Chère Mademoiselle,
Please come to Chatou on Sunday by noon, or earlier, to Maison
Fournaise on the island. If you are willing, I have a painting in
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mind that begs for your charms, a
souvenir
for future ages of life as it was lived in the summer of 1880. It is of crucial importance to me, but I can’t begin it without you. The time of year forces me to start immediately. Please wear a dark blue dress for boating, and a pretty hat. Do you still have the one you wore at the Promenade de Longchamp, the felt one with feathers and gold braid
that makes you look so lovely? We will be outdoors. If you have any feeling left for me, if only the fond remembrance of times
past, come.
Je t’adore toujours,
Pierre-Auguste
On the bottom, he drew the hat, and folded the paper in thirds.
“Please see that Mademoiselle Samary receives this privately.” He pressed a fifty-centime piece into the concierge’s waiting palm.
He loped into the vast place du Carrousel surrounded by the arms of the Louvre, sacred ground for him. He’d played marbles here as a child, living in the slum of old guardhouses within the arms of the Louvre until Haussmann demolished the eyesore and moved the working class out of the heart of Paris. It grieved him that the house where he’d drawn his first real pictures, on the floor, was no more. But he had lived there long enough to know every inch of the Louvre.
Entering the ground-floor galleries, he felt the calm of the classical marble faces he had drawn as a youth, as familiar as family. He climbed two flights of stairs to the Salon Carré, hungry for what he’d come to see. Not his favorites, Ingres and Fragonard, not even Watteau, whose paintings of
fêtes galantes,
aristocrats of the last century enjoying a day of love on the wooded isle of Cythera, conveyed the mood he wanted.
He had painted hundreds of ladies’ fans with Watteau’s romantic images of Cythera in his younger days. He didn’t need to see them again.
It was Veronese he needed now, to study his technical achievement.
There it was,
The Marriage Feast at Cana,
ten meters wide and nearly seven meters tall. He studied the angles of the U-shaped table positioned broadside in an outdoor pavilion with richly dressed fi gures bal-
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anced right and left according to the Renaissance ideal, gesturing, talking, leaning toward one another. And surrounding them—
musicians, jesters, servants, even dogs. The end of the meal, the table opulent with goblets, grapes, sugared fruit. The wine having run out, Christ performs his first miracle, turning the water into wine, and it pours out ruby red from the urns. The festiveness, the wealth of ornament, the splendor of the silks in aquamarine, emerald, carmine, yellow ocher, had always astonished him.
His would use just one angle of tables. He would emulate the close overlapping of figures, several conversations going at once, and the foreshortening, the most difficult perspective to achieve. He would honor Veronese, and he would vie with him—and Watteau and Ingres and
Rubens and Fragonard and Vermeer to boot! And he would do it all in two months. He felt hot with the pressure to get started, and to make it the greatest figure painting of the whole Impressionist movement.
Only four more days to prepare. He needed to perform his own
miracle.
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To the Left Bank and Back
Crossing the river on the Passerelle des Arts, Auguste was seized by a thought. He was straddling more than just the Seine. The
iron and wood footbridge stretched from the Louvre on the Right Bank to the formidable, gold-ribbed dome of the Institut de France housing the Académie des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank. The new art was a Right Bank school growing out of ragtag Montmartre and the subur-ban riverside to the west, as far from the classical, tradition-bound Left Bank Académie as it could get. Yet the painting that swirled in his mind, even though modern in subject, required the skill of the classi-cists. He felt as giddy as he had as a youth the moment before touching the first breast offered to him.
With long-legged steps, he strode through shaded streets of traditional galleries huddled around the Académie, their windows assault-ing him with huge battle scenes, teary-eyed Mary Magdalenes, and Roman temples crowded with men in togas. He stopped on rue de
Grenelle in front of the Charpentiers’
hôtel particulier,
a mansion eight windows wide and six stories high, all theirs, Monsieur Charpentier’s publishing house on the street level, their living quarters above. Open-jawed bronze lions’ heads supporting stone pediments roared their displeasure at anyone not invited. Up the marble stairway, he sounded the heavy brass knocker, another lion’s head, and noticed that his right hand and wrist had swollen.
“Control your arms,” his mother used to say. “Don’t slouch. Tall men
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should use their height to advantage.” He put his left arm through the sleeve of his coat and tried to drape it smoothly over his right shoulder.
Salons were a strain on him. There was an annoying proliferation of them lately, most of them hosted by Madame de-This or Madame de-That. He disdained the pretension of names with de or du, as if they were announcing their owner’s pedigree like a racehorse naming his sire. Such women hosted political salons, academic salons, literary salons, romantic salons, obsequious salons, critical-of-everything salons, and salon-commentary salons.
Madame Charpentier’s tended toward the theatric and literary because Monsieur Charpentier published Zola, the one man Auguste
didn’t want to see on the other side of this door. Conversation would veer toward Zola’s review, and that could get ticklish. Madame needed to round out the arts with a painter of
la vie moderne,
the name of her husband’s journal supporting the new art movement. Manet had a salon of his own, Monet was living in the country, Cézanne was in the South of France, Pissarro was too politically radical, so the position fell to him. He and Madame fed each other’s ambitions. Her rooms were full of potential clients, so he’d had to learn how to be witty and gallant among the rich and talented, despite his discomfort. He was a crafts-man, fi rst and last, and never wanted to be otherwise, but a poor man can’t afford shyness.
The butler ushered him in to the sound of many voices and the clink of crystal stoppers in decanters. He passed through the Japonaise room quickly where teethy stone lions were ready to gorge themselves on his thin, available arm.
Upstairs in the silk-paneled drawing room under a window frame
carved in a mishmash of cupids and leaves, he spotted his favorite chair, a simple Louis Quatorze armchair with plain blue upholstery. No one ever sat in it because no one thought it would show a person to advantage. He wanted to hug the thing, but instead, he just sat down in it, crossed his legs one way, then the other, and listened to that academic painter in his outrageous plaid trousers, Carolus-Duran, plucking his guitar. Not only had he painted Jeanne in an off-the-shoulder drape, a
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portrait that got into the Salon and was purchased by the Comédie-Française, but the lucky devil had won the Prix de Rome! Oh, what he, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, could do with that prize, and the trip that went with it, the chance to study the Italian masters. The craving surged in him so strongly that he could taste it, like a full-bodied Chianti on the tongue. With it he could write his own ticket, paint on his own terms, whatever and however he wanted.
At the opposite end of the long room, Jules Laforgue was reading his poetry aloud. It was hard to catch the gist of it, and he doubted if others did, but they applauded when he finished, and Auguste along with them. He had to respect the man for following his own style. He wanted Jules in the painting.
A servant offered him a choice of canapés from a silver tray. He felt like packing all of them into his pockets for later. He took one and surveyed the room for people on his list. Ellen Andrée, the star mime at the Folies-Bergère, a pretty brunette who had posed for him in an elegant café. Good. Not the cachet of Jeanne Samary, a celebrated actress, but still an experienced model. Degas would rage that he stole Ellen from him. Let him stew. The cabaret singer, Yvette Guilbert? Plenty of cachet, but homely enough to sour milk. Leave her to Degas. Léon Gambetta? No. He didn’t want a national leader, especially one with an eye patch.
“Pierre-Auguste! Look at you!”
He sprang up from the chair. A pain shot through his hip. Madame Charpentier swooped down on him, rustling her mauve day gown, preceded by her enormous, matronly, mesmerizing bosoms that kept coming closer and closer until they were under his nose. She scrutinized him from head to toe.
“I see that you
half
remembered to put on a frock coat this time.”
She offered her ruby-weighted index finger for him to kiss. “What happened?”
“I took a job as a house painter because I didn’t have a sou in my pocket, but I fell off the ladder.” He raised his bent right arm.
“Nonsense. Your cycling cap belies you. Don’t you own a bowler?”
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“Yes, but I prefer my cap.” He grabbed it off his head and tried to flatten his hair over his receding hairline. What a bumpkin he was.
“I have new guests whom I’d like you to meet.”
“Potential collectors?”
“Don’t gawk. One is looking at you. Not a collector. A potential paramour.”
“You know I can’t afford one.”
Over Madame’s shoulder he saw her, a porcelain figurine of a woman expostulating coquettishly to Jules, with delicate hands fl uttering back and forth at the wrists.
“I told her she would be fascinated by how you can shift between bohemian Montmartre and the society of Saint-Germain and the boulevards. That intrigued her, so don’t disappoint me.”
Heat emanated from the young woman’s eyes. She smoothed her
skirt so that it suggested the shape of her thigh. Such a dress. Pale yellow cupped her voluptuous breasts from below. As joyous to paint as to touch, he was sure, but a taffeta evening dress in the afternoon? The top of her sleeves increased in fullness and projected upward above her shoulder, which gave her the appearance of being permanently startled.
There was something about her he couldn’t detect that made him wary.
Maybe it was the overlarge mouth.
“And the others?” he asked.
“As soon as they arrive I’ll introduce you. Monsieur and Madame Beloir. They may be ready to commission you—portraits and something else. If they do, it will be a juicy offer. They were speaking of a series.”
“Ah. I’m much obliged,” he said before she slipped away to greet others.
Just when he needed money, bless her heart. He caught himself. Was he still a portrait painter, or his own man, painting what he chose? It might be possible to do both—the portraits during the week, and the painting at Maison Fournaise on Sundays. One would fund the other.
He surveyed the room. How was he to ask some of the guests to
model, but not all? He tried to follow several conversations—she of the
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articulated wrists recounting her spring in Italy, a heavily bearded
fl â-
neur
trying out his cool observations on the behavior of dancers in the Opéra loges before publishing them in a journal of Parisian life, a portly man saying under his breath, “Now is the time to buy. Even his large paintings are going cheap. I happen to know that a year from now, he’ll be fetching high prices.”
Puh! As if paintings were stocks or racehorses.
His portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children was hanging between two porcelain plates perched on the ornate black marble man-tel. The plates interested him. Had Madame been taken in, or were they authentic Sèvres ware? His china-painting days at Monsieur Lévy’s workshop beginning when he was thirteen had taught him the difference. He walked over to them, swaggering a bit remembering that he could turn out eight Marie Antoinette plates in the time other workers took to do one, and he’d gotten forty centimes apiece.
“Examining your work?” Gambetta asked.
He jerked back from a figurine. How did Gambetta know of his
humble origins?
“No—that is, I was just taking a look at Madame’s china.”
“I meant the portrait. The glow of her flesh is positively radiant.”
“I hate the word flesh. It sounds like she’s a piece of Prussian meat.”
“Quite right. We can’t say that. Nothing Prussian,” Gambetta said.
“Inventive of you to have that child sitting on that Newfoundland.”
“Remind me never to do another painting with a dog. They make
horrible models. This one snored with such unmelodic abandon that I had to time my brushstrokes between them. Whenever one snuck up on me, I ruined something.”
“Nevertheless, it’s your greatest masterpiece.”
“Then put it in the Louvre. You’re the Ministre de l’Intérieur. Put it in the interior of the Louvre. Greatest! You think I’ll never surpass it?”
“Not at all. I’m sure there are more to come.”
“If you really think so, there is something you could do for me.”
Auguste straightened himself to his full height.
“I will if I can.”
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“If you could use your influence to get me a post as curator of some provincial museum, one that would pay a few hundred francs a month and not require much of my time—”
Gambetta laughed uproariously. “My dear Renoir, you talk as if
you’d just been born yesterday.”
Auguste fumbled with his cap.