‘You are reech?’ enquired Luc as he sipped his wine.
She laughed. ‘Rich? Oh no, I’m actually very poor. Both my father and mother are dead and I was sent to painting classes by a lady who likes my work. I’m only here for three months and when the classes are over I’ll have to go home again.’
Pierre understood what she was saying and translated for Luc who shook his head sadly. ‘So you are poor like us! Dommage. A pity. We thought you and your friend were rich young ladies, Americans perhaps.’
Marie was shocked and remembered Amy’s warning. ‘Was that why you spoke to us?’ she asked.
He laughed and admitted, ‘Yes, at first, but then we saw your work and knew that you were serious. The other girl is rich perhaps? Her work is not serious.’
Marie shook her head. ‘Amy’s not rich either but she comes from a better-off family than I do. She’ll go home and get married to someone but if I don’t sell my pictures, I’ll have to take a job as a governess or a schoolteacher if I’m lucky.’
Pierre reached over the table and grasped her hand, ‘Then you really are like us. We are friends. Come, let’s go to Montparnasse and you can meet other serious artists.’
Accustomed as she had become to the gloomy respectability of Madame Guillaume’s block of apartments, the teeming building where Pierre’s friends lived at the far end of the Boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse was a revelation. The ground floor was a laundry, the steamy, sudsy smell of which filled the whole place. The floors above were like a village because they contained warrens of rooms, full of people.
Built around an inner courtyard with all the windows looking into it, this community was entered through an arched doorway off the street and a twisting, precipitous stair led them up for floor after floor until Marie thought that her lungs were going to burst from the effort of climbing.
‘How much farther is it?’ she gasped.
‘There are ten storeys but we are only going to level eight,’ Pierre told her.
At last they reached their goal and she had to lean against the wall, fighting for breath while he knocked on a door of blistered wood. A woman in a long white gown and a brilliantly coloured turban answered. When she saw them she threw her arms around Pierre and kissed him on both cheeks, repeating the greeting with Luc. They introduced Marie and the woman kissed her too.
‘This is Thérèse. She’s a painter, and a very good one,’ Pierre explained as they pushed their way into a room which seemed to be full of people. Canvases were stacked against the walls and a large half-finished work stood on an easel in the middle of the floor. It was of a glowing vase of flowers.
There were about ten people there already and all of them, women as well as men, were smoking little black cigarettes, filling the room with wreaths and coils of grey smoke. A large, portly man with very curly, grey-streaked hair half-sat and half-lay in a long chair by the window.
‘Entrez, entrez!’ he called out and looked at Marie with his eyebrows raised, obviously wondering who she was.
When Pierre introduced her the big man stood up, bowed, took her hand, raised it to his mouth and held it there for a long time. She felt herself colour beneath his scrutiny as Pierre told her, ‘This is Adolfo Mancini, a famous painter, one of the best in Paris.’
Mancini pulled a face, ‘Famous for flower pictures and I hate the smell of flowers. I have to paint with a peg on my nose or I spend all day sneezing! Isn’t it bad luck that the thing people want to buy from me is the thing I least like painting.’
He spoke in French and Pierre translated for Marie, who murmured something she hoped sounded sympathetic. She could see from the picture on the easel that Mancini was an artist of great talent.
Thérèse called out something which Marie could not understand but actually was, ‘Don’t complain, Mancini. At least you’re selling. Think of the rest of us.’
He turned to look at her and called back, ‘You’d sell more if you spent less time with your lover and more at your easel.’
Everyone, including Thérèse, laughed, and she walked across the room to sit down in the lap of a beautiful young man with springing blue-black hair and the face of a fallen angel. He was at least twenty years younger than she and with a look of triumph on her face, she cupped his chin in her hands to kiss him on the lips before looking back at Mancini and saying, ‘You’re only jealous, Adolfo.’
Pierre sat down on a cushion on the floor and patted it indicating that Marie should sit there too. When she did so, he put a friendly arm around her shoulders and she did not draw away, for that would have looked too prim in such frank and uninhibited company. Someone put a glass into her hand and she sipped at the milky-looking liquid it contained. The taste was like the aniseed tea that Tibbie sometimes made from a herb growing in her garden.
‘What is this?’ she whispered.
‘It’s absinthe. Don’t drink too much of it if you’re not used to it. It’s very strong,’ he counselled. She took his advice and nursed the glass all evening.
Her heart was singing and it was midnight when she returned home. Amy was asleep. Next morning when Marie tried to tell her about the visit to the artists’ colony at Montparnasse, Amy was dismissive.
‘I think it’s most unsuitable for you to be going about with people of that sort,’ she said.
The idea grew in Marie’s mind that the first thing she must do was to learn to speak and understand French. To help her in this endeavour she enlisted the assistance of Madame Guillaume’s maid, Isabelle, who always smiled and nodded, whereas Marie had not yet seen one smile cross Madame’s forbidding countenance.
Whenever she could, Marie followed Isabelle around, pointing at things and asking their names. Because she had a gift for mimicry, in a very short time she was speaking rudimentary French with a working-class Parisian accent which horrified Amy.
‘It is really amazing,’ she said scathingly one day after they’d had a disagreement about some trivial matter, ‘how old sayings often prove to be true.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Marie.
‘I mean, sayings like “pride comes before a fall” and “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”, that sort of thing, nearly always prove to be true in the end.’ Amy’s voice had taken on the silken quality that weeks of living with her had taught Marie meant she was trying to be nasty.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps you’re right,’ she said.
‘Of course I’m right. People from poor backgrounds nearly always betray themselves in the end, no matter how hard they try.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes, of course. I’m not meaning to be hurtful, but look at you. When you start speaking French you sound like a washerwoman… you really should try harder. Listen to the way Madame Guillaume speaks and try to imitate her instead of Isabelle.’
It was important to keep up a façade of friendship, so Marie bit her lip and said nothing but she was thinking of David’s letter. That was what Amy was symbolically brandishing in her face.
While their friendship was seeping away like a receding tide, others were growing. She went to the restorer’s workshop and watched Pierre giving a craquelure finish to what looked like an old painting but was actually a copy of one in the Louvre and he took her back to Mancini’s where she met voluble artists who talked so quickly that her French could not keep up with them, but she enjoyed seeing their paintings. Mancini’s work was her favourite and she would stand before his easel for a long time admiring his technique.
‘You like my pictures?’ he said to her one evening and she nodded vigorously.
‘Very much, very much indeed.’
‘You paint?’ he asked. She told him that she did and that one of her favourite subjects was flowers.
‘Ugh!’ He screwed up his face. ‘I am tired of flowers but there is always a market for them. Bring me a flower painting that you have done and I will tell you what I think of it.’
Next day, she abandoned the teaching of the sal
on and started to paint a flower still life, having bought a huge bundle of roses and delphiniums from the flower market on the Île de la Cité early in the morning. She kept them in a shadowy corner of the salon in a big vase of water that she changed every day. In spite of her care, however, they began to droop on the third day and she hurried to finish the picture before there was nothing left but stalks. It was still wet when she took it back to the apartment for varnishing and Isabelle threw up her hands in delight.
‘I can smell them!’ she cried.
‘I hope Mancini can’t,’ said Marie but no one else understood her joke.
When she was varnishing the canvas, however, Madame Guillaume came into the bedroom and said stiffly, ‘I do hope, Mademoiselle, that you do not intend setting up an atelier in my house. I do not like the smell of paint.’
That evening Marie went to Montparnasse and lugged the canvas up the flights of stairs. Mancini, as usual, was not alone. A thin woman wearing gold-rimmed spectacles on a face like a goat’s was watching him paint. They looked up in surprise when Marie went in with her canvas and propped it against the wall.
‘You said to bring you one of my flower pictures. Well, I did this one to show to you,’ she announced.
Mancini sneezed, blew his nose on a vast red handkerchief and said, ‘It is magnificent. You did this? You are my rival.’
The woman stepped across the floor and stood before the canvas. Her clothes, Marie noticed, were very elegant and expensive-looking and her long, narrow feet were clad in shoes of the finest, softest-looking leather.
‘Hmmmm, remarkable,’ she hummed beneath her breath.
‘I’m not your rival,’ said Marie to Mancini, ‘because you can get colour and sheen into your pictures that I can’t in mine. How do you do it?’
He laughed. ‘You are asking my secrets! When I look at your picture I cannot believe that a woman painted it, it is too good.’
His female companion turned and said, ‘Tell her Mancini. She’ll work it out in the end. She’s nearly there now.’
He shrugged expressively and said, ‘All right. I do it with little dots of colour. I don’t use strokes of the brush but I make tiny dots, thousands of them. It gives the glow, it gives the sheen. But it takes time to learn how to do it. I’ll show you if you like but only if you work very hard.’
‘I would like that very much but I’m afraid I won’t be able to work in the flat where I live, the landlady doesn’t like the smell of paint,’ said Marie.
‘Never mind her. Come here tomorrow,’ said Mancini, but the woman gave a funny whinnying laugh and nudged Marie as she said, ‘Beware. He’s a goat of a man. He tries to seduce every woman he meets.’
Mancini fixed Marie with an earnest eye and told her, ‘You come. I will not touch you because you are serious.’
The goat-faced woman laughed again and patted his bottom fondly. ‘You are not all bad, old man,’ she said.
Then she turned to Marie and announced, ‘I too can help a young artist. My name is Félice St Laurent and I have a studio near here but I’m going south, tomorrow for two months. There are paints and an easel and canvases there. You can use them till I come back if you feed my cats. They do not mind the smell of paint.’
‘That would be wonderful. Where is it?’ asked Marie.
‘Above the Café Flore at Montparnasse station. Come tomorrow morning. Ask at the café for Félice St Laurent.’
‘You should not have accepted that offer,’joked Mancini. ‘She asks everyone to look after her animals but what she does not tell them is that she has fifteen cats and they are all rabid.’
Next morning Marie did not go to class with Amy but hurried to Montparnasse where she found the Café Flore full of early drinkers. They all knew where Félice St Laurent’s studio was situated and pointed above their heads. It was on the first floor with long windows to the front and the back, a little like Professor Abernethy’s establishment except that this studio was full of a weird and wonderful collection of objects that seemed to fill up every corner.
Félice was inside, smoking a cigarette and stabbing at a canvas with a brush. She looked over her eyeglasses when Marie stepped through the open door and said, ‘You’re up early. I like people who are early risers.’
Marie’s French was good enough to say, ‘I was brought up in the country. Everyone rises early there.’
‘I too am a country girl. I was born near Moustiers and go back there every summer. Now let me show you where everything is. I’ll leave money for the cat food. Buy it from the fishmonger on the corner. Don’t move anything in here. I know where everything is.’
Marie stared around at an incredible jumble of furniture draped with exotic pieces of material glittering with gold and silver thread; huge vases; spears; potted palms and rolled-up carpets.
‘They’re my props,’ explained Félice. ‘I paint portraits.’
As she spoke a stately black cat came strolling across the open section of the floor and rubbed itself against Marie’s legs. ‘Good, she likes you,’ said Félice.
Marie stroked the cat. ‘It won’t be any trouble to look after her, she’s so lovely,’ she said.
‘Oh there’s more than her. I have eighteen of them but six are only kittens.’ Félice was painting again and had an abstracted air.
Marie gasped, ‘Eighteen cats! In here!’
It was then that Marie realised why Félice worked with the door open. There was a stench in the room that even turpentine and linseed oil could not drown.
Félice cocked an eye at her. ‘You will still paint here?’ she asked.
Marie looked around. In spite of the animals, the studio had the atmosphere of a place where serious work could be done. She’d clean it up and get rid of the smell.
‘Yes, I’ll work here. I’ll look after them for you,’ she promised.
Then the owner of all the animals handed her a key and a small sum of money, pulled a luxurious silk wrap over her shoulders, perched a beautiful hat on her head and sailed out of the door.
Marie sat down on the sofa and the black cat jumped onto her knee and lay purring happily. She surveyed her new haven with delight. Here, she knew, she would be able to paint in peace. Impatient to start, she put the cat on the floor and stood up.
There was a stack of primed canvases in a corner and she took one. Félice had left paints behind too and Marie lifted a brush. Inspiration was upon her and she started to paint the crowded and chaotic room.
She worked till evening and then went downstairs to buy the cat food. The money Félice left, she soon found, was not going to last for even one week because the fishmonger had parcels of fish awaiting her which cost more than Marie would have spent on herself for a week.
‘Don’t they eat scraps?’ she asked.
He sniffed. ‘Mademoiselle St Laurent only feeds her cats with the very best fish,’ he said. Marie realised then that Félice was not so philanthropic as she seemed. If her rent was the animals’ food, when she was in charge of them, they would eat scraps from different purveyors than the one their owner normally patronised.
It was dark when she reached home and Amy was reading in bed. She looked up and asked, ‘Where on earth have you been? Madame is furious because you didn’t come for luncheon or supper and the food was wasted.’
‘I’ve found a studio. I’m going to paint there every day. I won’t be needing lunch here any longer,’ Marie said excitedly.
Amy exclaimed, ‘You’re not going back to the School?’
‘No. I’ve given it up. I’m going to paint on my own.’
‘I hope you’ve written to Lady Godolphin and told her not to pay any more fees in that case,’ said Amy primly.
Marie said, ‘I’ll write to her tomorrow. I only found my studio today. I’d like you to come and see it with me. It’s quite delightful – in spite of the animals.’
‘What animals?’
‘Some cats which belong to the owner. She’s gone away for a few months an
d I’m looking after the place till she comes back.’
‘What’s her name?’ asked Amy suspiciously.
‘Félice St Laurent. The studio’s in Montparnasse.’
Amy sat up in bed. ‘Félice St Laurent! Are you sure? The girls at the salon were talking about her the other day. She’s very well known. She paints portraits, good ones I believe. All the smart women sit for her. She makes a lot of money.’
They were friendlier and nicer to each other than they had been for ages as they undertook the journey to Montparnasse. Amy had received a letter from home that morning and read bits out to Marie.
‘Murray thinks he’s probably passed his exams this time. Things are working out well for him. Oh, yes, and he sends his love to you. He hopes you’re not working too hard.’
‘Is that letter from Murray?’ asked Marie eagerly.
Amy folded it up and put it back in her pocket. ‘Yes, it is. That’s good news, isn’t it?’
Marie’s heart ached. Memories of him came flooding back. Why hadn’t he written to her? Why would Amy not let her see his letter?
When they reached the studio her mood lifted again and she was eager to let Amy see her wonderful new discovery, so she ran up the stairs first and unlocked the door, throwing it back with a flourish. The smell that came out was nauseating and Amy reeled. ‘Good God, it’s like a zoo in there! You can’t live in that.’
‘It’s all right when the air gets in. I’ll open the windows and then you’ll see.’ Marie wanted Amy to like it as much as she did but the other girl hung back.
‘Are you sure you won’t catch something breathing this in?’ she asked suspiciously.
Marie was opening windows and ushering out cats. ‘Of course not. Do come in,’ she said.
Amy stepped cautiously over the threshold and went straight to the jumble of furniture at the back of the room, exclaiming, ‘But Marie, this furniture is exquisite. That’s a boule cabinet! Look at that Louis Quatorze commode. And what a lovely sofa. Good heavens, there’s a litter of kittens in it. What can that St Laurent woman be thinking of?’
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