The Painted Girls Read online

  He moves on to recounting the stories of three witnesses, each showing the stepfather of Émile to be a known liar, a brute to his wife, her son. I lean in and lean in farther, and Monsieur Danet, he goes on for two hours, showing the worthlessness of every scrap of evidence against Émile.

  To finish Monsieur Danet pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, takes his time wiping his brow, then says, “Is Émile Abadie one of the murderers of the good woman Bazengeaud? The prosecutor instructs you not to hesitate even one minute before declaring him thus. I can still hear his words asking you to hand down a verdict without pity. But is it right to pretend the details of this case are as clear as day? Wouldn’t it be truer to say that never before has a case left spirits more uneasy and consciences less reassured? Émile Abadie, at nineteen years of age, with his life before him, has not been proven guilty, and I remind you, esteemed jurors, of the vow you have taken, the duty you have to fulfill.”

  I search the face of Émile, looking for some sign he is just as hopeful as I am after the brilliance of Monsieur Danet, but he is looking to his feet, his lips pressed to a line. Did he not hear? Has fear made him deaf as mud? No. He is only taking the broken posture of a boy deserving of the mercy of the court.

  The attorney of Pierre Gille walks to the same spot where Monsieur Danet stood and opens his hands to the jury. “Why,” he says, “would young Pierre Gille divulge the location of a knife that could prove the guilt of a murderer? There is only one answer. The murderer is other than Pierre Gille.” Three times more he asks the same question and answers using different words, but always the meaning is the same. The chins of four men of the jury bob down, then up, and the attorney replies to those timid nods with a forceful one of his own. “Elisabeth Bazengeaud was not a small woman,” he says, “nor was she meek, not with the long hours she kept, laboring in a tavern. My colleague Monsieur Danet asserts that she was murdered single-handedly.” He points behind him to the prisoners’ box. “It is impossible that such a scrawny boy as Pierre possesses the strength required.”

  In the prisoners’ box Pierre Gille sits with his head bowed, his shoulders falling forward, his hands in his lap. He has grown skinnier at Mazas, and slouching like he is, he looks to have no more power than a newborn bird. Across the room, the men of the jury shift their attention back and forth between the waifish frame of Pierre Gille and the hulking one of Émile. Pierre Gille looks up, giving those jurors full view of his face. He wipes at the corner of his eye with the back of his hand before going back to bowing his head, and I hate that boy a thousand times more than in that moment when he slapped my face.

  I lace my fingers together, knock my knuckles against my chin. Those men, what they need to be told is Pierre Gille is no weakling. They need to hear about the shove throwing Colette onto her rump, the slap sending my head jerking to the side, the kick snapping the neck of a dog. I want to scream it out. Never mind about the rules of the court, and the presiding judge in the robe of an emperor and the attorney with his gazing and pausing and velvet, practiced tongue. But with those final words between me and Émile yesterday, I know better than to open up my trap.

  Both his hands were clutching the iron bars of the grate. His face was hanging low and his voice no louder than a whisper, when he said, “Monsieur Danet told me to prepare for a verdict of guilty, for a sentence of death by guillotine.”

  I felt a creeping coldness, like Death breathing alongside me in the cell. My limbs lost their vigor, my heart ceased thudding in my chest. Those words, they hung between us, beyond my strength to grasp.

  Then Émile was speaking again, his lips moving, but I could not hear. I mustered the strength to wag my head the smallest amount, and he repeated himself. “Wait,” he was saying. “All is not lost.”

  I bent forward from the waist until my forehead was resting against the iron bars of the grate.

  “Monsieur Danet, he told me to prepare because, in the court, I need to show only remorse. He said the president of the Republic has got the power to lighten a sentence. No hoisting fists, he said. No hurling threats. Not unless I want to spoil any chance of clemency.”

  After the jury comes back into the courtroom from the deliberating, each of the men stares at his shoes instead of straight ahead into the faces of Émile and Pierre Gille. Sweat trickles down my back, even with the bit of breathing room I been granted by the others in the gallery grown nervous of me. Already, during those thirty minutes the jury was away, I glared at an old nanny goat, swearing she could see the mark of the devil upon Émile, and batted the coins from the hand of a man collecting wagers on the outcome of the trial, and spat, “Stupid enough to eat hay, the both of you,” into the faces of a pair of girls giggling about the prettiness of Pierre Gille.

  I wait alone in the courtroom for the only judgment I ever cared about in my life. Alone and afraid. There is a part of me wishes Marie was here. To have her fingers laced with my own would be a comfort. To have her wanting what I want would be enough to make me a little brave. But she would not be waiting beside me, wishing with all her might for the court to declare the innocence of Émile, and I could not bear it any other way. And so I wait, trembling in the courtroom. Alone.

  The head juror gets to his feet, and with the court-goers holding their breaths, he says, in a low voice, “We, the jury, find defendants Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille guilty as charged in Elisabeth Bazengeaud’s murder.”

  Émile closes his eyes, puts a hand upon his heart, and the presiding judge says, “First I ask Émile Abadie, have you anything to say?”

  Émile lifts his eyes, higher than the bench where the judges sit, to that carving of Jesus upon the cross. “I only ask for my good mother to find it in her heart to forgive me.” He sits, still as a stone, through the judge asking the same of Pierre Gille and Pierre Gille making a little speech about the dishonor he has brought his family, about how his father and brother are upright and hardworking and should not be persecuted because of their association with him.

  Émile don’t scratch or shift in his seat or move his eyes from the carving as the judges leave the courtroom to decide the sentencing, as the noise of the gallery rises up, as it quiets with those sweating, red-faced judges filing back into the court. The only sign of life is the ripple of a swallow in his throat when the presiding judge says, “The court condemns Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille to death by guillotine.”

  Yesterday, with Émile saying, “All is not lost,” I waited for a bit of brightness, and when it did not come, I said, “What is it I should be hoping for, Émile?”

  “Forced labor,” he said. “Forced labor in New Caledonia.”

  The first thought leapt into my mind was that knowing him to be alive and well in a place called New Caledonia would be worse to bear than a separation enforced by the guillotine, and it made me ashamed. I only wanted him here, with me, those moments of happiness—his smile coming when I appeared; his hands so gentle upon my cheeks; his body wrapping my own, hanging on with a fierceness that said he was never letting go. Those other moments, too, when, hands buried in suds, my mind drifted to the evening, to him, the possibilities. “New Caledonia?”

  He tilted his chair back onto its hind legs, making wider the gap between me and him. “Monsieur Danet is writing something to stir up public sympathy. I don’t know what, but he wanted every detail of my sorry life.”

  I looked up from my hands. The idea of President Grévy showing clemency did nothing to lighten the air, nothing to bestow the ease that was upon the face of Émile.

  LE FIGARO

  29 SEPTEMBER 1880

  ABADIE’S MEMOIRS

  Émile Abadie, condemned to death for murdering the Montreuil tavern owner, has written his memoirs while awaiting the guillotine. Here, without further delay, is the moving preface of his “The Story of a Man Condemned to Death”:

  This story was written by a poor prisoner, who begs the reader not to judge his style too harshly. It was written as well as I could manage with
my meager skills and in the hope that it would serve to prevent others from taking the wrong path.

  He continues, telling us that at the age of twelve, shortly after his first Communion, he left the hearth of his mother’s home with the shadow of his stepfather’s boot imprinted upon his skin. He found work as an apprentice engraver but never stayed more than a few months with any one employer. An urchin kicked about the streets of Paris, he found shelter wherever he could.

  From age sixteen, girls took over his life and became his undoing:

  Girls, love, nights of decadence made me forget the healthier parts of life. I needed money to enjoy myself, to live the high life. If, all of a sudden, work dried up for one reason or another, I didn’t want to abandon pleasure. I feared losing the sweetheart who counted on gifts of barley sugar and meals of mussels in parsley sauce.

  He had relations with many women and names a half dozen. One of the sweethearts was the woman Bazengeaud.

  He met Pierre Gille at the Ambigu Theater, where each was an extra in Zola’s naturalist play L’Assommoir. Gille invited Abadie to share his clandestine living quarters in his father’s storage shed. Fed and lodged, Abadie was, in his own words, the happiest of men. But then, after a run of more than a year, L’Assommoir closed, and the pair found themselves out of work.

  They committed petty thefts to survive and plotted out the crimes that would keep them in clover. One of these was blackmailing the woman Bazengeaud. The memoir continues, with Abadie laying out the details of the blackmailing going awry, but the story he tells ends differently from the one he told in the Court of Assizes. Here, he does not leave the Montreuil tavern after enjoying a cognac, but rather he and Pierre Gille rob the tavern and in a moment of panic, slit the throat of the woman.

  The poor woman was in my arms and I had my hand over her mouth. Gille stabbed her in the stomach and again in the chest. I let her go, grabbed the knife and went after her, cutting her throat. In the end she lay on the ground, looking up, in a pool of her own blood, and I was overcome by the horror of what we had done.

  After the recounting, Abadie pays tribute to his mother, waxing eloquent in his regret of his savagery toward her.

  One day, hungover and drunk on absinthe, I wielded a knife on my poor and good mother. I didn’t strike, it is true, but I raised my hand against what is most sacred to me in the world. Poor mother, who so loved me, who did everything for me, who denied herself to feed me. Believe it, I repent and ask that she forgive me.

  In the bitter setting of a prison, Abadie concludes his memoir, soothing himself, daring to hope.

  I await the day I am awoken to be walked to the guillotine or to be told that my stay of execution has been granted. All I hope for is life, a chance to show my jury that it is more important to judge the heart of a man than a moment of panic. It has reformed me, as hard as I may have been, when at night in my prison cell, I see the good woman Bazengeaud rise before me.

  The guillotine. Is that where this story will close? Will it be the end of me, one who so deeply regrets having led a criminal life, a horrible life?

  I have quoted Abadie as much as I can and, in the analysis, used his own words and expressions. In cases like these, no rhetoric from a journalist can replace a cry from the heart.

  Marie

  Monsieur Lefebvre is very rich and sometimes he is mean but usually he is kind. Always, he is generous. And every now and then, he is a man I do not know.

  “You’ll undress,” he says.

  And I say “All right,” because it is what I have said twenty times in the past months.

  I put down my satchel and step toward the screen in the corner of the apartment that he calls his artist’s workshop, even if draperies with tassels block the light and three sofas and nine chairs, all tufted and ornate, one with gilded arms shaped like swans, take up the space where Monsieur Degas would have placed a sturdy table holding a jumble of brushes and palette knives.

  I stand naked and waiting while he pours water from a kettle into a zinc tub, like an oversize pie plate. “You’ll bathe today,” he says.

  I place one arm across my breast and the other around my waist.

  “Come now, Marie. Surely you’ve seen Monsieur Degas’s bathers?”

  Last week, as I turned toward the screen, he said, “I’ll watch you undress,” and when I paused he said, “You attended the exposition of the independent artists? You told me you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw it, then, Monsieur Degas’s monotype, a woman slipping a dress over her head? Toilette he calls it.”

  I nodded, and he waited, and then I began loosening the drawstring of my blouse. He smiled and took up the spot behind the single easel in the apartment. In less than an hour I was leaving, and same as each Tuesday, he put a twenty-franc note upon my palm, almost twice the amount I was once paid for a week’s labor at the bakery, more than three times what Monsieur Degas counted out for four hours of modeling.

  It was my fault, more or less, what happened that day back in June when I passed the examination elevating me to the quadrille, vomiting as I had onto the floor of Monsieur Lefebvre’s carriage, the cuff of his pressed pants, his polished shoes. It is what I remember but only in scraps—flashes of spattered black leather, spattered black wool, foul black floor. I vomited, and Monsieur Lefebvre hollered to the driver, snatched away my pretty glass with its pattern of garland and wreaths and hollered again. The carriage stopped, the door opened, and I was sent flying, Monsieur Lefebvre’s foot on my backside—I am pretty sure—into the brightness of the day outside. Then I was on my hands and knees, spewing onto packed dirt. He called me a wretch—I know that—and told the driver, Louis, to leave me there, at the side of the road. “But, Monsieur Lefebvre, we are just arrived at the Bois de Boulogne,” said Louis, “and she is in no state to find her way home?”

  “Now.”

  After Monsieur Lefebvre was settled on the groom’s seat at the back of the carriage—he would not suffer the stink of traveling inside—Louis, on the way to his bench up front, said in a low voice, “Now, you stay put. I’m coming back.”

  Once they were off, I crawled from packed dirt to struggling grass to the shadow of the woods bordering the road. Would Monsieur Lefebvre tell Monsieur Vaucorbeil? Monsieur Mérante? Monsieur Pluque? Would my name be posted with the others joining the quadrille in the morning? Gut heaving, I hardly cared.

  I rolled onto my back and looked up into the heaving, spinning, cloudless sky; the heaving, spinning canopy of green. I remember being struck by the beauty of the leaves, the sun shining through, turning them to a pale yellow green. Stretching my neck, I looked deep into the woods, to the black places where there were—I was sure—wild boars snorting and pawing the dirt. The newspapers made a habit of saying how dangers lurked in every corner of a Paris gone to pot in the ten years since the Emperor Napoleon III got our country beat. The rot was spreading, they said, turning the youth of Paris into thieves and murderers. They pointed to Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille as proof. I did walk quickly on the pavements, particularly in the evening, glancing over my shoulder from time to time. But the fear was nothing compared to the terror that put my eyes skittering about the woods with each rustle, each snap. My heart stopped at the noise of a leaping red squirrel kicking up leaves. Never before had I seen a woods, a place so full of shadows and shifting darkness, blackness in the broad light of day.

  My head ached. My tongue was thick. I would have licked a dewy leaf, lapped up a puddle, but there were none. At one point, I started wondering whether the memory of Louis saying he would come back was even real. With evening coming on, it would be easy to change his mind. I got up and walked a hundred feet down the road, following the direction of the retreating carriage. But a way off, the road forked and so I sat down, thinking of nightfall and crying into my skirt.

  Then Monsieur Lefebvre’s carriage was back, and Louis said for me to climb up front. Once my backside was upon the bench beside him, he swat
ted the rumps of the horses, and we set off but heading away from Paris. “There is a fountain up ahead,” he said, and then after a pause, “I’ve got two daughters of my own, and you needn’t be afraid.”

  At the fountain, instead of collecting water in my hands, I pressed my cheek flat against the stone, allowing the water from the spigot to wash over my face and into my mouth. I stayed like that a long time, getting cleansed, even when my thirst and the dried-up vomit on my chin were gone.

  Then Louis said we were heading to the lake so the horses could have a drink. “This heat,” he said, wiping a handkerchief across the back of his neck. Many times I looked out over the Seine and saw the silver moon twinkling on the lapping river, but I never before saw a lake. Still, I only wanted to go home, to put my cheek upon my mattress, to gather the wrinkled linens and bury my head underneath. It is something I regret, now, the way I hardly looked—the tiny islands, the rowboats, the mossy rocks with greenery clinging to the crevices in between. There was a waterfall connecting the upper and lower parts of the lake, falling like a veil, the prettiest sight in all my life, and yet I shut my eyes and held my throbbing head in my hands.

  On the way home he asked about the Opéra, and I told him about the examination, about sixteen fouettés en tournant at the end. “Monsieur Lefebvre told me I was moving up to the quadrille,” I said. “Don’t know about that anymore.”

  “He isn’t one for holding grudges.” He gave a crooked smile. “He has me driving like the dickens to get to the Opéra gate in time.”

  I saw a scene, then, with Monsieur Lefebvre leaning forward, sliding open the little window in the carriage wall, and calling out, “Faster! Onward! We’ll miss her!” and Louis rolling his eyes that once again Monsieur Lefebvre told himself he was not going to the Opéra gate, not today, not at all, and put off leaving until it was close to too late.