The Painted Girls Read online

  “Jean Luc. Jean Luc Simard.”

  And then Madame Brossard is there, calling Odette over to tell Monsieur Simard about the peddler who was selling flowers cut from the cemetery not a stone’s throw away. Madame Brossard takes me by the elbow, steers me from the salon, calling out over her shoulder, “Just imagine it, Monsieur Simard.”

  A cemetery is a fine place for plucking flowers. Tomorrow I will gather up fistful upon fistful to lay around the hem of my spread skirt as I wait for Émile outside the storage shed of the father of Pierre Gille.

  Marie

  Between the rue de Douai and the rue des Pyramides, Charlotte and I count twenty-six posters announcing the fifth exposition of the independent artists. Monsieur Degas is listed third, with fourteen others, including two I know from the newspapers—Pissarro and Gauguin. I have made a habit of counting the posters, and once when I walked farther than the half hour of today, I counted forty-three. All of Paris knows.

  “Another one,” I say.

  “Twenty-seven,” Charlotte says.

  “Makes me nervous, so many people seeing the statuette.”

  The exposition opened last Thursday, April 1, and the three days of waiting for today to come were the longest of my life. There was no earlier chance, not with Madame Dominique’s classes and Madame Théodore’s private lessons and the kneading of the baguettes. Friday evening I very nearly broke my own rule of being curled upon my mattress by eight o’clock and headed out. But how could I after pleading with Maman and Antoinette to tiptoe, to shut their squawking mouths? “I need to sleep,” I said, hollering and blubbering and rubbing my eyes. “Madame Dominique told me I need to get more sleep.”

  The examinations were nine weeks off, and Madame Dominique was back to doling out tiny nods. Blanche had stayed nice and said my fouettés en tournant were better than hers and showed me a combination the minute I was stuck. Once when the day was hot and we were sitting in a patch of sunshine with our backs resting up against the Opéra wall, she put her face in her hands. “Maman can’t go on, working every minute of every day.”

  I tilted my head onto her shoulder.

  “Five months now I haven’t grown.”

  “I’ve got the face of an ape. It will go against me in the exam.”

  She shrugged, huffed a little laugh because what else could she do?

  “A monkey and a shrimp upon the stage,” I said.

  “If there’s a bit of fairness in the world.”

  She was right about elevation to the quadrille for both of us being fair, and probably Madame Dominique would agree. Always she was saying, “A little more sweat, if you please,” but never was the girl scolded for laziness, me or Blanche. She still easily held the first spot at the barre, but I had nipped at the heels of others in the class, sometimes hard enough that a girl fell back to nipping at my own. I worried, sometimes, that still my jetés lacked height, that Josephine’s back was growing suppler than my own, that only I noticed the strength of my fouettés en tournant. But a ribbon came off my slipper the other day, and I knew what it meant when both Linette and Alice made up excuses for not lending me a bit of thread. Blanche and I and a handful of others were pulling away from girls like Linette and Alice, girls still botching combinations, still dropping to their heels instead of holding steady on their toes in an arabesque. The quadrille—the chance to be a real ballet girl with white on my arms and a costume of fine silk, to appear as a sylph and be adored—was growing more and more possible with each day. And when I thought of the music of an entire orchestra reaching inside me, filling me up, instead of a single violin, I felt myself grow lighter on my feet.

  Even so the patch on my thumb was picked to a pulp. I cut my fingernails short and warned myself not to count my chickens before they hatched. But still my mind wandered, thinking and rethinking, fearful of the thing I was sweating and slaving in the practice room to get. From the bakery came the baguettes we ate in the morning, the wages I handed over for rent and wood and milk, those I kept for practice clothes, for pork cutlet and veal stew—those extra portions of meat I allowed myself—always a nervous eye on the door of a café up in the place Pigalle, always fearful of Antoinette coming upon me there. If I was elevated to the quadrille, I would be dancing upon the stage some evenings; and it would mean getting back to our lodging room after midnight, far too late to be waking up early and kneading baguettes. The girls in the corps de ballet were supposed to rise late, get to the Opéra in time for class in the afternoon and be prepared to stay all hours, rehearsing or dancing upon the stage. But the ballet girls that slept until noon had fathers buying their meat, fathers or abonnés.

  Twice after class, when Blanche and I were crossing the courtyard of administration to the Opéra’s back gate, I saw Monsieur Lefebvre. The first time, he was talking to another gentleman beside a carriage, a fine one with a pair of plumed horses, glass windows and a gilt L upon the door. The bench for the driver was padded and there was a seat for the groom at the back, when most would have expected him to stand on the footboard at the side. I told myself to call out but knew I did not have the nerve. Then Monsieur Lefebvre bent forward from the waist and tipped his hat.

  I smiled, just a little, and said, “Hello” and then after a tiny pause, “Monsieur Lefebvre,” so that he would know I remembered his name.

  After we had crossed to the far side of the street from where the carriage was parked, Blanche said, “You know him?”

  “He came into Monsieur Degas’s workshop.”

  “Such a carriage.” She craned her neck to get a second look, and I was thankful that, with the carriage in the way, Monsieur Lefebvre could not see her gawking.

  A week later he was there again, and he called Blanche and me over to his carriage and ushered us inside. Was Madame Dominique working us sufficiently hard in preparation for the upcoming examinations? he wanted to know. His pink tongue flicked against the corner of his mouth. Was the date set? He would like to attend and would inquire about obtaining a pass. We must conserve our energy, he said, and then he asked Blanche if she lived up near me and insisted on taking us as far as the sweet-seller shop in the rue Fontaine. He told us Madame Lefebvre adored its red caramel pipes.

  When we pulled up outside the sweet seller’s, he said we should wait in the carriage, that hardworking ballet girls, such as ourselves, would benefit from a sweet. He came back with bits of almond paste and sugarplums and red caramel pipes. We stuffed our mouths, Blanche more so than I, because my teeth were ugly enough without red smears, and Monsieur Lefebvre’s questions never let up. What was I paid by the Opéra? He knew about my extra lessons with Madame Théodore and wanted to know what they cost. Was it true my father was dead? My mother a laundress? My sister, too? He did not take a single sweet for himself, which explained how a man rich enough for a carriage with glass windows and creaseless, polished shoes had cheeks as hollow as a black night. Blanche stayed mostly quiet, but she did blurt out that no one could match me when it came to fouettés en tournant, that he would be watching me in the quadrille come next fall. “Yes, such turns!” he said, and it made me think those two times Madame Dominique gave us our class upon the stage in preparation for the examination, he was watching from the blackness of the house. “I’ll put in a good word, make sure Monsieur Pluque and Monsieur Mérante, too, know the attention she deserves.” Monsieur Mérante was the Opéra’s ballet master, and passing on the red caramel was not a mistake.

  “And Blanche,” I said, “she’s got arms like the wings of a dove. Madame Dominique told her that.”

  “Uncommon grace.” He looked over to Blanche, and I felt a tiny pang that he watched her, same as he watched me.

  After his carriage went around the corner, with me and Blanche left on the pavement outside the sweet seller’s, she grabbed my elbows with both her hands. “A carriage with velvet seats, silk draperies!” she said. “And he knows both our talents. He said I’ve got uncommon grace.”

  I did not know whether
I wanted Monsieur Lefebvre’s attention or even if sugarplums bought from a sweet seller meant anything at all, but I was sure Blanche had only met him on account of me. It was bold, her saying how he admired her grace, and it made me feel like there was something she could snatch away from me. My face must have fallen, and it must have made her think twice about whether I would ever again open up my mouth about her dove arms to Monsieur Lefebvre, because the next thing she said was, “I was only thinking he might mention me to Monsieur Mérante, too.” She linked her arm around mine. “It’d be nothing for him to give you what the bakery does.” She yanked me down the pavement, galloping and hopping and twice twirling me around.

  In the rue des Pyramides I count three more posters, and it tips Charlotte over to sour. “Antoinette said he only paints ballet girls scratching their backs,” she says. When I first told Charlotte about the statuette, she put her full weight over to one hip and stuck out her chin. “A statuette? Like Marie Taglioni? But you’ve still got to pass the examination for the second quadrille.” Antoinette rolled her eyes and said, “Such a dunce, Charlotte. He don’t see Marie as no ordinary girl,” and I felt a growing warmth in my chest. But then yesterday Antoinette came in from the washhouse in the evening, looking all bashful with her hands behind her back. “I can’t go to the exposition with you tomorrow,” she said, and my heart grew tight. She held out a coiled ribbon. “A little starch and a hot iron and your old ribbon is good as new.” The wrinkles were flattened, the tatty edges trimmed. I touched the ribbon, newly crisp and smooth.

  “You’re off with that boy somewhere,” I said.

  “He’s got a name, Marie.”

  “I’ll take Charlotte. Charlotte will want to go.”

  “Let me plait your hair in the morning,” she said and made a meek smile, but I only shrugged.

  Oh, but never mind Charlotte. Never mind Antoinette. My feet are light upon the pavement, and the breath of springtime is rolling across the land, calling up tender blades of grass, coaxing canopies of green from the hard kernels of their winter beds. There is happiness in sniffing air full with cherry blossoms; but more than that, I have this feeling, like I sit before a cake, watering at the mouth while the baker adds a glaze, a drizzle of chocolate, a decoration of candied fruit. First there was a single poster—bold red letters against a background of green. Then there was the knowledge they were everywhere—walls, doors, bridges, gates—that a hundred buckets of paste were emptied to put the posters up. There was the location, too, announced underneath the artists’ listed names: 10, rue des Pyramides. I did not know the street and asked Antoinette. “Right bank,” she said. “Connects up with the Pont Royal.” The rue des Pyramides was five minutes from the lapping, twinkling Seine, closer still to the flower beds and reflecting pools of the Jardin des Tuileries, practically on top of the Louvre, the fortress that houses the greatest artworks in all of France. The rue des Pyramides, it brought to mind a stone monument, standing until the end of time.

  Since Monsieur Degas told me about the statuette, he has not called me to his workshop, and so I have only my own mind to dream up how it will look. I thought about the figurine of Marie Taglioni, the one Papa gave to Antoinette. It was cast in terra-cotta, painted with airy white, the softest of pinks, then hardened up in a kiln and set upon our mantelshelf to be loved. The figurine was not naked. No, a plain dress clung to sloping shoulders, and mostly it was enough to keep me hopeful that my own flesh would be covered up, to push away the hundred drawings of me naked in fourth position, to put my mind on the later drawings. Almost always I was dressed—a bodice, practice skirt, slippers, and stockings.

  The wings extending from the back of the figurine made it clear Marie Taglioni wore the Sylph’s costume, that the little base she hovered above was not the practice room floor but the woodland ground of La Sylphide. Would Monsieur Degas show me as a ballet girl upon the stage instead of as a petit rat, worn out and waiting her turn? His pictures told the story of a heart and a body, just like the gentleman at the Durand-Ruel gallery said, and I had felt Monsieur Degas’s eyes burrowing beneath my skin. What story would he tell with the statuette? What had he seen? For a tiny instant, I worried about wanting so much, about greediness, but Maman drained her bottle of absinthe, and hopelessness was the reason why.

  Sometimes my mind fell to the massive sculpture jutting from between the two most easterly of the Opéra’s arched entrances. When I was ten, I stood before the stone carving with Antoinette. “It’s called The Dance,” she said.

  I stared, wondering how it was that solid stone could heave and twist, and waited for Antoinette to tell me what my opinion should be. She was fourteen and newly dancing upon the Opéra stage.

  “All of Paris got fired up when it was unveiled,” she said, tilting her head, still making up her mind.

  The women held hands, making a circle around a winged man with raised arms and a tambourine and hair floating up like he only just landed upon the earth. They were naked, fleshy, cavorting, wild. There was a plump baby at their feet.

  “Don’t know about all the complaining,” she said. “They look brimming with happiness to me.”

  The women’s heads were thrown back, laughing, like I had seen in the cafés, like Maman’s was from time to time, before the bellowing and the bawling and Papa being sick.

  I had passed by the carving a hundred times since. Usually I did not look. The thought of those naked breasts—chiseled, scoured smooth under a living hand without so much as a thread of cloth in between—it made me want with all my heart for Monsieur Degas to keep in place the bodice and practice skirt and slippers of the later drawings.

  There is no street number and even with the jumble of exposition posters pasted to the door, I check the addresses of the buildings on either side twice. The building is new, not finished, with two masons upon scaffolding and four roofers upon the roof. The windows looking onto the street are streaked with ridges of dirt, the cleaning cloth too laden with grime to be of much use. “This is it?” says Charlotte, and I swing open the door, as if I am not disappointed in the least.

  The clamor coming to my ears pushes me back a step. There is the shuffling, scraping, and hammering of roofers, the sawing of carpenters. Charlotte covers up her ears, and though I want to do the same, I only say, “Stop the fuss.”

  A man with dirty fingernails and a painter’s shabby smock sits at a table made out of a wooden plank upon two crates. Not a bit sure—no one else has come in to show us about exhibition-going—I set upon the plank the pair of one franc coins owed for admission. Charlotte shifts closer. “The two of us are petits rats with the Opéra,” she says, bolder than a rooster. “And my sister here is a model for Monsieur Degas. It’s his artworks we came to see.”

  “I should have guessed it,” says the man, eyes glinting with the same light Charlotte draws from the pork butcher, the watchmaker, the crockery dealer in the rue de Douai, and from Monsieur LeBlanc, who Antoinette says we will see no more of with her again earning a steady wage. The man slides the coins back to our side of the plank. “Third salon,” he says.

  The first salon is large with some twenty pictures hung upon the walls or perched upon the easels in the center of the room. A good half of the frames are purple, with yellow mats. It is what I see first, and this noticing of the trappings ahead of the artworks does not put my mind at ease. “So much filth,” says Charlotte. At the far end of the room, two women clutch at their skirts, their attention less on the walls than on keeping their hems clear of dust. With each blow of a hammer, heads turn, noses wrinkle, shoulders flinch. A few of those gathered in the room study the pictures—a woman with a knit brow, a gentleman stroking his beard, another two in top hats, leaned in close, muttering into each other’s ears.

  In the third salon, right away I see the paintings upon the walls belong to Monsieur Degas. My eyes sweep the room, seeking the statuette—a fourteen-year-old dancer in fourth position, arms clasped behind her back, hands nestled in the tar
latan of her skirt. It is the way I have thought up the statuette a hundred times. But it is not here.

  There is the girl in the blaring red shawl, hunched over upon a bench, and beside it another picture, new to me. Two dancers sit collapsed upon a bench, their bent knees parted, their tired legs turned out from the hips, even as they catch their breaths. In the next picture, a dancer bends forward at the hips to straighten her stockings; and another, with a shock of red hair and a face turned to the floor, looks like she is stretching out her toes, but it is impossible to know because a good half of her foot is chopped off, and this time, the top of her head, too. Behind the dancers, fluffing the tarlatan of her daughter’s skirt is the mother, with the puffy face of an old concierge, and her friend, rough with her raw nose and plume of feathers bristling from her hat. These girls, Monsieur Degas is saying, do not be tricked by the grace of their backs. These girls are of common stock.

  After that, portraits. I barely look. And last, a washbasin and a pitcher and a woman in black stockings and nothing more, pulling a dress over her head. Her backside is plump, soft, spread beneath the fleshy folds of her waist. She is no laundress or concierge, no milliner or wool carder. The shadow of her stockings lurches the mind from decent work, and only a whore slips on a dress with her backside still bare. I have looked away from such pictures in Monsieur Degas’s workshop. But today I stay and gawk, wondering. Why does he make such things? Why is it on display, when he has so many pictures, some even a little bit pretty if you ignore the cutoff feet, if you do not mind a girl sweaty upon a bench. Why a fleshy backside instead of me in fourth position, a ballet girl sprouting wings?

  “It isn’t here,” Charlotte says, flippant, like nothing ever mattered less.

  “No.” I give her arm a little tug. “Let’s go.”

  And then my eyes fall upon Monsieur Degas, coming through the doorway of the salon, and the man from the table, pointing a paint-stained finger in the direction of Charlotte and me.