Authors: Michelle Gable
It goes back to Marguérite, which is almost always the case. She is my closest friend, indeed, “friend” is not strong enough a word. As delightful as she may be, one must temper the information one provides sweet Marguérite. Several months past I elected to share with her my most prized beautification secret. She agonizes endlessly over her (lack of) clear skin and (lack of) sweet breath. I prescribed a daily enema as a solution but neglected to add it should be done in private. With Marguérite these things must be spelled out!
When I went to call on her the next day, there she was, leaning against the mantle, her
robe d’intérieur
hiked up around her waist and a chambermaid administering the very treatment I ordained. No fewer than four Arab servants looked on with eyes popping out of their skulls. Oh, Marguérite!
So on that day, when the model stood before me in a pink dress much the same color as Marguerite’s undercarriage, the memory clicked into place. Here was the former chambermaid, the enema giver! A smart woman, she. It did not take her long to seek alternate employ. And really, she was too pretty a creature to tussle with Marguérite’s backside.
“Well, you have certainly moved up in the world,” I said with a laugh.
“Beg pardon?” The woman turned to better display the frock.
“No need to be coy,” I said. “I do not blame you for leaving Marguérite’s home. Let me apologize for my friend. Her enthusiasm for new beauty regimes often obfuscates her sense of decorum. I would have been in Doucet’s begging for a job, too!”
“I have no idea of what you speak,” the woman replied, lips quivering.
“You were a chambermaid with my dear friend Marguérite. I saw you assisting in certain matters.”
“I am going to change,” she said. “Please consider these dresses, and inform M. Doucet if you plan to purchase one.”
She scuttled out of the room so quickly I did not have a moment to provide assurance that Marguérite was the one to be embarrassed, not her.
In the end I felt obligated to purchase the pink gown, and further obligated to wear it at least once. If I had not cared so little for the dress I wouldn’t have been so careless in Giovanni’s studio! You see? As I said, it always goes back to Marguérite.
Dear God, Giovanni is going to paint the dress.
Dear God, what did I tell Giovanni?
Giovanni. The baby. I need to address that particular fiasco. Now is not the time. As they say:
J’ai d’autres chats à fouetter
. Plus I’ve lost the mood to write. All this talk of Marguérite and I cannot stop seeing her up against the fireplace, flesh displayed like a ham hock at the market, coils and coils of tubes dropping from her nancy. And, I must add, a nancy not so pert and fresh as it once was!
Chapitre VII
“Reading private correspondence, Madame Vogt?”
April jumped. The pages tumbled out of her hands and she caught them between both knees. Skin throbbing, April looked up at the faces of the three men, their expressions ranging from amusement to scorn.
“Oh, hello there, I was just—”
Luc reached down. He patted her thigh.
“Allons-y!” He tapped her again. “Open up.”
April separated her legs an inch and let the papers fall into his hands. The day was cool, but sweat collected along her hairline and on the back of her neck. She did not need a mirror to acknowledge the round tomato redness of her face.
“I thought you were a furniture specialist,” Luc said as he thumbed through the pages. “Olivier did not tell me of your expertise in manuscripts. I will have to confirm whether the beneficiary of Madame Quatremer’s estate wants these papers assessed as well. Until then they are not for public consumption.”
“It’s not exactly public consumption,” April said, nausea snaking up through her insides. She’d been in Paris sixty minutes and already pissed off the client. He could easily have another house conduct the auction. The premiums on the take would be stratospheric, and her job gone within thirty seconds of losing the deal.
“Madame Vogt—” Olivier started.
“These documents will help with provenance,” she said quickly. April cleared her throat and glanced toward the painting. “In fact, you were correct, Olivier. What an eye you have! The portrait
is
a Boldini. I believe we’ve found the journals of the very woman in the painting!”
“Really?” Olivier raised an eyebrow. “Alone not five minutes and you’ve already authenticated the piece? Monsieur Thébault, please return the journals to April so she can show the group the relevant entry.”
Luc smirked, apparently the one expression he most often used, and passed the papers April’s way. Not once did he take his eyes off hers, not once did he soften the look on his face.
“Merci beaucoup. Let’s see … here it is! July twentieth, 1898. ‘I sat for Boldini today,’” she read.
“Hmm…,” Marc said. “I suppose that’s a start.”
“Our authoress also goes on to call him ‘Master of Swish.’ She even mentions the pink dress.”
April pointed to the painting, to the very frock the woman despised. She suppressed a grin, thinking of Marguérite and her
nancy
.
“Something amusing, Madame Vogt?”
“Yes, well. The woman has a way with words. She’s fascinating, really, and I’ve only read a few pages. According to the entry, she was pregnant at the time of the portrait, a child possibly even fathered by Boldini himself.”
This was no small thing: a mother-to-be rendered by the most famous portraitist of the Belle Époque. Why hadn’t Madame Quatremer wanted the painting? April had begged her father for one measly photograph of her own mother while pregnant, it didn’t even matter the baby inside. Her brother, her—April would’ve taken either one. She only wanted to see her mom as exactly that: a mom. Maternal. At the start of her life instead of in the hopeless half-state in which she toiled out her final days.
Sorry, kiddo, your mother and me, we’re not packrats. We were never big on photography. All we ever needed were the memories.
Fat lot of good that did everyone.
“A bastard child,” Marc clucked. “Quite interesting.”
“I’m not one of your so-called furniture experts,” Luc said as Marc flicked through the pages. “But a dead woman’s sexual … proclivities hardly seem relevant to the appraisal of furniture.”
“Unfathomable,” Marc said, scanning the entry a second and third time. “It is a Boldini.”
“Well, we shall need a touch more to authenticate the piece,” Olivier said. “But this is a good start. Thank you, April, for taking care of things while we stepped out.”
April nodded and tried to avoid Luc’s serpentlike, lingering gaze hovering somewhere on her periphery. Beneath her suit trickles of sweat continued to roll down her back. If only he’d stop staring this would all go away.
“Look at this entry,” Marc said. “Someone’s a
sniffeur
?”
“Our lady enjoyed the cocaine?” Olivier said with a chuckle. “That could explain the mess in this home.”
“Hold on just a minute!” Luc lunged forward and reclaimed the diaries. “These are private documents, and you’ve not been granted permission to rifle through them.”
Luc grabbed a box from the corner, a box so old and worn it could’ve been how the journals arrived in the first place. Perhaps the woman ordered them shipped to her home in bulk, a whole pallet full, enough to put down any word that floated into her brain, any feeling that surged through her body.
“Would you like to borrow a pair of gloves to handle those?” April had to ask.
“No need.”
“Where do you plan to take them?” April said and looked toward her colleagues. “Will they be somewhere we can access for research? It’s possible I might need them for provenance.”
“Yes, Madame Vogt is correct,” Olivier said. “Perhaps you can leave them with us, to aid with valuation.”
“Non. I’ll return them to the beneficiary of Madame Quatremer’s estate,” Luc said as he transferred ribbon-wound stacks of paper from bookshelf to box. “She can decide how to dispose of them.”
“Dispose?” April said with a gulp.
“You have no need of them here.”
Wincing at his gross mishandling of the papers, April felt an unexpected sting somewhere in the middle of her chest. She wanted more. She wanted to know about the pregnancy, about Boldini’s reaction, and, God help her, she wanted to know more about Marguérite’s tawdry behavior.
“If I may, who is the beneficiary?” April asked.
“It hardly matters.”
“You said Madame Quatremer’s grandmother rented this flat. Is the woman in the painting the grandmother? Was she pregnant with…” She tried to do the math. “Was she pregnant with Madame Quatremer’s mother? Does that pan out?”
“None of that is necessary to your appraisal,” Luc said as he flung the last stacks of papers into the box. “It’s gossip, nothing more.”
“Actually,” Olivier started. “If we have more color as to the background of the furnishings, we can elicit a higher price at auction. People like pieces with a bit of history, a story to tell.”
“We are done here,” Luc snapped. “My client cares not of maximum dollars.”
“Doesn’t everyone care of maximum dollars?” April said, trying for a joke. “That’s what they teach us in America.”
Luc rolled his eyes and chucked a few more books and documents on top of the diaries. April turned away from him and stared at the woman in pink, as if she were physically in the apartment, too. With a sudden feeling of responsibility for her voice and legacy, April mouthed a quick apology of regret.
“Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me,” April said, her breath tangled up somewhere in her ribs.
She shouldn’t care that Luc was manhandling the documents but April cared more than was appropriate. It was easy, sometimes, in her line of work to picture only things and not the people who once owned them. April would not make that mistake now.
“I’m going to start on the furniture. Snap a few photos. Get straight to work.” Her voice cracked, and cracked again. April forced a cough to cover it all up. It was dusty. A good-enough excuse. “Monsieur Thébault, nice to meet you.”
She shook his hand and quickly skittered out of the room, leaving the men to discuss contracts and timelines.
As she walked down the hallway, April imagined the dark-haired, full-bodied woman moving, dancing, floating through the flat. She tried to picture her own mother too, once dark-haired and full-bodied herself, yet somehow less real than the woman in the painting. There were no portraits, no pieces of furniture, nothing to anchor her mom to the world. April squeezed her eyes closed but, like trying to grab a sunset, she saw flashes of color but could not hold on.
Chapitre VIII
In the antechamber April busied herself with a blue-and-gold lacquer armchair and a Tabriz meditation carpet from Persia, which, though not Continental by origin,
was
by purchase. In other words, exactly the kind of thing you’d find in a wealthy European’s nineteenth-century apartment.
As she picked through the items, April tried not to think of the Boldini, or the woman in the painting. Sorting it all would prove challenge enough. Emotions had no room to hang out.
April stepped behind the armchair to inspect a mahogany writing desk. It was perfect and simple, this piece, though not insignificant. She ran her fingers across its surface, clearing the dust to reveal two stamps bearing the name “JH RIESENER.”
“Jean-Henri Riesener,” she whispered in awe.
Riesener was the favorite cabinetmaker of Marie Antoinette. Even this basic unadorned writing desk had almost incalculable value.
“Who
were
you, Madame?” she said. “Who
were
you?”
Atop the Riesener sat two carved ivory figures of Jeanne d’Arc. Behind the Jeannes stood a thick jade vase etched with a battle scene. Unable to reach it, April stepped on a nearby trunk, treading carefully on its steel hinges so as not to damage the piece. April stretched toward the vase to check for the artist’s markings but found the object too weighty for her thrilled and shaky hands. As she pushed it fully back onto the shelf, goose bumps tickled the back of her neck.
“Madame Vogt.”
“Mon Dieu!”
She leaped from the trunk but misjudged the floor’s traction. Slipping on her slick-bottomed flats, April tumbled backward, nearly impaling her upper left hamstring on a fireplace poker, though ultimately finding herself in a far more precarious position: cheek smack against Luc’s chest. He looped an arm around her back.
“Tout va bien?”
“Merde.”
“Oh là là! I did not expect this language from such a nice American!” Luc said, with what was becoming a trademark smirk.
“I’m not that nice.” April pushed away momentarily but had not regained her footing. She grabbed for Luc again, choosing to decimate her pride instead of the eight-foot-tall glass butterfly behind her. “I apologize if I offended you, but you snuck up on me.”
“Je suis désolé,” Luc said, grinning, no hint of apology anywhere near those pointy teeth. He tightened his arm around her shoulders. “The salty language is unexpected but, yes, this hug. It is very American.”
“It’s not a hug.”
April tried to jerk her body away but had not an inch to move.
“Careful.” Luc released April from his hold, but she continued to feel every part of him. That was his hip, non? It was merely his hipbone.
“I’m nothing if not careful,” April muttered.
“Tell me, Madame Vogt, are you staying nearby?”
“They’ve rented a flat for me on the rue Fontaine,” April said absently. “In the Ninth.”
Usually she would not divulge such details to a strange man in a foreign city, but April was still trying to work out how to stop touching him in this packed and delicate space.
“Are you familiar with Le Café Zéphyr? It is also in the Ninth.” Luc held tight to April’s gaze and remained entirely unbothered by her squirmy panic. Could he feel the sweat on her? she wondered.
“Never heard of it.”
April wiggled to the left, but it came across as more of a snuggling-in than an attempt to escape. She could nearly hear the woman in the portrait tittering in amusement. This wasn’t a publicly attended enema but humiliating all the same.