The Painted Girls Read online

  “You were splendid today,” he says, stepping clear of the doorway, waving his hand in a way that makes me think he means for me to go inside. I inch closer to the carriage, not so boldly that he will think me brazen if his waving meant something else. “Yes, yes,” he says, “out of the hot sun.”

  Inside he points for me to sit, takes the spot beside me, crowding a little close, considering the bench is wide enough for four and that across from ours a second runs the width of the carriage. “Your turns at the end,” he says. “Even Vaucorbeil pulled himself up at little straighter in his seat.”

  “You were in the house?” Monsieur Vaucorbeil sat straighter on account of me? But does Monsieur Lefebvre know the seriousness of such a claim?

  “My little gift? The size was right? Of course I was in there.”

  “The slippers?”

  “Come now, Mademoiselle van Goethem. There’s hardly a girl in all the corps buying her own.”

  “It’s only that I thought they were from someone else.” I feel a dunce, now, for assuming the slippers were from Monsieur Degas. With three months come and gone since he asked me to model and the statuette being a failure, it was a stupid thing to think.

  He puts his face close to mine, and his voice snaps from light to stern. “I told you I would put in a good word with Monsieurs Pluque and Mérante. I kept my promise. Now, who did you think the slippers were from?”

  Almost, it is like I am back in Sister Evangeline’s classroom, fearing the answer I am about to give is wrong and wanting so badly to get it right. With the slippers, was Monsieur Lefebvre showing a desire to help? Now more than ever I need his charity. “Monsieur Degas.”

  He waves away Monsieur Degas with the flick of his wrist, like men with rumpled waistcoats and sloppy beards are no more than vapor in his mind. He opens the velvet-lined box sitting at his feet and takes out a glass etched with garlands and wreaths and hands it to me. Then he lifts the cloth draping a silver bucket of ice and twists the cork from a dark bottle sweating the heat of the day. “I’ve been assured of your elevation to the quadrille,” he says.

  He does not seem like the sort of man to say what is not true, not like Maman getting weepy and calling me her dearest dear when we all know it is Marie the First, or if we are only counting those who are not angels, then tiny Charlotte. To hear such a thing and then not find my name upon the list posted outside Monsieur Pluque’s office in the morning will break my heart a thousand times worse than if he never opened his mouth. “Please, Monsieur Lefebvre, I can only hear what is cast in stone.”

  He fills my glass. “I understand the seriousness of what I said.” He puts a hand on my thigh, gives a gentle squeeze, like Papa, and it is all I can do to keep myself from dancing my happiness. His hand lifts to my glass and tips it to my mouth. “Now, my dear, be a good girl and drink your champagne.”

  Should I ask about Blanche? She came into the Foyer de la Danse after her turn, and I saw right away her hands clutched together, holding in her glee. She would not leap and carry on, fueling bitterness, not today. She gave me the little smile that said the examination board had seen her very best. And I have no reason to turn Monsieur Lefebvre’s mind to her dove arms. It is not a thought I am proud of thinking, not when she is my only true friend at the dance school, but the truth is, if he has more to give than slippers, my need matches that of Blanche.

  I wet my tongue, swallow a mouthful. Champagne, which I never before sipped, is like drinking air. I feel tiny bubbles breaking open in my throat, taste the tang of a metal knife slicing a tart apple. “In the rue de Douai we are used to tasting the cask in our wine.”

  He laughs, fills his own glass, slides open a little window across from our bench and tells the driver we will pass along the Seine. Once we are under way, he says, “A celebratory drive, mademoiselle?” and I nod and wonder about him opening the closed drapes blocking out the lapping Seine.

  He leans his head up against the back of the carriage, looking not a bit like he desires to talk, and we ride in quiet for a bit, me sipping away. In this moment I should be thinking of nothing more than the tiny bubbles at the back of my throat, but never have I showed a talent for dwelling on what is good; and in my mind’s eye appears Antoinette, last Sunday, coming in from visiting at Mazas and burying her head in her arms folded on the table. I sucked in a deep breath and reminded myself about the hundred times she was patient with me. “Well?” I said.

  “They found the knife. The inspector told Émile.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a glimmer of hope rising up. Was Émile Abadie’s guilt finally slithering into her mind?

  “Can’t you see? Pierre Gille wouldn’t give up the place where he got rid of it unless he knew not an ounce of blame was aimed at him.”

  She looked up, skinny and tired, her eyes rimmed in red, and it made my heart ache. Stirring hope in a girl crumpled on a chair was not right, not when it was only putting off the further heartache just around the bend. But her anguish was such that in that moment I forgot about the promise I made myself to show her Émile Abadie through the clear lens of my own eyes, and I said, “Maybe the inspector was bluffing.”

  “He showed Émile the knife.”

  She would have to give up her fantasy of Émile Abadie’s innocence, and I put my palm upon her shoulder, as tender as I could. But I felt her bristle, irritated by my touch, like it was traitorous of me to think the news might tip her over to seeing his guilt. Was it possible she was not swayed in the least? “There is no doubt, then, that those boys slit the throat.” I stated it like a fact.

  “Don’t prove a thing,” she said and shrugged off my hand.

  Monsieur Lefebvre blinks his head straight from resting against the back of the carriage, and I remember I have not said a word of thanks for the slippers. Such a gap. “Well,” I say, feeling the boldness of the champagne on nothing but a crust of bread, “if my feet shone even the smallest bit today, it was on account of your gift. You sent me to the stage with my spirits soaring high.”

  And then his hand is upon my thigh again, but there is no squeeze like Papa’s. No, the hand stays put. I remember Josephine’s claims of abonnés dreaming up the unnatural, forcing it upon a girl, of fingers creeping where they do not belong. My back grows rigid, my shoulder blades pushing hard against the back of the bench, and the hand lifts. Perot said the abonnés only helped out so a girl could keep her mind on her work. “Madame Dominique tells me you’re up before the roosters, kneading dough at a bakery.”

  “It’s true,” I say, and then I cannot really remember what made me so skittish about a hand upon my leg. It seems like nothing, now, with even the memory of that hand’s weight gone.

  “It can’t continue,” he says. “You’ll have performances in the evening. You should be sleeping late. How much do they pay you?”

  Is he right now thinking about altering my situation? For a bit of luck, I slip my hand into my pocket and touch the black iron of the key waiting there. “At the bakery? Twelve francs each week and two baguettes a day.”

  He reaches inside his jacket, pulls out a wallet, and hands me a twenty-franc note. “Quit,” he says, and it appears Perot has a truer view of the abonnés than Josephine. I think of the dust-licking curtsey of a coryphée Monsieur Mérante had switched from the lesser role of a maenad to a nymph in Polyeucte and get up from the bench, wanting to copy it, but am only jostled back into my spot. Instead, with Monsieur Lefebvre’s laughter spurring me on, I bring Charlotte’s easy smile to my lips and find the voice she uses with the pork butcher. “Such generosity,” I say. “I am in your debt.”

  “Nothing pleases me more.”

  He tilts the champagne bottle to my empty glass, and I hold it out to him. I lap at the froth filling my glass, laugh when it tickles my nose, which keeps the smile upon his face. It is then, with my glass again drained and filled back up, that he opens the sliding window and says to the driver, “The Bois de Boulogne,” which I have never before seen but know t
o be thickly wooded and far away on the western outskirts of Paris.

  I swallow the bubbles of air at the back of my throat.

  LE FIGARO

  3 AUGUST 1880

  THE MONTREUIL MURDER

  Next month Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille go to the Court of Assizes to answer for the murder of the tavern owner Bazengeaud, that brave woman of Montreuil who was massacred with the knife these young scoundrels were able to locate for the chief inspector. While both have confessed to going to the tavern with the intention of blackmail, Gille claims Abadie slit the woman Bazengeaud’s throat in a moment of panic. Abadie denies anything beyond enjoying a cognac at the tavern after the blackmail attempt failed and leaving in advance of Gille.

  I saw the two of them up close last week when they were taken to the Montreuil tavern by the chief inspector for questioning. One could not help but be immediately struck by Abadie’s bestial look. He is barely nineteen years old and yet is shaped like a herculean man—stocky, wide shouldered, arms of steel. His head is solidly planted on a short, thick neck, and a large and powerful jaw gives it a brutish air. His coloring is yellowish—the skin color of prison. This young thug oozes crime from top to bottom. Meeting him in a dark place would send one’s hand flying to the hilt of one’s sword.

  Gille, on the other hand, is fresh faced, all smiles. He looks like a bright young man, who, on first glance, elicits sympathy. At sixteen years of age, he is tall, slim, narrow waisted. His coloring, despite his long detention at Mazas, is still of an elegant paleness. With his blond, abundant hair over a large, well-proportioned forehead, his look is exceptionally gentle; I will say more—it is distinguished. If he were dressed by a fashionable tailor, all the girls of Paris would yearn for him. On the night of a premiere, with his lovely adolescent head seen in the front rows, he would be taken for the son of an English lord.

  Antoinette

  Today, the final day of the trial, I stand for the first time in the crammed gallery of the Court of Assizes, awaiting the judges, the prisoners. Just yesterday, a day of recess, I sat across the iron grates from Émile, and when I asked a string of questions about the trial, he snapped I should bother showing up if I was so concerned. But once when he was fuming, he called all those court-goers gawkers and degenerates—both the society ladies, who petitioned for a spot on the witness benches up front, and the hordes, who lined up for hours to get a place in the gallery. “I didn’t want to gawk,” I said, which did nothing to alter the hard look on his face, and so I made the promise I keep today: “Tomorrow I will be in the court.”

  For weeks the nose of Marie has been glued to the newspapers, and since the trial got under way, she spends every waking moment worrying and planning and licking her lips, getting herself ready to prove to me the guilt of Émile. Just last week, she tapped the newspaper spread open on our little table where I was digging the last of the marrow from a bone. “They found a pair of trousers and a shirt flecked with blood in the storage shed belonging to Pierre Gille’s father,” she said. “The trousers are the right size for Pierre Gille, not the shirt though. The shirt is more the size of Émile Abadie.”

  Such news was not good. I had intelligence enough to know that. Yet seeing hopefulness on her face that finally my mind was turned against Émile, I pouted my lips and gave a saucy shrug. “Proves Pierre Gille slit the throat, don’t it?”

  “Proves he was close enough to get splattered, which isn’t different from what he’s been saying all along.”

  I stood up from the table.

  She tapped another spot, lower down the column of print. “The missing watch has yet to turn up. Émile ever show you a fancy lady’s watch, Antoinette?”

  A week ago an inspector came waltzing into the washhouse, asking if I was the sweetheart of Émile. He pulled open a portfolio and shoved underneath my nose a drawing of a watch with the face behind a heart-shaped opening. “Missing from the strongbox at the tavern,” he said, poking the drawing. “Your darling make a habit of giving you gifts?” I never laid eyes on such a watch and said, “Don’t know a thing about it,” which turned out to be the exact words Émile used when I next sat across the iron grates from him and asked about the watch.

  I gave my harshest glare to Marie, standing there, chin pushed forward, hands on her hips. “He gave me a dozen watches,” I said, “all of which I pawned.”

  “Yes or no, Antoinette?”

  “What makes you think I’d tell you if he did?” It got my back up, her harping, her going on and on. I felt like she wanted him proved guilty more than she wanted happiness for me, and it made me wonder if at the heart of all her fussing was some dream of not sharing me with Émile.

  The next evening, she was at it again, this time following me about our lodging room with a newspaper like I could not hear her blathering unless she was breathing down my neck. “Émile Abadie’s stepfather—a Monsieur Picard—was in court today,” she said. “He called Abadie …” She finds the spot in the newspaper. “ ‘A no-good boy who always had money for women and drink, even without a day of honest work in his life.’”

  I snapped around to face her. “He hates Émile.”

  “Antoinette, listen. Just listen with your mind open to the possibility that maybe Émile Abadie isn’t what he seems.” She cleared her throat and, reading from the newspaper, said, “‘Under oath Monsieur Picard said, “That boy, he pulled a knife on the missus once, threatened her life, all because she refused to pour him a glass of wine when he was already soused.” Madame Picard corroborated the story.’”

  My face must have blanched because next thing I knew Marie was reaching out, tenderly laying a hand upon my arm. I steadied my voice and said, “She is lying for her husband, just showing a bit of loyalty, which is more than I can say for you.”

  Her hand fell away. She bit her lip. And maybe I felt a tiny bit remorseful for rebuking the girl. But still, it worked to shut her up.

  It is a stinking, sweltering day, and the heat is even worse in the courtroom than it is outside. I feel my skin growing damp, smell the tobacco and garlic and sweat of those crowding close in the gallery. My stomach flip-flops, and I wonder how I will endure the day, even as I shove an elbow into a toothless fellow taking advantage of the tight quarters to press himself against my hip.

  The court is long and narrow, with the seats of the judges at the end farthest from the gallery. Beneath the tall windows running the length of a side wall, the men of the jury wait, stroking mustaches, brushing lint from their jackets, straining to look full of thought. I shift my gaze from one to the next and see, just like Émile said, each is the kind who admires Baron Haussmann for flattening the lodging houses of the poor to open up the boulevards, the kind who believes it is nothing but dance halls and cafés keeping the lowly from eating meat every night. Across from the jury are the defending attorneys, those heroes of the court according to Émile, and behind them, perched high up and awash in the harsh light spilling through the windows, the prisoners’ box where Émile and Pierre Gille will be held.

  The din of the crowd grows, and then the ladies, sitting in their finery on the twelve benches up front, shift to their feet. In the gallery, the gawkers rise up on tiptoe, straining to see. More than one points. Émile and Pierre Gille, blinking into blinding glare, shuffle to the prisoners’ box, a jailer each gripping their arms. A moment later the attention shifts over to the three judges filing into the court. Any other day, I would howl at the ridiculousness of those men, each wearing a little hat, like six inches of stovepipe propped upon his head, and a heavy red robe trimmed at the front opening with a wide band of white fur spotted with black. Even before the presiding judge takes his seat underneath a carving of Jesus suffering upon the cross, sweat is creeping down his face. I glance to the windows, the still curtains hanging there, the laden sky beyond, and wish for a clap of thunder, a breath of cool air upon the neck of that roasting judge.

  After I said I would come, Émile told me what to expect—first, the
final plea of Monsieur Albert Danet, the attorney defending him, and that of the attorney lying through his teeth on behalf of Pierre Gille, and then the summary of the judge and last the verdict of the jury and the sentencing. Émile said more than once about Monsieur Danet slaving like an ant on his behalf, and the scrawny, black-robed gentleman with the bruised-looking eyes has got to be him.

  He approaches the jury, and with his gaze locked upon the face of one or another of those stern men, he says, “The prosecutor asked you to consider why Émile denied being in Montreuil the day of Elisabeth Bazengeaud’s death. The answer he supplied—that Émile knew his guilt—is in fact true. The part, esteemed jurors, where you were misled was the prosecutor’s suggestion that the boy knew himself to be guilty of murder, when in truth, he knew himself to be guilty of nothing more than an attempt at blackmail. To accept any other conclusion is to shirk your responsibilities to this court.”

  He goes on about the blood-speckled trousers, saying they were no doubt worn by the scoundrel who held the knife to the throat of the good woman Elisabeth Bazengeaud. “Much ink has been spilled describing Émile’s herculean physique,” he says, “and I can assure you of this: Even with the pulling and yanking of the inspector, the blood-speckled trousers—the very pair that fit Pierre Gille like a glove—never made it more than halfway up the thighs of Émile Abadie.” Then Monsieur Danet slips off his robe and holds it by the collar, out from his side, and turns in a slow circle. Back to facing the jury, he explains about being more or less of the same build as Pierre Gille and how he himself is wearing a shirt that is a replica of the blood-speckled one that turned up in the storage shed. “Not the best fit, to be sure,” he says, “but good enough, particularly for a youth—estranged from his family, without employment—such as Pierre Gille.”