He led me to an area of shelves filled with a vast and varied assortment of brushes.
I had anticipated my choices would be difficult as I struggled with items I had little familiarity with. I’d learned little at school.
My father was interested in the concept of lives being recycled. Metempsychosis, a concept dating back to Pythagoras, was a popular topic among spiritual circles in New York, especially the Theosophical Society, which my father found interesting. We’d attended some lectures together and discussed the concepts at length. Walking home from one, my father, I recalled, had described me as an “old soul.”
He said that one day I’d find my way to creating something beautiful and meaningful because my soul would demand it of me.
I had never understood what he meant. But perhaps I was going to find out.
Sennelier was waiting. “Mademoiselle?”
Nervously, I inspected my choices. There were at least fifty different sizes and shapes of brushes. How many was I supposed to choose? Which were basic and required? Did I want the longer or the shorter handles? I reached out and touched one and then another. Did I want bristle or sable? I read the names of the shapes: flats, filberts, brights, rounds. For one dizzying moment I thought that I could not manage this charade. I even wondered what was propelling me. Why did it matter that I go to the école and learn to paint?
With a tentative hand I took a flat bristle brush with a long handle. Then a long-handled sable filbert. My hesitation was unexpectedly gone. My hand seemed to be moving of its own accord, knowing exactly what I needed.
After I’d chosen a dozen assorted brushes, I chose a palette knife with a smart, round wooden handle.
“Now for the paints,” Monsieur Sennelier said as he proudly showed me to another section of the store. “We use the most pure safflower oil and grind the pigments more finely than other merchants. You’ll find the distinctive texture more like satin than other brands.”
Here were at least one hundred tubes in a rainbow of color selections. Each was affixed with a simple label: a band of black with the block letters SENNELIER in white, then a thicker band of the color inside the tube both shown and spelled out, and a third band with the number and other information.
But instead of the panic I expected, there was only a thrill as I reached for the colors that would make up my palette. I chose the basics: titanium white, cadmium yellow, pale orange, red and green, along with quinacridone rose, dioxazine violet, and French ultramarine blue.
The tubes were cool to the touch, and shivers of excitement traveled up my fingers, up my arms. I put each one in the basket Sennelier provided. Using these slithery paints, I would create something magical. Dipping my brushes into the luscious oils, I would bring forth visions that were going to change my life and fulfill the covenant of my heritage.
In my mind, from some unknown place, came unbidden images in shadows. Secrets of light and dark, mysteries and puzzles waited for my brush.
“I’ll need these, too.” Unable to refrain, I added more of the exotic colors and then more, as if each one held another promise: Chinese orange, cinnabar, cobalt green, Orient lake, Sennelier blue, and baryte green.
I could see the swirls on a palette, a wet brush making daubs on a canvas, images emerging in the penumbra. And strange images they were, all painted in my imagination as I stood in the store.
It was the last image from my father’s dream and mine. The scene reflected in the woman’s eyes: a dark stone cell, moisture glistening on the mossy rocks, a single crack of light illuminating a woman, woebegone, prostrate on the ground. I could hear her crying. In my mind, she looked up at me. Her face etched with terrible sadness. Her hand on the floor, one finger pointing to something she’d drawn in the grime. A symbol that I recognized—one of those I’d seen in the bookstore I’d gone to with Julien.
When I was in school, we’d done still lifes of flowers and fruit. My father collected masterpieces, favoring impressionism and evocative portraits done by the likes of John Singer Sargent and Whistler. Other than the one Moreau that he’d bought me, nothing he bought was symbolic, nothing as suggestive or evocative, as illustrative or iconographic, as my vision. Nothing like the paintings I suddenly knew I wanted to tackle: forgotten dreams, lost legends, mysterious messages. Was I being influenced by Dujols’s bookstore? Or by knowing I would be studying with Moreau, the greatest symbolist artist of the day? He was one of the reasons I’d wanted to study at the école, so that I could work with the one painter I believed could help me along the path I wanted to take. The strange thing was that I’d never had to mention him to Girraud. He’d chosen Moreau for me.
The very professor I’d been thinking about.
Encumbered by a multitude of packages containing canvas, wooden arms, stretchers, paints, primers, turpentine, oil, and various other tools, Julien and I left the store and took a carriage back to the Maison de la Lune.
We stumbled into the foyer with all of our parcels, and as we did, it felt to me as if the house had eyes and could see what I had brought home and trembled in excitement. It was then, for that first time, that I heard, very soft and low, one sentence, uttered, it seemed, with her lips moving slowly so she would be sure I could understand the archaic French:
I have been waiting so very long. Welcome home at last, my Sandrine.
Chapter 13
I glanced over at Julien. From the way he was stacking the packages, it didn’t appear he’d heard the voice. Had it even been real? We’d had a lot of champagne at the café, so perhaps I could blame the sparkling wine for what I’d heard. Or simply an overstimulated imagination. Certainly the day had been momentous and curious. There’d been the odd coincidence of having Girraud suggest Gustave Moreau as my teacher. Then meeting him and realizing I’d seen him before in the Louvre. The exhilaration of being accepted and then the celebration. The strange experience in Sennelier’s of my knowing which brushes and paints and supplies to choose without having to be told. Was it really any wonder I was able to imagine that the painter who had lived in this house hundreds of years before would welcome me home?
“Are you all right?” Julien asked. “You look like you’ve seen—”
I cut him off. “I’m fine. Wonderful. Famished, though.”
“I can cure your ills then. Especially if you’re thirsty, too. I’ll go fetch some things from the kitchen. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”
“Where would I go?” I laughed.
He laughed, too, and then, without a word, leaned down and kissed me full on the lips. And I kissed him back.
He broke the embrace and stepped back.
“Forgive my being so forward,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do that all afternoon.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” I smiled. “I wanted you to do it all afternoon.”
Suddenly unsteady on my feet, I took hold of the banister. I didn’t recognize myself or the sensations coursing through me, and was at the same time embarrassed and excited by them. And, yes, afraid of them. Here in this house I was someone so very different from the woman I’d been all my adult life.
“Let me get some wine and some cheese. I think there’s still some fruit,” he said, and left me standing there as if this was his house, not mine.
He returned with the bottle and two of my grandmother’s marvelous bloodred Baccarat crystal glasses and a tray of delicious-looking soft cheese, hard bread, and two oranges.
“How did you know where these glasses were?”
“I’ve been inventorying the house. At this point I think I know where everything is.” He gestured to the salon. “Should we take our feast in there?”