“Students frequent this place. It’s inexpensive and convenient, and the owner is an artist himself,” Julien explained. “Sometimes if you’re low on money, he’ll trade you some food and drink for a palette. He thinks one day some of them will be priceless. And he’s probably right.”
The waiter arrived, and before I could order the coffee I so badly wanted, Julien ordered a bottle of their best champagne.
When I looked at him questioningly, he just smiled but didn’t say anything until the waiter arrived back with a bottle of Jarretière and two flutes.
“Messieurs, voilà,” the waiter said.
He’d thought I was a man. How much the eye is fooled and sees what it wants to see.
The waiter worked the neck until the cork escaped with a festive pop. He poured the golden sparkling wine almost to overflowing.
Once he was gone, Julien raised his glass to me. “I’ve never seen anyone quite like you,” he said. “You’re fabulous, Sandrine.”
I felt his words inside of me, and their pull was instantaneous and urgent. I bowed, hiding my flushed cheeks.
“A toast to the first woman ever admitted to the école des Beaux-Arts. Even if you are a bit of a hybrid.” He leaned back in his chair and peered at me. “You’re extraordinary. A woman without fear!”
“Oh, I’m afraid.” I laughed.
“Of what?”
“Of what is going to happen when I actually start to paint and I’m found out as a fraud.”
I was afraid of other things, too. I was thinking of my husband. While I may have succeeded in running away and hiding behind my grandmother’s name for now, my fear that Benjamin would eventually find me was always on a low simmer in the back of my mind. I knew him, and if he was intent on ferreting me out, he would. Benjamin never accepted failure. My father’s suicide was proof of that.
But it would not do to tell Julien any of those other fears now. Except for one. “And I’m a little afraid of you.”
He reached for my hand. Saw something out of the corner of his eye and retracted it. “Your dressing like this is going to take some getting used to. Those people over there clearly think you’re a young man and I’m a lech. And even in Paris, that raises eyebrows.”
“Other than them thinking you are a lech, I think I like people mistaking me for a man. It’s very liberating to be sitting here and not have anyone paying attention to me, going out of their way for me. Treating me differently.”
Through the window, I saw students from the école walking down the street, carrying sketchpads and with knapsacks on their backs. Behind them was a couple in their twenties, strolling arm in arm. They appeared very attentive to each other, and I continued watching as they entered the café and sat down fairly close to us.
Their demeanor was so very different than ours, with the gentleman being so solicitous of his female companion, and she being so flirtatious, looking at him from under her eyelashes.
Julien and I were playing none of those games now. By taking off my female clothes, I’d altered how we spoke to and interacted with each other.
“I should like to meet your fiancée,” I said.
“You would? Why?”
“I’m curious what kind of woman you’ve chosen to marry.”
“Most women don’t come out and say things like that.”
“I know, but most women don’t steal family jewels to pawn so they can become libertines and attend the école des Beaux-Arts.”
“That’s true.”
“I want to see if she’s worthy of you.”
Julien blushed. I laughed.
“It won’t matter, though,” he said solemnly as an afterthought. “I’m engaged to her. There’s no turning back.”
“You make it sound like an obligation.”
“Isn’t marriage a series of obligations?”
“Mine was. But does it have to be? I know her father was your professor at the academy and took you into his firm and gave you a start, but does he demand you marry his daughter in payment?”
“No, there was no price. She had her choice of suitors. Charlotte Cingal is a brilliant opera singer, a star and my greatest supporter.” Julien picked up his champagne glass and drained it. “I have great affection for her.”
“My grandmother has great affection for her terrier, Mou-Mou.”
“How cruel and sarcastic you are without the encumbrances of lace and satin. I might prefer the more demure Sandrine to the outspoken one.”
“Really?”
“I’m not quite sure,” he said, more seriously than I liked.
“Well, I’ll finish my thought regardless. You have great passion, Julien, and so many dreams—”
“Yes, and I’m going to make them all come true.”
“With her father Monsieur Cingal’s help?”
“Of course. He is my mentor. Like a father to me.” Julien’s hand had moved to his watch fob, and I noticed he was fingering that heavy gold ring again. “What of it?” he asked.
I shrugged. “You aren’t marrying her family, you know. You are marrying her. You deserve a marriage of passion as well. Not one of obligation and convenience.”
“Said with such disdain. Did you and your husband have a different sort of marriage?”
“No, which is why I can speak this way. My marriage was disastrous.”
“But we are in France, not America. And Charlotte is marvelous. As for passion, how often does passion outlast the first year or two of marriage?”
“Why not strive to have one of the unions where it does?”
“You are romanticizing marriage. We don’t do that in my country. Romance is its own phenomenon. In France a husband and wife have more freedom inside a union than you do in America. There are not the same constrictions here. Not the same outrage over dalliances.”
“Dalliances? You think you’ll be satisfied by that?”
He poured more champagne. “When the time comes, why not? Most men are. Why do you think I’m any different?”
“In truth, I don’t know.”
After finishing the champagne, we walked down the street, turned left, and walked two blocks to 3 Quai Voltaire. The green-and-gold sign on the front of the building read simply: Sennelier.
Julien opened the door, and I walked into a swirl of colors and smells. Men in white smocks waited on customers, showing them pencils, pigments, brushes, pastels, watercolors, and choices of paper. I swung slowly around in a circle, taking in the world that had just been revealed to me.
My fingers itched to buy the supplies I needed and to take them back to the house and begin experimenting.
“Monsieur Sennelier, this is Mademoiselle Verlaine. She’s going to be studying at the école with Monsieur Moreau.”
Like the admissions director’s, Sennelier’s stare told me he’d thought I was a young man and was surprised to discover my true gender.
“Welcome to my shop, Mademoiselle. We supply Monsieur Moreau and many of his students . . . but did you say the école?” He looked at Julien, who nodded.
“Well, this is something indeed. How amazing! Congratulations, Mademoiselle. This is surely going to be news. I’d be honored to sell you whatever you need.”
“I’ve recently arrived in Paris, and all my supplies were lost in transit, so I need to be totally outfitted.”
“But of course,” the color merchant said. “A full complement then. Will you be making your own paints, or would you like to buy my special extra-fine oil paints in tubes?”
“Tubes, please.”
“Very well,” he said. “You’re in good company. Messieurs Monet, Matisse, and Gauguin prefer them also. I have been working with them for years now, creating variations on colors to accommodate their work. Are you interested in impressionism?”
“To admire, yes, but I’m more of a symbolist,” I said.
“This way please.”
As I followed Monsieur Sennelier through his store, I felt my father’s spirit with me. Though I wasn’t sure he’d approve of my method to getting into the école, I was sure he would be excited by the idea of my attending. We’d spent many afternoons at museums and galleries, inspecting and discussing the work of current-day painters, and now I was on my way to becoming one.
Monsieur Sennelier was waiting. “Mademoiselle? Brushes?”