I didn’t answer, but I felt my cheeks flush. Suddenly, standing there in the cemetery in front of the large mausoleum with its lovely stained glass windows, I was actually experiencing Julien’s lips on mine, and the gathering and pulsing that was so new to me still, started up deep inside me.
Beside me, my grandmother became even more agitated. “What is it, Jacob? What do all these questions mean? What are you suggesting?”
Ignoring her still, he asked me if I was able to sleep.
I told him I was.
“And when you are awake, are your thoughts your own?”
“What do you mean?” My grandmother’s voice was raised. Had anyone from the mourning party still been present, it would have been most embarrassing. “It’s not possible, Jacob. These things don’t exist.”
The rabbi turned to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, Eva. I can help her.”
She brushed off his hand. “No, this is rubbish. Nonsense. Old-fashioned fairy tales. We are living in an age of science and reason. There are no ghosts. No demons. People are not possessed by spirits from the past.”
I stared at her. What was she saying? The rabbi had not mentioned any such thing to me. But that was what his questions meant, wasn’t it? And my answers, even if I had not voiced them out loud, suggested they certainly did exist, and I was being haunted by one.
Chapter 15
“The modeling here is heavy, Mademoiselle Verlaine. And too light here.”
“Yes, I see.”
Monsieur Moreau stood beside me, studying my canvas. Per the assignment, I’d been painting the female nude posing on the podium, but in my composition had positioned her in blue-black darkness. Lurking in the shadows, I’d sketched in some of the angelic creatures I’d seen hovering over the tombstones in the cemetery. One of them, a male with wings, was about to swoop down on her.
“You’ve lost some of the figure’s dimensionality, and she’s too flat around the calves and ankles. But I’m pleased to see a style emerging.” He stepped back and peered at my painting from another angle. “Yes, it’s an interesting and atmospheric vision.” He looked away from the canvas to me. “You are impatient, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I think I am.”
“ ‘Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’?” he said, quoting the well-known Andrew Marvell poem. “You’re young and have years of painting ahead of you. What is your rush?”
I couldn’t tell the ma?tre that I had another life and that I might not be able to remain in Paris for long enough to soak up all the knowledge he had to impart. Just that morning my grandmother had shown me yet another telegram from Mr. Lissauer. This one coming only a week after the last.
According to the lawyer, Benjamin had hired a detective agency to find me. Once again I mentally retraced my steps. Had I left any clues in Southampton? My passage to Calais couldn’t have been recorded; I had paid for my ferry ticket with cash, not a bank note, and had not been asked to offer any form of identification. But surely there were people who’d seen me on the boat. Or on the train from Calais to Paris later that day. Would they be able to identify me if shown my portrait?
No, I might not be able to stay and study with Moreau indefinitely. I might not have years of painting ahead of me. Nothing was certain; events were unfolding and changing so rapidly that I couldn’t be sure the center, as I knew it, would hold. But I couldn’t say that to my teacher, so instead I said: “I am trying to make up for all the time I lost after my accident when I couldn’t paint.”
“Understandable,” Moreau said, “but may I suggest you slow down while in class. Improved technique will lead to refinement of style.”
“I’ll try, of course.”
“If you want to increase our time together, you might think about joining my atelier. Is that something that you would like to do?”
“I would be honored.”
Moreau only asked a few students to join him at his studio, and I had only dared to dream I’d be invited into the inner circle that included Desvallières, du Gardier, Matisse, Rouault, and Maxence.
“We meet two nights a week, and the work we do there is a commitment in addition to what we do in our classes here. The address is 14 rue de la Rochefoucauld.” He was about to move on. Then turned back. “The Old Masters had a very specific technique using a strong contrast between light and dark to give the illusion of three-dimensionality . . . I see that seventeenth-century chiaroscuro in your work, and I like it. I didn’t think they were teaching that at the art school in New York. Very few painters still use it. Is it part of the regular curriculum?”
I was stumped. I had no idea. I had to come up with an answer. He was waiting. “Not usually, no. When I tried to copy techniques I’d seen at the Metropolitan Museum in the Caravaggios my father and I enjoyed so much, my teacher gave me special instruction.”
It was a lie. But what else could I have said? I wasn’t aware of how I’d learned anything that I was able to do with paints and brushes on canvas. Yes, Cherubino and La Lune had employed chiaroscuro to give their paintings depth, but how could I have learned it from artists who’d been dead for over two centuries?
“You’re a very exciting student, Mademoiselle. Your compositions are still slightly awkward, your color sense could be more refined, but your vision is provocative and very curious. You show great promise.”
He walked away, and I picked up my brush and continued working on the woman’s form. Why was I so afraid of the future? I could write Mr. Lissauer and ask him if there was a way to start divorce proceedings while I remained in France. Regardless of the social stigma, there was no question I needed to end my marriage. If I could sell my father’s house in Newport and the mansion on Fifth Avenue, both of which had been left to me directly, I’d have more than enough money to remain in Paris, buy a small house, and have my own studio. Like Mary Cassatt, Sandrine Jeanette Verlaine could be an American painting in Paris. Once I had my own home, I wouldn’t need my grandmother’s help or even her consent to live my own life the way I wanted.
Our conversations since the funeral the previous week had been stilted. She was convinced I was troubled, hated that I had taken up drawing, was certain I was being affected negatively by being in Paris, and wanted me to consult with her cousin the rabbi.
I refused. Her theories about me were rubbish. I was certain that when I told him, Julien would agree. Being possessed by a demon was a nonsensical concept invited by overactive imaginations. But Julien wasn’t there to concur. He’d left the day of my cousin’s funeral to travel to his hometown of Nancy to oversee several suites of furniture his uncle was creating for a house on the exclusive Avenue Hoche in the 8th arrondissement.
When the class ended that day, a few of the students whom I had gotten to know invited me to join them at the café around the corner. Since my grandmother would be dining with the count and I’d told her I was spending the evening with my imaginary visitor from America, I was free.
At La Palette our group included Gaston Billet, who was gentle and quiet but painted boldly and with fervor; Maurice Soubrelle, an aesthete and intellectual who frustrated Moreau with questions that our teacher said were better left to critics than creators; and Serge Mouton. I had the hardest time with Serge, who was often lewd and always smelled of beer, but his paintings were glorious and full of colors that made me want to get lost in them. I never could reconcile his personality with his beautiful canvases. He was two different people—the artist who was a marvel and the man who was often appalling and unappealing.
“Lillian’s skin today glowed like a peach,” Gaston said when we were seated and the wine had been served. He was blond and had pale blue eyes that he blinked a bit too often.