“Yes, let’s see what we have,” he said as he grabbed another rag and began helping dust off the murals.
Under the layers of grime brilliant colors appeared, fresh and vibrant as if the fresco had been painted just weeks ago. The painting was High Renaissance, lush, evocative, colorful, and extremely eroticized, even more so than the Ingres, and I was embarrassed to be looking at it with a man I didn’t know.
“It’s the story of a woman . . . and a man with wings . . . ,” I said.
“It appears to be an illustration of the myth of Psyche and Cupid,” Monsieur Duplessi said in a faraway voice, as if transfixed by the beautiful and strange allegory we were uncovering.
“I think you’re right.”
Cupid had strong limbs, penetrating eyes, and was well endowed. Psyche was voluptuous and sensual. I could almost feel how soft her skin was, how seductive the perfume was that she was wearing.
We made our way around the room, revealing more of the story, until we eventually found the spot where, in a darkened bedroom, the artist had painted the doomed lovers in a deep embrace, coupling.
I was riveted to the lovers’ scene. I’d never known any desire that strong in my life.
“I wonder why the style changes here . . . and here,” Monsieur Duplessi said, in what I was sure was an effort to distract us, practically strangers, from the intimate nature of the paintings themselves.
We had reached the corner of the room where two tall objects loomed. Covered, it was impossible to guess what they might be. Pulling the sheet off the first, I exposed an easel holding a painting, its back to me. There was a brush on the shelf with dried ruby-red paint on its bristles. I picked it up. Holding it, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. I had no doubt. Here, right here, was the heart of the house.
I pulled off the other covering, revealing a second identical easel. Also with a painting on it, also with its back to the room.
Something occurred to me. I looked down at the tarp that had been protecting the first easel and then the second. There should have been more dust on them. There was dust everywhere else. How could these items have been spared the detritus of the years when everything else in the studio had not?
With trembling hands, I turned the canvas on the second easel around. I was staring at a portrait of a nude woman seated in front of an easel just like this one, in this room. She held a paintbrush. On its tip was ruby paint. Behind her was an untouched, clean canvas. This woman resembled Psyche in the mural, but here she wasn’t playing a part.
This was her, who she was, her very self naked for the viewer to examine.
There was a mixture of expressions on the woman’s face. Pleasure and pain at the same time. I’d certainly read enough about romantic entanglements to understand I was looking at a portrait of -passionate longing.
When I’d been fifteen and thought I’d been falling in love with Leon, I had felt a child’s version of this, hadn’t I?
I remembered that last night again . . . my grandmother finding us, calling me ungrateful and willful as she dragged us apart and pulled Leon out of the servant’s room. I remembered how I had followed, running behind them, crying. And then that one terrible blow that had set off an asthma attack that sent Leon to his knees and finally to his death.
I’d gotten so sick afterward that my parents had been summoned from Morocco. And I remembered, too, listening to my grandmother talking in hushed tones to my father outside my bedroom.
“You have to protect her from love,” my grandmother warned.
I lay in bed, weeping, hiding under the covers, cowering and confused, delirious with fever, hearing the phrase like some verse repeated in a song.
Protect her from love. Protect her from love.
As if love were a disease that would destroy me.
My parents and I left for London once I recovered and spent several weeks seeing the sights and taking tea and visiting museums. Sometimes at night, when I was supposed to be asleep in the adjoining room of the suite, I overheard hushed and worried conversations between my parents.
What were the secrets they talked of?
It was all very vague until a letter arrived from my grandmother that I wasn’t supposed to read, but did.
Love is dangerous for Verlaine women. It leads to heartbreak. It leads to tragedy. We are too passionate, and it is like a poison for us. Don’t let it rule Sandrine’s life or it will ruin her. Teach her to rise above her instincts; marry her off to a man who will not incite or excite her but make her feel safe and calm. She can have a grand life, but it needs be a certain kind of life.
“There are initials here,” Monsieur Duplessi called out.
He had made his way around the room and finished wiping off the mural. It was still fairly dirty, but the whole myth was clear and beautifully rendered.
“ ‘CCLI,’ ” he called out.
I repeated them. Shook my head. “I don’t recognize them, do you? But that could be the date: CCLI is two hundred and fifty one in Roman numerals.”
“I might do some research at the library at the école des Beaux-Arts.”
“Look at what I found.” I pointed to the second easel, then walked around to the first and turned its painting around.
“It’s the same man who’s Cupid in the mural,” I said.
“But he’s a cartoon in the mural scenes compared to this.”
It is one thing to be with a man when you view a painting of a nude woman. We are inured to the female nude, even if she is flirtatious or lascivious as painted by Rubens. Or voluptuous as painted by Renoir. She is still within the norm of what polite society sees as art. But it is quite another to be alone in a medieval tower with a stranger whose eyes seem to see through you while you’re looking at an erotic painting of a nude male.
I couldn’t stop gazing at the canvas. Who was the sitter? Who had captured him so feverishly?
The man was painted with passion that informed every stroke. He was not handsome—his nose appeared broken; a scar ran through his right eyebrow; his lips were too full and almost mean; his eyes were dark and hooded. Mysterious and driven, he was all energy, all excitement: a hungry satyr.
He was not only naked but also slightly erect. He appeared so real that I wouldn’t have been surprised had he stepped out of the canvas and I’d discovered it was one of those tableaus so popular at parties in the States, where hostesses have models pose as great paintings for the guests’ amusement.
I felt heat coming off me in waves and wondered if Monsieur Duplessi sensed it.
“Interesting . . .” Duplessi mused as he moved closer to the easel and me. So close I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. “The styles of these two portraits are the same. He’s created a dramatic effect using chiaroscuro—those heavy contrasts between dark and light—to achieve three-dimensional volume, hasn’t he?”
He stepped back. Looked at the woman’s portrait. “How do you think they compare?”
I studied one and then the other. “I think he’s more sure of himself painting the woman—bolder perhaps?”
“And there’s a sense of urgency in the woman’s portrait. As though every time the artist worked on it, he’d rush to finish his work for the day so he could bed the model.”
Obviously Monsieur Duplessi was less embarrassed to be standing here with me than I was with him. And also more comfortable talking about what men and women did together than I was. And why shouldn’t he be? I was the granddaughter of one of the most famous courtesans in Paris. Who would guess at how na?ve and unsophisticated I was when it came to matters of the heart and the bedroom?
I began describing the male portrait. “This one is painted more adoringly, as if the painter was lingering over each stroke, luxuriating in each curve and contour of the male form. As if she was loath to finish it.”
“Why do you say that?” Monsieur Duplessi asked.