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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  She would go downstairs and have a small glass of pinot noir, sit in the gray twirly chair in the living room. The visionary chair from which and in which she had visited spacious joy and contained peace.

  But her clothes were damp. She needed to put on all dry things first. Her flesh was pebbly with goose bumps. In the bedroom she went straight to the maple chest of drawers; it had been in their home in Montgomery; she’d known it all her life. As she changed her clothes, she tried not to look at the empty expanse of king-size bed.

  She entered the media room on the other side of the bathroom. No leaks there. She supposed Yves could have slept there, on the pullout sofa bed, but it wasn’t really comfortable. The kind of bed you could offer an understanding, lithesome niece in a pinch, but not a heavy male guest.

  She walked slowly down the main stairway. It was good not to rush. Ignoring the dripping chandelier, she stood at the kitchen counter and poured the pinot. Then she took refuge in the living room, dry and intact.

  The pinot was good. She regarded the two women in the large blue painting over the piano. The dominant figure, a trapeze artist shaped like the rocker of a cradle, was flying through the air in the foreground. In mid-picture, another circus woman walked a tightrope, which had gone slack. She was anxiously looking around for help. With her strong legs ready, the trapeze artist would swoop down and catch her friend under her arms, hold on tight, and wing her to safety.

  Ryn thought of how Élisabeth the painter had tried to persuade her friend, the companion of her teen years at the Louvre, to leave Paris. Had Ryn remembered to include in the novel the fact that the former Mlle Boquet and Joseph Vernet’s daughter, who had enjoyed the soirée à la grecque, were executed by guillotine? They had given a small bridal reception for someone, the last day at Château de la Muette. They were arrested, tried, and executed for wasting the people’s candles.

  No. The end of Kathryn’s novel was about a visit by Élisabeth’s nieces to Louveciennes, when she was very old.

  Élisabeth had come to love her nieces on both sides of her family, after the Revolution, when she finally returned to France. Julie, her daughter, returned with her no-count Russian count, had died in Paris. Sad. Suddenly Ryn realized she’d forgotten to include that scene in her novel! What a lapse!

  There was her cell phone again.

  It was Peter. He didn’t often phone her. If it weren’t Peter, she wouldn’t have answered; she was exhausted; nerves stretched to the end. Day’s end.

  When Peter said something unintelligible into her ear, she barked, “I can’t hear you,” scarcely trying to mask her irritation. And then she said, “What?” because she couldn’t believe what she’d heard.

  “Humphrey’s coming?” she repeated. “Where is he?”

  “In the air,” Peter answered.

  Humphrey had told Peter over the phone, from Göteborg, that he would come home as a surprise, not to tell Kathryn.

  “Then he thought he’d better give notice. You schedule your life so closely, he thought you might already be expecting somebody. He called me from the airplane, to phone you.”

  “No,” Kathryn answered, excited. “Nobody’s coming tonight.”

  “He’ll land tonight at one in the morning, after midnight. He’ll stay the night in New York. We can pick him up at noon tomorrow.”

  “I’m so happy!” she exclaimed. She pictured him seated inside the airplane speeding through the dark sky, high above the dark ocean. “Why is he coming?”

  Peter mumbled, but she made out the answer. Her son was coming to celebrate with her—that she’d completed the first draft of her new novel.

  In a daze, she disconnected the call, scarcely registering their polite good-byes.

  Ryn sipped her wine and relaxed more deeply into the gray twirly chair. She wondered what wines, if any, Élisabeth liked to drink. Humphrey was coming home to celebrate his mother’s new book. She would like to toast Élisabeth while she sat in this living room of her lovely, leaking house. And a toast to handsome Humphrey, the light of her life. She raised her glass. And a toast to her writing and to her friends as well. She’d finished the first draft of her novel; she could rest, choose to indulge a bit. Humphrey was flying home.

  She rose from the twirly chair and walked to the front of the house again to look out through the dark at the fountain: same as ever; the spotlights had come on fully. Golden glamour. Nobody was about. She could see the wet streets reflecting light. The pavement encircling the fountain was littered with leaves, stuck down flat and dark. Here came a car. She heard the crack of a limb the driver had run over rather recklessly. The car continued crunching its way down the street, but it was slowing now between her and the fountain. It came to a stop, and the driver commenced to park in front of her house in a waiting space.

  Even through the rain-bleared windshield, she saw that the driver was unmistakably Jerry.

  PORTRAIT

  JUST AS DUSK comes to Louveciennes, with a sliver of new moon gleaming in the western sky, I see horses and coach turn into the large U-shaped drive that holds out its welcoming arms from my house. Thudding of hooves and rattling of carriage—as merry a sound as bells on Noël. There is Caroline’s face at the window, bright and eager as Étienne’s, at fifteen, when he looked back over his shoulder at me about to go to his classes, and I said, Stop still, for just a moment. I must sketch you now, and later an oil painting to capture you forever. And he obliged, stopping in midstride, changing nothing of his natural bright expression, for in those days we were just that much at ease with each other. It is that way now with Caroline, his daughter. The horses and coach move forward on the curve of the drive as steady as the hand of a clock.

  Their coach rattles in the key of not heavily laden. Luggage is light for spending only a night. Within the swaying carriage, their hearts are as light as mine. I hope they have noticed the sickle moon, which always seems hopeful and carefree to me. For me, my monthly time always came with the full moon, with complete regularity, and it was the same for Julie. I have known families of many women whose monthlies all came at the same time as though there were some magic signal commanding them all at once to prepare their bodies for the possibility of fertility.

  “We await the arrival of the General” (as she called their monthlies), Antoinette’s mother, the empress of Austria, always said to her daughters in Vienna, though my mother spoke of the Governor. Being so simpatico and the same age, the queen and I were that close: we could speak of anything from our domestic past together. She missed her many sisters (in fact she never saw them again once she left Austria, not even one, though her brothers came to visit), but here they come, my nieces, true friends, and true friends of each other as well, through me.

  But not so many guests in the carriage as I had anticipated. There are three women: my nieces and a new, slight figure, small and dressed in silver. It always surprises me to see that my nieces are of middle age, for they seem as young and full of life as girls, but this bright-headed maiden, not more than twenty-five, is truly young. When I embrace her in greeting, she feels as slender as the new moon, and her hair is a pale gold, like wheat.

  The slight young woman turns out to be a pupil of my niece Eugénie (herself a painter), and this fairy, Sophie, has begged her teacher to take her along to meet me when the expected other members of the party suddenly found that they were unable to make the trip. At least that is the explanation given when I say, “And the others?”

  But I see my nieces exchange a slight glance at my question, a glance that suggests I may have become confused in my expectations and mixed up this projected visit with one that I remember or hope for! They would never voice their suspicion (don’t all elderly people get a bit confused, or sometimes stop in the middle of a task as though frozen in time while they remember or imagine another time and place?), but both my nieces descend on me from each side so that I am caged in their embraces, and they each kiss a cheek, and exclaim how well I am looking.

>   I have worn a light green frock to suggest the spring, with a dark rose shawl, a color that always became me, and as a sort of turban, a striped scarf combining similar hues but with glints of silver and gold woven through it. Only a soft frizz of my gray-white hair peeks out.

  When we step apart, we all three laugh, for each of us who are kin have dressed with some reference to spring by donning a shade of green. Caroline’s skirt carries a bold blue-green stripe. I think she knows that I’ve lately acquired a taste for those two colors together, of grass and sky. Eugénie, though my niece only through my marriage to Le Brun, is indeed the artist of the two, and her outfit is more subtle: the fabric of her dress is composed of the tiny, four-petaled flowers the English call forget-me-not, and the blue of the so-small flowers and the green leaves almost melt away into a pale green background, so one asks if the overall effect is blue or green.

  Little Mlle Moonbeam is shy at first, but when she walks into my home, she lets out a small gasp of pleasure. I smile. Of course my colors and the furniture unify for an effect bold, knowing, and unfailingly effective in its selection and arrangement, for after all I am known as a colorist. Then she goes to stand before my painting of Emma Hart, and I explain that she later became Lady Hamilton, and then the lover of the British Lord Nelson (I say this quite forthrightly, for it is a well-known fact), who died at Trafalgar during the Napoleonic conflicts.

  The mention of Nelson’s death somehow prompts my inexperienced visitor to bring up the subject of Gros, my friend, a fine painter who died. “His must have been a difficult loss,” the very young woman says, not unsympathetically (but what can she know of a lifetime of losses), “as you had known him since he was a child.”

  “Yes,” I replied quietly, “I painted him when he was a child of seven.”

  “Did he show talent then?” Eugénie asks. Her tone matches mine. She is pursuing this painful subject a little so as not to let Sylvie, dressed in silver, feel that she has committed a faux pas.

  “As a child, he would bring objects together of various colors,” I readily explain, “just to see how the colors complemented or modified one another.” I speak in as lively a fashion as I can, but really my dear friend’s self-inflicted death is still with me. It is still difficult if not impossible to think of dear Gros in any context without thinking of his violent end. I feel my mood darken, and perhaps the beginning of the wish that the vacancy in the carriage had not been given over to this young person despite her pleasing, sylphlike appearance.

  Niece Caroline kindly redirects the conversation by asking me if I have made a watercolor during the day.

  “Indeed I did,” I reply, rising to take them to my studio, “and both of you, my dear nieces, will smile to see it, for in its color it too references the coming spring, and it matches well several of the hues we have chosen to wear for this primavera.”

  “All along the road,” Sylvie exclaims, “the chestnuts were in flower. Perhaps in your travels to Italy you saw the Botticelli Primavera?”

  “First I saw engravings of it. Spring is a poor subject for an engraving, I think, because everyone wants to relish the new and delicate tints we associate with that season. Spring is a matter of color. But yes, eventually I did see the painting itself, in Florence.”

  “Better an engraving,” Caroline puts in cheerfully, “than to have no representation of it at all.”

  “Did you suspect, Mme Le Brun, that Gros would be a colorist?”

  Persistent child! So unacquainted are you with grief that you cannot recognize its traces. “Only lately I was in the Sainte Geneviève,” I say stoutly, “and quite overcome with the compelling vividness of his glorious work in the dome.”

  I determine to make a speech, knowing that such a conversational stance sometimes staunches the flow of questions. “When I returned to France, I was awestruck by what I saw in the work of Gros. In the second volume of my Souvenirs, I freely admit that I had not been entirely prescient about his talent, though I had loved him. He was a genius. I say it loud and clear, without qualification. Make no mistake. He had the kind of originality that is necessary for the founding of an entire school of art, which he did found. He and I, when he was mature, became extremely close friends, honest in both our praise and criticism of one another’s work. In public, he spoke in an extraordinary, brusque way; but in private he freed his genius with language, for he was an original in that regard as well.” I take a breath and plunge on.

  “His speech was full of surprising metaphors that evoked powerful images in abundance.” As I speak, I guide the trio to my studio.

  “My father,” Caroline interjects (it delights me for anyone, especially his daughter, to summon up the image of Étienne), “used to say about his plays that the path to the universal was most certainly through the particular, but all great works, like a bridge, must place a foot on each shore, one concrete and one abstract.”

  “Do you remember”—Eugénie Le Brun addresses me—“how your husband used to shake with laughter at the wit of Étienne Vigée?”

  “I do indeed,” and I smile readily, for it has been my steady habit, even after our marriage was a disappointment, always not only to agree but to savor anything nice that can be said of my late former husband. And of course I am especially eager to let no breach of any sort occur in the intimacy I feel through the person of Eugénie with the Le Brun branch of the family. “But here is my little watercolor. I suppose it is not much—nothing to show to posterity—but I cannot begin to describe to you the pleasure I felt in executing it. I enjoyed even the sensation of natural light on the back of my hand as I strove with my brush to suggest distant light in its naturalness.”

  My little guest inserts herself like a sliver between my two nieces and brings her nose quite close to my paper fastened to the board. She has a keen little nose, pretty in its own way. Beyond her through the window, the planet Venus has risen, and I think of a line of English poetry comparing this evening star to a diamond on the cheek of an Ethiope, though here Venus shines less sharply against the brief gray that precedes true night. I enjoyed my stays in England.

  Eagerly Sylvie exclaims, “I believe those must be chestnut trees you have painted, for if I look closely I see you have suggested something of the panicle blossoms. Do chestnut trees live a long time?”

  “I have seen one at Versailles,” Caroline replies, “that was planted by the queen, Marie Antoinette herself, near the Petit Trianon. That would have been at the latest about 1787. As it is now 1841, we can testify it has prospered for at least half a century.”

  “Fifty years is not so long,” I say with a smile. It is a genuine smile, for I am getting used to the fact that in Sylvie we have an enthusiast; she has not cultivated, nor has anyone cultivated in her, the art of exquisite manners. Perhaps that grows to be a lost art, that particular kind of conversation we practiced in the salons that could blend propriety with spontaneity, the result of which was a certain shade of sincerity. “Now see this color,” I say as though giving a mock lecture to the artists present. “This blue has remnants of strong green and cobalt in it, but blended with a bit of gray. The gray adds thoughtfulness to the appreciation of nature.”

  “But there is nothing sad in the painting,” Sylvie remarks. And she is correct.

  “That is because the willow has a tincture of yellow or even gold in it because the willow wands turn golden before shading into green. For me there is never anything sad in nature, and I would not allow myself to represent it that way, for that would be false to my philosophy.”

  With a sparkle in her eye my brother’s daughter says, “But darling aunt, do you not think it sad when the hawk swoops down on the pigeon?”

  “Of course that is sad,” I reply. “Let me see. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking of animals at all. But of the mountains, the great crags that some find terrible, barren, wild, and ugly. I was thinking of how they have their own grandeur. They are sublime. But sublime is not the opposite of sad. I am a
bit confused in my categories.”

  Eugénie comes to the rescue. “Yes, you are thinking of Burke and the way he contrasts the sublime with the beautiful.”

  “There you are! Thank you, my dear,” I reply.

  SOON, AFTER NIGHTFALL, we are feasting on rabbit, wild and savory, made civilized with sage and enhanced by mushrooms. When I remark to my maid about the mushrooms, she replies that they were brought over by a neighbor, a very old man, to the kitchen door, as a gift.

  The service at table is provided in the old style, that is to say with the servers almost invisible and the plates coming and going as though by magic, except for a rare moment or two when the servers know exactly whose eye to engage to add the cozy human flavor: we are all in this life blended together.

  As we eat and chat, I love them all, even the student Sylvie, and I am careful to end the after-dinner conversation before it is quite finished, for this ploy always implants the wish in guests to return again soon. I do it this way:

  Sylvie asks me to tell about the famous party I gave à la grecque, not very long before the Revolution.

  “Although my quarters for entertaining were small, the highest nobility attended my soirées. They had to crowd in and even sit on the bed sometimes, for invitations were much sought after,” I begin.

  “In those days, we usually met about nine in the evening. While politics were not discussed, literature was often the topic of conversation, as were music and the theater. Sometimes we played charades to amuse ourselves, or someone read some of his verses. About ten in the evening, we sat at table and ate.

  “Oh, at my house, the suppers at my table were always simple, like this evening. Usually some fowl, fish, a vegetable, and a salad. All very light food, and not much of it. I was even known to invite so many people, fifteen or so, that sometimes there was not enough food, but it didn’t matter in the least. We were that comfortable with one another. And none of us was starving. The time passed so pleasantly, all in a wink, and my guests did not begin to drift toward their homes till almost midnight. Evening was the only time I allowed myself to relax, as I painted all day, and then at night, knowing I had worked my best, I truly was pleased to enjoy fully the leisure I had earned.”