The Painted Girls Read online

  But it is not enough. No starting position. No direction for the glissade, the brisés, the assemblé. No mention of which foot to land in front. She knows it yet turns away. Yesterday the combination was tricky, with six girls botching it, including Blanche. And then it was my turn. I linked the steps perfectly and landed the final jeté in a steady attitude, and Madame Dominique burst into applause.

  I am not nipping at Blanche’s heels in the practice room. No, she is still the better dancer, but I have moved up from class dunce. With Blanche’s gliding, leaping hands blocked by her scrawny back, I know it is not just me who has noticed the gap between the two of us narrowing. When I told her about the statuette, all she said was that Monsieur Degas looked like a lunatic with his blue spectacles and his great bushy beard, which made me sorry I had not kept my excitement to myself. And Saturday the two of us set out after class to the rue Laffitte, where Josephine said she had seen a picture of me in the Durand-Ruel gallery. We were barely under way, just out front of the Opéra, when we put our noses up to the window of the Adolphe Goupil gallery, something I had never done before. The ceiling was tall with large panes of glass lit up by the sky and a single crystal chandelier. The draperies framing the window were velvet, held open with gold, tasseled cords. The sofas, all scrolled wood and tufted brocade, were clustered together in the center of the room and turned outward so that they faced the walls, which were covered with pictures from the wainscot on up to the ceiling. I looked from one to the next, searching, and there was not a single one with cutoff feet or great expanses of empty floor, and definitely no laundresses bent under the weight of heavy loads or stooped over a hot iron, all of which were usual in Monsieur Degas’s workshop.

  Blanche pointed. “That one with Eve taking the apple, it couldn’t look more real.”

  “Monsieur Degas’s pictures are different,” I said.

  By the time we reached the rue Lafitte, I thought it was a mistake to have asked her to come. The street was full of galleries but none near as grand as that of Adolphe Goupil. When we came to number sixteen, I saw the building was stone and the window a good size and polished clean. Still, Blanche said, “It doesn’t hold a candle to Goupil’s.”

  “Let’s go.” We could not see any picture of me through the window and Blanche was in no mood to say anything nice, even if Monsieur Degas drew my legs with two feet attached.

  “We’re here to look at your picture,” she said, opening up the door.

  The place was empty, and there were lamps with garish reflectors shining light upon walls that were not nearly so tall, not nearly so crowded with pictures as Goupil’s. A gentleman wearing a waistcoat and a watch chain was soon upon Blanche and me, looking us up and down. He had little curls over his ears where his hair was turning grey, and his brow was wrinkled at the surprise of finding two skinny girls with worn-out boots in his gallery, but his cheeks were round with a smile and he would not snap at us to get out.

  “We came to see the picture of her,” Blanche said, jutting a thumb. “Monsieur Degas made it.”

  “Ah. The pastel,” he said. He made a little cough into his fist. “Follow me.”

  And there I was, on the far wall, in pastel and black chalk—two legs, two feet, two arms—reading the newspaper beside the stove in Monsieur Degas’s workshop. I wore my practice skirt and the blue sash I bought with my bakery money and you could make out the braid running atop my head that it had taken me a good half hour to get right. There were bracelets upon my forearms, which was strange when I did not own a single one. The picture hung upon the wall beside another of Monsieur Degas’s, the one of the dance lesson with the brokenhearted girl and her blaring red shawl.

  Reading the newspaper was how I passed the time while waiting for Monsieur Degas to mix his pigments with oil or find a pastel of a particular shade of blue. Not a week ago I was doing just that and letting the warmth of his stove seep into my tired bones, when he called out, “Don’t move, Mademoiselle van Goethem. Don’t move the breadth of a hair.”

  Of course, with him hollering, I looked up.

  “Eyes down, reading the newspaper again.”

  I put my attention back on a story about the murdered tavern owner, how her watch was stolen, how any Parisian coming upon the watch was to contact the inspector in charge of the case. The posing went on and on, with the intervals between Monsieur Degas hurling a crumpled sketch upon the floor growing longer, which usually meant he would not be stomping off, cutting short the four hours and paying me the full six francs anyway. I did not dare turn the page, and so, by the time Monsieur Degas stepped back from his easel, I knew all about the heart-shaped opening over the face of the missing watch.

  The gentleman held a hand out to the picture. “Dancer Resting,” he said. I felt my shoulders straighten, seeing myself there upon the gallery wall in the prettiest of frames and looking more like a real ballet girl than a starving waif from the rue de Douai.

  “Doesn’t look done,” Blanche said. I could see what she meant, especially after gazing into the Adolphe Goupil gallery and seeing the paintings there, so polished, almost like tinted photographs.

  “The new painters, like Monsieur Degas, are not so concerned with finish,” he said. “Their aim is only to re-create exactly the sensation of what is seen, to capture life.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I did not understand and it must have shown, because he went on: “Degas’s pictures, every one, tell the story of a heart and a body.” He folded his arms and focused his eyes upon the picture of me. “It’s easy to see you’re a dancer. There’s the erectness of your back, the outward rotation of your legs, the practice costume. Your hair is put up. You’re skinny; a hard worker, one who doesn’t always get enough to eat.” He paused, glancing my way, maybe to see if calling me skinny was hurtful, but said so gently, it was not. “Your skirt is neat, new. I see ambition in that. And you can read. In a moment of quiet, you turn to the newspaper. It says a lot, the way a girl chooses to rest.” He gave me a kindly smile. “Well? Has Monsieur Degas succeeded?”

  “He drew bracelets upon my arms. There isn’t money for that.” I shrugged, then smiled, thinking of myself passing the examination and joining the quadrille. My pay would increase—fifteen extra francs a month, plus a bonus of two francs for every evening I spent upon the stage.

  “Dancers are always collecting trinkets from their admirers,” he said. I felt a creeping bit of pleasure that maybe Monsieur Degas and this gentleman believed that one day someone would think enough of my dancing to put bracelets upon my arms. But the idea made me jumpy, too.

  Sometimes the girls talked about admirers—or protectors, as they were usually called—gossip they collected in the Opéra corridors or at home from older sisters and cousins and neighbors holding spots in the corps de ballet. Always I stayed quiet, gripping my ribs, the hair upon my arms standing straight up. They were the finest of men, Perot claimed, wishing only to make a ballet girl’s life easier so she could keep her mind on her work. They were ambitious, Lucille said, wanting nothing of a girl except her name linked with his and envy stirred up among the rest of the abonnés. Blanche and Ila and Louise held that they were gentlemen, tired of their wives and looking for a bit of pleasure. But Josephine shook her head, and speaking in a low voice, her eyes always on the lookout for Madame Dominique, told how abonnés dreamt up the unnatural and forced it upon a girl. Fingers creeping where they did not belong. Girls pushed to their knees. Licking. Orgies. I sucked my lip and willed Josephine to stop but never once pulled away from the mass of huddled girls.

  I glanced from the picture of me to the one of the girl in the blaring red shawl, and I remembered, back in Monsieur Degas’s workshop, how the picture made me dream up her life and try to guess what had put the weariness on her face. “New painting?” I said.

  He nodded, and I nodded back.

  “I don’t see why he’s drawing Marie,” Blanche said, her face in a pout. “He’d be better off drawing an étoil
e.” She did not like the prophesy of the bracelets. She did not like me singled out. Yes, I was her friend, but it did not change that there were only so many spots in the second quadrille, that the two of us were vying for the rank.

  “The first of his ballet paintings was of Eugénie Fiocre, starring in La Source,” the gentleman said, and the pout on Blanche’s face grew.

  Madame Dominique calls out, “Josephine, Marie, Perot,” and the three of us move to center and stand in fifth position. The violinist shifts his bow to hovering over the strings. I manage the sissonne, the entrechat, the glissade before Madame Dominique’s sharp clap stills the room, quiets the violin. “Glissade dessous, Marie,” she says, meaning that my front foot is to finish behind.

  Again the music starts up, again the sharp clap. “It’s two brisés, Marie.”

  After my third blunder, her voice is curt. “You may sit down, Marie.”

  I move to the bench and huddle there like the brokenhearted girl in the blaring red shawl. With one arm wrapping my waist and the other propped upon my thigh, I wonder if it was being told to sit down that had that other girl wiping her eye upon the bench.

  Always at the close of class, the girls together glide through a révérence, each of us bowing low to show our respect to Madame Dominique, who keeps behind any girl failing to lower her eyes and then raise them to meet her own. “A tradition from the days of courtly dance,” she says. “Sacred. Inviolable.” I join the girls in center as is expected and make a révérence with every speck of grace I can muster, bowing extra low to show humility. I say a little prayer, too, for Antoinette, vague hopes that she does not make a habit of staying out through the night, that she does not end up pierced full of holes. Each of us in the class holds still in the ending position of the révérence, arms à la seconde, a foot stretched in a tendu to the front, until Madame Dominique gives a tiny nod and says, “Dismissed.” Then there is the clamor of girls laughing and chatting and scuttling down the stairs to the petits rats’ loge.

  The loge is three times longer than it is wide, with a strip of low cabinets in the center, running from end to end. Each of us has our own spot—two feet of countertop holding a looking glass and a gas lamp, the cupboard underneath, a stool we seldom have the time to use. The din picks up as we put on boots and toss practice skirts into satchels and mothers holler from the doorway for their daughters to hurry up, to wrap their shawls a little tighter, to be gentle with the tarlatan skirts. “Fifteen francs for a new one,” says a mother. “It’ll be the washhouse for you before I get another skirt.”

  I am rolling my sash into a neat coil, when I see Madame Dominique’s black skirt before me. I lift my eyes and stop myself from sucking on my lip. “See me before you leave,” she says.

  Wanting the other girls, especially Blanche, cleared out before I get the scolding I am due, I take my time wrapping my slippers with their ribbons, folding my tarlatan skirt. Humble works best with Madame Dominique, and I try to push my mind from Blanche’s meanness, but I am stuck—a peddler with his cart too loaded up to pull—thinking how I will work harder, how one day I will be at the front of the barre and demonstrating exercises while Blanche is made to watch. But in truth there is little chance of me catching up when almost always she is first in the practice room, when never does she waste a minute pampering tired legs, easing the soreness from her back. She means to dance upon the Opéra stage. She means to have roses flung to her feet, bracelets upon her arms. Once when I said the thing I wanted most was to pass the examination elevating me to the quadrille, she said, “The quadrille is only the beginning for me.” I nodded, because I knew it was true. She has no father, never has, only a brother gone to Saint-Malo years before, a sailor on the high seas. Her mother went from brothel to brothel in the afternoons, arranging the coquettes’ hair. Afterward she washed dishes from early evening and right on through the night in the kitchen at Le Meurice. Mornings she bawled and told Blanche she would not last another week, that the Opéra was their only hope. She was too careful with her wages to spend them on absinthe; and it gave Blanche, who already had a two-year head start at the Opéra, the added advantage of not kneading the dough for eighty loaves before class every day.

  When all the girls, all except Blanche, are cleared out—galloping the stairs and smirking about me staying behind—she comes over to me. I watch her lick her lips, wring the skirt clutched in her hands. “Monsieur Degas was right,” she says, “putting those bracelets upon your arms. You’ll be elevated to the quadrille. You’ll be admired.”

  I pull my satchel tight against my belly, tug at the frayed skin of my thumb.

  “I should have helped. It was mean not to help,” she says and sinks down to a crouch. She leans her head against the stool where I sit. “I’ve got to grow another three inches, or I have no hope of being an étoile.” Then she tells how her mother measures her height twice a month and is undertaking to lengthen Blanche’s spine. She is made to lie on her back, her toes wedged under the larder’s apron, while her mother curls her fingers around the base of Blanche’s skull and pulls. “It doesn’t work. What I need is meat. I haven’t grown a speck in four months.”

  Before I manage a word, she is up and through the doorway leading to the corridor. And I wish I was quicker. It was true: Not a soul among the étoiles or even the premières danseuses was as small as Blanche. But still, I should have said how everyone knew her talent, how she outshone every other petit rat.

  Madame Dominique comes into the loge and settles her backside upon a low cabinet in front of my stool. “You have a new skirt, no?” she says.

  I nod.

  “Extra lessons with Madame Théodore?”

  “Twice a week,” I say.

  “The abonnés, they want their protégés upon the stage, and yet they keep a girl out half the night.” She shifts her body sideways so that she is looking me fully in the face.

  I make the smallest shrug, not a bit sure.

  “You know the examinations are not far off, and still you come to class exhausted.”

  “I made the mistake of going to bed too late.”

  Her lips pull tight. “The shadows under your eyes are nothing new.”

  She taps the coral ring she wears on her pinky against the cabinet, waiting, and I scrape the frayed skin of my thumb, hidden, behind the shield of my other hand.

  “I could speak to him?” she says. “To your protector? He must be made to understand the rigor of the examinations.” She touches my hand, stilling the picking going on underneath. “You must arrive rested for class. You need an allowance for meat. A new skirt isn’t enough.”

  It comes to me that she thinks I have a protector, that he bought my skirt. “I work at a bakery.”

  A line appears between her eyebrows.

  “I’m only kneading dough, saving my legs,” I say. “I go in the morning, first thing.”

  “Before class?” A palm moves to her cheek, holding up her heavy head.

  “Half past four. I’m finished by eight o’clock.”

  “Oh, Marie. Every morning?”

  I nod. “I’m modeling, not as much as I was.”

  “I see.” Her hands drop. “It’s noble. But, oh, Marie. It’s impossible. Already you’re wearing yourself out.”

  I was told to sit out class, would not have got the combination right even if she gave me a fourth chance.

  “There are other ways.” She says it quietly, eyes upon the floor.

  “A protector?”

  “I thought you’d taken one on. I saw your new things. Madame Théodore said about the classes.”

  “You’ll help me? I don’t know the abonnés.”

  “No,” she says, too fast. A decision already made, before, on behalf of some other girl. “I won’t.”

  Her eye twitches then, something I have never seen, not with her steady gaze. And it makes me wonder if in that twitch there was not a flickering bit of shame at failing a girl, a girl she is charged with pushing along from p
etit rat in her practice room to ballet girl upon the Opéra stage.

  Antoinette

  Colette insists upon gathering up the dead dog with its twisted neck and blood-leaking mouth. She is carrying on, blubbering and sniffling, not bothering to wipe the snot from her face. Part of me is all for joining in, bawling and pounding my fists upon the ground, but how would it all end? There is no mother coming with a soothing teat, no sweetheart with embracing arms. Colette and me, we are on our own and all the blubbering in the world won’t change a single thing. She spreads her shawl over the ground and shifts the dog’s hindquarters onto the wool. “You got to leave it,” I say.

  She slides one hand beneath its muzzle, the other beneath its breast. Taking great care with the neck, she spares that broken mutt the cold stone of the pavement. “Well, help me,” she says.

  Marie is waiting for me, I know, dipping only her toe into sleep. Always she stirs awake the second I settle under the covers and then, with my heat beside her, sighs and drifts into proper sleep for the first time of the night. I know the look of peacefulness come to a slumbering girl, also the dusky hollows brought on by losing rest. But Colette is watching me with the naked eyes of an urchin new to the streets.

  Together we lift, begin walking, each of us holding a gathered edge of the shawl and in between, the weight of a dead dog swaying in time with our steps. It appears Colette knows where we are headed, and I put one foot ahead of the other, following. My heart is cleaved that Émile should take a smoke from a boy who slapped my face, crushed that he walked away. Already I know I want his hot breath upon my skin again, his stroking fingers upon my flesh. If he don’t come begging to me, I am going begging to him, and I don’t see any point in pretending something different for an evening or a day. Maybe it was something he understood even as he put that offered smoke to his lips. Maybe it was not so much choosing Pierre Gille ahead of me, not if already Émile knew it would not change a single thing between him and me.

  As we turn the corner Colette says we are going to the house of Madame Brossard on the lower slopes of Montmartre and continues at an even pace. I know the parents of Colette are dead, that her family name is not Brossard but Dupree. She was chummy with the boulevard tarts at the brasserie, also a gentleman twice her age. She owns four dresses, all of them silk, none of them worn out, and tonight, upon her neck, she wears the fanciest of watches. It hangs there, winking, catching the flickering light of the lamps, drawing the eye. But to her it is only a trinket, something to toss in a drawer. She is not the smallest bit modest, the smallest bit shy about her heaving breasts, her pretty calves, her plump lips. Not an hour ago she was lifting up her skirt and taunting Pierre Gille and calling out for the world to hear, “It isn’t free.” All of it says there is only one possibility: The house of Madame Brossard is a brothel, a shuttered house of Paris. Still it takes a further block of trudging before I say, “Just who is Madame Brossard?”