic work of others. I felt my life, my art, was woven of a concealing fabric of lies.