I woke the morning after the incident at Le Grand Véfour determined to do something about my dreams. After all, I was in Paris. The mecca of artists from all over the world. The home of Ingres, and David, Poussin, Millet, Georges de La Tour, and more. And now the very capital of impressionism and symbolism.
The finest art school was only blocks from our apartment. Of course I would take lessons. Just because I’d failed during my one try at school didn’t mean I couldn’t learn. Besides, now that the count was back in residence in Paris, my grandmother was too busy for us to spend every afternoon together. Certainly, I could occupy my time reading or visiting museums on my own . . . or I could try my hand at creating something.
When I went downstairs that morning, my grandmother was readying to leave—to visit her milliner, she said, and then meet the count for a shopping excursion.
“What will you do today?” she asked me with a little nervous catch in her throat. I knew she was worried about me.
I could have told her, but I held back. I wanted to find out what the requirements were to attend art school and then surprise her with how enterprising I was. While I was sure she’d be delighted that I had decided to do something with my time, I wasn’t sure she’d embrace my choice. My father had said she had many superstitions about women in our family; one was about them going into the arts. I’d never thought much about it before, but it made me even more hesitant to tell her my plans until they were a fait accompli.
I left shortly after she did. The day was cold, and carriages crowded the streets. People were moving more quickly than normal; horses snorted white breaths as they pulled their cabs. Heading north toward rue de Grenelle, I made a left onto rue Saint-Guillaume, a right onto rue Perronet, and then a left onto rue des Saints-Pères. The school was around the corner. I had made a mistake choosing this route. It took me right past my grandmother’s house.
As I looked, I saw her emerging through the Maison de la Lune porte cochère. With her was Monsieur Duplessi.
I prayed he wouldn’t notice me, or if he did, not let on that I’d visited the house, met her architect, disobeyed her wishes.
Once they were safely out of sight and headed in the opposite direction, toward Boulevard Saint-Germain, I proceeded to the river and my destination, the école des Beaux-Arts.
Leon had been attending the école, and I’d often accompanied him on his walks to school in the morning. It was a hallowed place to someone who revered art.
The imposing school took up much of the block, and for a moment I was overwhelmed with memories of being that fifteen-year-old girl, so impressed she knew a boy who was studying here.
Then the memories were replaced by intimidation. What made me think I was good enough to attend this institution? I had taken painting classes and shown talent, but not enough to attend the école des Beaux-Arts.
For hundreds of years, France’s most famous artists had studied here—Delacroix, Géricault, Fragonard—and the modern masters, too: Monet, Degas, Renoir, Moreau, and so many more. There was no more august art institution in the world. Two dreams for two consecutive nights, and suddenly I thought I belonged here?
But I did. I was certain of it.
A crowd clogged the large wrought-iron gates. All manner of men and women and even children were gathered. Marching up to a guard, I asked where I might go to talk to someone in admissions to the school. He regarded me with an odd glance but gave me directions.
Hurried and determined students—wearing smocks and coats, long hair, most with whiskers, carrying boxes of paints or rolls of architectural drawings—crisscrossed the courtyard beyond the gates. I walked among them, my heart beating fast. I was mesmerized by the activity and the architecture. Inside the building the floors were marble. Gleaming gilt columns held up the high ceiling. The walls were covered in paintings. Sculptures loomed. I imagined all the great artists who had stood here and gone through this very process.
After encountering some trouble following the directions, I eventually navigated the last long hallway, which smelled of tobacco and turpentine, and found the office I was searching for.
The clerk behind the desk, a dour-faced man with skin as gray as his hair and beard, asked if he could help me. I explained I wanted to apply.
“But this is not the correct office,” he said with a sigh as if he answered this question far too many times a day and had no time for it anymore.
“But I asked at the gate.”
“Why didn’t you stay at the gate with the others until it was time?”
“Others?”
“Didn’t you see the other models?”
I had, but what did they have to do with me?
“Ah, no,” I said. “I’m not here to apply for the position of model. I wanted to find out about applying to the school. I want to study painting.”
He shook his head and looked at me with disdain. “We don’t accept students in the middle of the semester, but Mademoiselle, even if we did, women cannot study at the école.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand? It’s quite simple. We don’t have female students.”
At the Art Students League in New York City, men and women studied together. Was it really possible that here in Paris women could not attend the école? There were so many fine female painters in Paris—Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès. Did none of them attend classes here? Did none of them teach here?
He must have taken pity on me, for he gave me a half-smile and said, “There are many good painters who take female students at their ateliers. I can offer some names.” He glanced at my empty hands and frowned. “But of course, you cannot just appear and ask to join without a portfolio. You will need to show your work.”
It was a gray, chilly day, the clouds hung low over Paris, and I had nowhere to go. Restless, I walked by the Seine. Just being inside the school had intensified my desire to paint. I could still smell the turpentine and feel the energy of those students. I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to study there. I felt, as odd as it was, as if my future happiness depended on it. But what choice did I have? If I wanted to study, it would have to be privately. And I did want to study.
Even on that cold morning, walking by the river, I was already seeing the world around me differently, the way a painter would see it. Breaking the sky up into patches of colors, I noticed impressions of light and shadow. I examined the people who walked by as forms, and the negative shapes between them jumped out as spaces to be dealt with.
You will need to show your work.
But I had no work. I remembered that sad little watercolor I had tried to paint for my father when I was younger. That had been a pastime, not a passion. Now I felt the desire to stand in front of a canvas and explore the world through the stroke of a brush oozing color.
I did not go back to the apartment on rue de la Chaise but rather to Maison de la Lune. Maybe there were paints in the tower studio that I could use and try to do something good enough to get me admitted into one of those ateliers the clerk had told me about.
As I let the hand of fate drop on the outside of the door, I remembered that I had seen Monsieur Duplessi leave with my grandmother earlier. He wouldn’t be here. Disappointed, I was just turning to leave when I heard the door open behind me.
“Oh, hello,” he said.
I turned. He was smiling.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, almost out of breath, clearly not in the slightest surprised that I had appeared without prearrangement.
“Why? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“We left the door to the tower studio unlocked, did we not?”
I nodded.
“I went back just a little while ago to take inventory, and it was locked again. But no one has been here but me.”
I’d followed him inside, and we were standing in the foyer.