The Painted Girls Read online

  Never have I begged, except that one time with Marie, a black moment. Still I drop onto the floor, bow my head. “Mother, I beg you.”

  “Antoinette,” she says, flicking her wrist in a way that commands me up off the floor and back onto the bench. “This Émile Abadie, it is true what the girls say—he was your lover?”

  I nod, a tiny, sheepish nod.

  Voice like a tack, she says, “The devil lives inside that boy,” and then she is back to fingering her crucifix, head rocking side to side. Eventually she clears her throat, making way for a flood. “I’ve seen you staring down the brutish girls in defense of those too timid to do it for themselves. I was told about you sharing your evening meal with Estelle when she missed lining up. And Sister Amélie says you are diligent and quick in the sewing workshop, always assisting the others not so adept with needle and thread.” She holds her palms out like an opened book. “You’re a good girl, Antoinette.”

  I lick dry lips. “I need the outcome of that trial.”

  “You’ve seen the painting of Prud’hon, hanging in the chapel here, no?”

  The picture is dark, black except for the light on the stretched-wide ribs of Jesus, the nails in his feet, the shoulder of the lone girl huddling beneath.

  “The mourner is Mary Magdalene,” she says, “a prostitute cleansed by our Savior, the first He showed Himself to once He was risen from the dead.”

  The fallen girls sit shoulder to shoulder in the chapel Sunday mornings with Father Renault filling up our ears, the message always the same—a promise of a great reward awaiting beyond a pearly gate. Eyes lingering on that picture strung high above our heads, our minds are meant to dwell on following in the footsteps of that girl with her shoulder all aglow and purging ourselves of the boys with the devil lurking inside. I know what the Superioress is thinking: She will not hand over the bit of news I seek. She will not add to the rot keeping that pearly gate from opening up for me. But what she don’t have figured out is already I scrubbed myself clean of Émile Abadie, washed away the filth of him in a river of tears.

  “Antoinette,” she says, her face soft. “He murdered two women, one a paramour.”

  Two. Two women is what she said. I breathe in her blundered words, the verdict of guilty for Émile Abadie. For him it don’t change a single thing, but sure as sure, Michel Knobloch got the same verdict and for that lying, brainless boy, it means a sentence of either New Caledonia or the guillotine. But which? It is what I need to know in order to answer the question of whether Marie put her own foot across a threshold, stepping over to the blackness awaiting on the other side. It is why I sit before the Superioress, breathing in her blunder, forgetting to let the air back out. Marie is grave and solemn, and her mind gets stuck on nonsense about an apish face, the truthfulness of L’Assommoir. I fear it is stuck again, on the tiny x she did not show Monsieur Danet, the way the x showed Michel Knobloch was lying, guilty of nothing more than bluster and a dream of New Caledonia. What I know to be true is only one of those two sentences—New Caledonia or the guillotine—is an ending Marie can bear. My heart flutters, and I see the Superioress see it, that tiny movement no greater than the flicked wings of a butterfly. “And Michel Knobloch?” I say. “Is it New Caledonia or the guillotine for him?”

  Her lips shrink to a thin line, and her fingers leave her crucifix, fall to her desk. Twice she strums the oak, the sound of patience stretched thin.

  “My worry isn’t for Émile Abadie,” I say. “Michel Knobloch, neither.” I rattle my head. “It’s for my sister Marie. You got to understand.”

  The band of her wimple creeps lower on her wrinkled brow. “You had better start at the beginning then, Antoinette, because I don’t understand.”

  I take in a deep breath, and the Superioress, she strokes open my gripped-together hands. She holds one in both of hers, a little cocoon of warmth. I say first about Marie, the way she was awaiting the moment she showed herself to be a beast. I tell about L’Assommoir and the sorry life of Gervaise and how Marie’s got herself believing it meant a miserable end for her own self. “She is smart,” I say, “smart as a whip, always reading Le Figaro, knowing the meaning of every word, tallying faster than even the fruiterer in the rue de Douai. But none of that intelligence ever done her a speck of good. The mind of that girl is a churning, brewing storm.”

  After that I halt, and the Superioress makes a little, coaxing nod. I scratch my ear, a spot where it don’t itch. I don’t want to say no more. In the rest of the story I slip up. Blunder. Fail.

  “You have more to tell,” she says.

  I keep up the scratching.

  “I wasn’t always a sister,” she says.

  I shrug.

  “I was born in the place Bréda, raised in the rue Pigalle and then the boulevard de Clichy and after that the rue Lamartine.” I know the streets, none far-off from the rue de Douai, and with so much hopping around, I know her father—if there was a father—was not always paying the rent owed.

  I start up again, spill my guts about the old chaise, about getting adored in between tableaux, except I call it suffering the needs of a boy. I tell about the calendar, about the tiny x, about Marie seeing that x and refusing to show Monsieur Danet, all because I stuffed my ears with woolen batting the hundred times she tried to tell me Émile Abadie was as rotten as a long-dead rat. “Marie knows going to Monsieur Danet was something she could’ve done,” I say. “She knows it was a choice. What’s got me filled up with dread is Michel Knobloch getting the guillotine and Marie figuring it was her cost him his head.”

  The Superioress sighs, shoulders lifting, slipping down. She shakes her head. “The verdict of the court was guilty and the sentence, death by guillotine.”

  The blood of Michel Knobloch is set to spill; the spirit of Marie is broke. Even here at Saint-Lazare, I know it to be true. Sleepless. Not going to class. Not caring about Le Tribut de Zamora, like Charlotte said. She is wretched, staggering, wracked with guilt. Her thumb picked to a bloody pulp, she sucks her lip raw. And for comfort only Maman, who takes her own from a bottle of absinthe, and Charlotte, who is only just starting to bother about anyone other than herself. I remember the dress Marie was wearing at Saint-Lazare, a fine grey silk she said was a gift. Tears run down my cheeks, even if there is not supposed to be a single drop left. Snot, thin as water, seeps from my nose. My face drops, and the Superioress clutches my hand more tightly, and I confess to spitting, hateful words: “On your hands, the blood of an innocent.”

  “Antoinette, sweet child.” Her grip is like a vise. “You’ve got a heart big enough to cure what ails Marie.”

  The lines of her brow are erased, her cheeks lifted up the tiniest little bit, her lips pulled into the most tender of smiles.

  LE FIGARO

  12 APRIL 1881

  DEGAS AND THE SIXTH EXPOSITION OF THE INDEPENDENT ARTISTS

  Although the catalogue lists only eight entries for Degas, the artist shows additional works, brought in yet again at the last minute. The statuette he first promised last year is again listed in this year’s catalogue but has not arrived. The glass case meant to shelter the statuette stands empty, waiting. This vitrine, Monsieur Degas, is not enough for me!

  He offers exposition-goers portraits, scenes of the stage, laundresses, nudes, and a study of criminal man. In this remarkable study, employing only the meager tool of pastel, Degas captures Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch—their wan and troubling faces, taken in the dull light of the criminal court. Only a keen observer could portray with such singular physiological sureness the animal foreheads and jaws, kindle the flickering glimmers in the dead eyes, render the yellow-green flesh on which is imprinted all the bruises, all the stains of vice. In titling the piece Criminal Physiognomies, Monsieur Degas makes clear his intent. A masterwork of observation, the study is informed by the findings of science in regard to innate criminality. Émile Zola, with his argument for a scientific literature, one where the inescapable forces of heredity and envi
ronment determine human character, has met his match among the painters.

  Marie

  I walk the pavements I have walked a hundred times before: the rue Blanche to the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where I make a habit of turning to see the église de la Sainte-Trinité. Sometimes I bother walking to the far side of the church and looking up at the statue called Temperance. Everyone says the main figure, who is lifting a fruit out of the reach of the babies at her feet, was chiseled to appear just like the Empress Eugénie. And those times when I have looked at the fat thighs of the babies, their rounded bellies, their grabbing hands, I have seen the empress as a mother, teaching her little ones about gluttony. But today, rather than seeking that lesson being taught, I turn away. Today I would find only a stingy mother protecting the bit of fruit she wants for herself.

  Usually I pass through the Opéra’s back gate, but today I continue past. Out front I look up at the writhing, naked flesh of the stone dancers on the eastern side. Antoinette saw pleasure, bliss. Not me, though, not now. The dancers’ faces radiate wickedness, call out to passersby in the street, “Look, here. Glimpse what is to be found inside.”

  From the boulevard des Capucines, I will turn into the rue Cambon, a quiet street linking the grand boulevards to the Jardin des Tuileries, a street with little balconies held up by the fanciest of stone scrolls and not a single shutter with peeling paint or hanging lopsided from a hinge. In the rue Cambon, outside the grand door of Monsieur Lefebvre’s apartment house, I will suck in my lip and ring the bell, calling the concierge, like I have so many Tuesdays before heading to Madame Dominique’s class. Just thinking about it, I feel a flutter in my belly, bats opening up wings. I was told to stay away. But this morning I opened up our lodging room door to Monsieur LeBlanc’s great belly. I thought about the small bottle of absinthe, bought with my earnings, how already it was gone, but there was no remorse about eight sous spent, not when Monsieur LeBlanc is owed for a full month.

  Maman was already off to the washhouse and so it was just me and Charlotte, left there trembling when he was gone. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “Tomorrow Antoinette gets home.”

  “Like I said, she isn’t coming back.”

  “Well, she is.”

  On such a morning I did not have the strength to explain. Instead I thought about lying down, the emptiness of sleep, but already I spread my fingers wide under Maman’s mattress and her bottle was not there. Charlotte slipped her hand into my own, and when I looked, she smiled up at me, the put-on smile of a ballet girl patting another’s back in a wing. It does not help, this small girl’s efforts to keep me from wallowing upon our mattress. Yesterday she left the small stub of a candle on my satchel as a gift. And last week when she came home from her morning class at the Opéra to find me still lying there, staring at the ceiling—the water stains, the lath where the plaster had fallen away—she crawled under the linens. My head was aching and cobwebby, and she put her fingers in my hair, like Antoinette used to do. “Don’t,” I said, and she took her hand away.

  “Do you want to hear how Madame Théodore’s petticoat fell onto the floor?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sick, Marie?”

  I felt I could heave into a bucket, like my tongue was made of paste. “No.”

  “Maman feels better after taking a bit of water.” She got up, dipped a cup into the zinc bucket and held the water out to me.

  I took the water because there was pleading in her eyes and wondered when it was Charlotte turned kind. I put the cup to my lips, but for me there was no comfort in water slipping down into my throat. Still it was clear as glass, even in my cobwebby head, about allowing a boy to go to the guillotine for nothing more than telling a lie. I was the one who set loose the blade, and only absinthe took the clearness away. Only absinthe let me forget.

  Standing there in the doorway, listening to Monsieur LeBlanc huffing and puffing his way down the narrow stairs, Charlotte gave my hand a little squeeze. “I was saving it for a surprise,” she said, “with Antoinette coming home tomorrow and everything.” Her face grew hopeful. “Saving what?”

  “Yesterday Monsieur Mérante came into the practice room in the middle of the barre and called out a chain of leaps and pirouettes. He made us line up, and I waited like everyone else.” She gave a smile like an imp’s. “We showed him one at a time. Then he said, ‘A cartwheel’ and pointed to me, and I made one, and he pointed again. ‘Our new acrobat,’ is what he said.”

  She bounced on her toes, and her hands were knotted tight together in front of her chest. I knew what was coming, that she got a part in Le Tribut de Zamora. But I did not muster the will to put my arms around her shoulders and pull her in tight.

  She made a little jig. “Jocelyn, another petit rat, she was the acrobat, but she got the white pox. Her fever broke, but she’s spotted worse than a Dalmatian dog.”

  I took her face in my hands and in a hard voice said, “Stroke of luck,” which was not nice or even true, not when she was always pushing our little dining table to the corner of the room to clear a path for a string of piqué pirouettes.

  “Tomorrow I debut.” She made a little curtsey. “Antoinette can come, and I get three francs for leaping across the stage.” She left her arms opened up wide, embracing all the goodness she found in the world. I would go to Monsieur Lefebvre, collect my thirty francs. A chain of steps repeated a hundred times grows to be as easy as breathing air.

  My last time calling at his apartment, even in the doorway I knew the visit would be different from the rest. He stood there, crossing and uncrossing his arms, looking me up and down, instead of moving aside to let me in. “A glass of wine?” he said after a while and stepped out of the way. “Or have you already had enough?” He did not say it nicely, like there was a chance of him pouring me a drop, but I was not fearful, no. Absinthe made me a little brave.

  I walked toward the screen, careful to keep down whatever drunkenness he had seen, but before I was even halfway there, he grabbed my arm and pulled me the couple of steps to the sofa. He shoved me onto it, and then he was on top of me, grinding his hardness into my thigh and digging his chin into my shoulder and kneading whatever flesh he could clutch through my blouse. The whole time he was saying “whore” and “drunken whore” and “Jezebel” through clamped-shut teeth.

  I did not open up my mouth to say, “Stop, Monsieur Lefebvre. Stop,” or knot my legs together or wedge my hands over my breast. I swallowed the promise of everlasting damnation of the soul and thought about the day Marie the First made me flinch from his finger on my naked spine in Monsieur Degas’s workshop. Was it the trick of a wicked angel lying in wait, working to gain my trust? I had not said the Act of Contrition in a hundred years, but still a line about the perfection we were to seek swam up into my head: “This day I shall try to imitate Thee; to be mild, chaste, devoted, patient, and charitable.” But I was none of those things. I knew it in my heart, and Marie the First knew it, too. By his moaning I could tell that with a slow count to twenty he would be done, and it came into my mind that this was easier than posing and waiting and wondering how it was that time was so slow to pass. When I got to eight, his head lifted away from my shoulder, and his face twisted into ugliness, and then he went limp, his whole body. I pushed him to the side and wriggled out from underneath.

  Right away he stood up and turned his back, shoving into his trousers the shirttails that had come loose. Then he took my allowance from the drawer. “Enough of you, your scheming,” he said, pitching three ten-franc notes to my feet. “Just stay away.” His voice broke, and it was at that moment the harsh tang of fear, like the skin of a walnut, came into my mouth.

  Close to the corner where I will turn onto Monsieur Lefebvre’s fancy street, my feet grow sluggish. So what if I collect enough to pay the rent owed? I put off by a week or a month or a year the misery steamrolling my way. Cesare Lombroso and the rest measuring the heads of the criminals in the jails and the skulls of t
he ones that already visited the guillotine, they would say, “Go ahead. Get your thirty francs. Keep yourself warm another few nights. But it won’t change a single thing. Still you have the face of an ape.” Of course I struck the match. Of course I have blood on my hands, absinthe on my tongue, Monsieur Lefebvre’s pawing hands on my skin. But is it the same for Charlotte? Was wretchedness coming to her, same as it came to Gervaise, no matter that she scrubbed linens like a slave, no matter that she saved close to every sou, tried to become what she was not. Charlotte was born of the same stock as me, as Antoinette, with her own apish looks, her fate of becoming a thieving coquette already jailed for stealing seven hundred francs. Charlotte knows the same reeking courtyard, the same foul gutters, the same slummy corner of Montmartre where we put down our heads at night. The same selfish mother, who does not bother with me, does not bother with her. Monsieur Zola would say Charlotte does not have a lick of a chance. But he would not have taken into account her face like a cherub’s, her rosebud lips, her dainty chin. There is no mark of a beast, and Cesare Lombroso would agree. He would say there was no feature hinting at a criminal life for Charlotte. I push a leaden foot out in front.

  Ahead of me a gentleman, escorting a lady with a lavish bustle of indigo silk, drops her arm. He opens the door of a plain building with windows running across the front. She dips her tiny, perfect chin as she passes inside. The door falls closed, and the six posters covering it up, all exactly the same, catch my eye. The gentleman, his lady in her indigo silk, are visiting the sixth exposition of the independent artists, the show where Monsieur Degas said he would put on display his statuette of me.

  It was Monsieur Lefebvre I was thinking of this morning when I put on my grey silk and only the smallest smear of tinted pomade. But now a tiny sliver of me latches on to the idea that, dressed up like a lady, I was meant to come upon the exposition in the boulevard des Capucines. I follow the pair down a corridor leading to a series of small rooms with low ceilings and walls crammed with pictures, some hung so low even a child would have to stoop to get a look. In the corner, a gentleman with hair bristling from his ears looks up from a small notepad, letting me know I am interrupting his peace. The light is poor and with my eyes still adjusting from the day outside, it takes a minute to figure out the exposition is no different from the one I already saw. Absinthe drinkers in a café—tattered clothes, unkempt beards, sunken eyes. A naked woman sewing on a bed—rumpled linens, sagging breasts, hands red with work. One signed by Raffaëlli, the other by Gauguin.