The Witch of Painted Sorrows

“What did you just say to me?” She was staring. Both horror and disgust on her face. She picked up my glass of water and splashed it in my face. “How dare you? Who are you to talk to me like that?”

 

 

The water did nothing to deter me. She was a fly on the wall trying to contain me. To control me. And I would not be controlled.

 

My robe was soaked and uncomfortable. I pulled it open, separating the wet, clinging silk from my skin, mopping the water with a napkin.

 

“What is that on your neck? What are you wearing?” my grandmother shrieked.

 

She was pointing to my neck. My hand went to my throat.

 

“Where did you get that?”

 

I wasn’t sure what to say. To tell her the truth would mean I would have to admit that I had been inside the house. Perhaps the necklace had been hidden in that secret space long enough that even she didn’t know that’s where it had been.

 

“It’s something Papa gave me.” I lied. “Don’t you like it?”

 

“It’s the same as the necklace that the women in the portraits are wearing.”

 

I knew full well what she was talking about but feigned innocence. “The portraits?”

 

“On the staircase in La Lune.” She was still frowning as she stared at the necklace. “I haven’t seen that since I was a little girl. My mother kept it with her other jewels, and it was the only piece I wasn’t allowed to play with.”

 

“Why was that?”

 

Grand-mère shook her head. “How did your father get it? ”

 

“Perhaps it’s not the same one? Maybe he had it made because he remembered it from the portraits and liked it.”

 

“Take it off. Give it to me.”

 

“Why?”

 

“It doesn’t matter why. Take it off, Sandrine. Give it to me.”

 

“Tell me why.”

 

“I said take it off!”

 

Before I could react, she had her hands on the necklace and was working the clasp.

 

I tried to pull her hands off.

 

She swatted my hands away, gave up on the clasp, curled her fingers under one of the rosettes, and pulled hard. The necklace dug into my skin. She pulled harder. The chain didn’t break, didn’t come apart. How was that possible? She was pulling so hard the pain was extreme. I didn’t want to be fighting with her. This was my grandmother. A wave of nausea overwhelmed me for a moment.

 

I grabbed my grandmother by the wrists and pushed her away. She stumbled but righted herself by taking hold of a chair.

 

I walked past her and out of the room.

 

Behind me I heard her shout. “Take it off, Sandrine, take it off.” It was a combination of a plea, a prayer, and a threat.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 17

 

 

I was still thinking about my grandmother’s behavior and my own, which was so unlike me and which I admit I felt both sad and guilty about, when I arrived at the Louvre to paint with Ma?tre Moreau and a dozen of his students.

 

“I’m impressed by your technique,” Moreau said when he came up behind me. “You said it was a teacher in New York who gave you such a good grounding in Renaissance practices?”

 

“Yes,” I said, hoping he would not ask me for a name.

 

“At what school did you say?”

 

“At the Art Students League.”

 

Of course I had never studied there, but as I offered up the lie, I was seeing my teacher. He stood over my shoulder, just out of sight, advising me on how to mix rich pigment with pure oil to get the right transparency in the glaze I was using so as I built the layers, they would create the impression of depth.

 

He was not handsome but compelling. His nose appeared broken, a scar ran through his right eyebrow separating it, his red lips were too full and almost mean, and his eyes were dark and hooded. He spoke French, but with an Italian accent.

 

I could see his face so clearly. He was so familiar to me. Who was he? And then I knew. Of course. It was the man in the portraits in the bell tower. The portraits painted by LL. I was imagining I had been taught by Cherubino. That I had been taught by La Lune’s teacher.

 

When the class ended, I packed up my canvas and paints and returned to the house on rue des Saints-Pères, hoping that Julien would be there waiting for me. I hadn’t seen him, other than when I’d shadowed him, since he’d returned from Nancy.

 

He wasn’t at the house, but he’d been there and left a note saying that he’d returned to Paris and would meet me the next day since Moreau didn’t teach on Fridays.

 

Without Julien there, I might as well go back to my grandmother’s apartment for dinner. I began to undress in order to change back into my gown. The air in the studio was always chilly if no fire was lit, and I wasn’t going to bother to start one. I could maneuver by the light of the candles and then leave.

 

I removed my jacket, shirt, pants, pantaloons, and stockings. The cold air was refreshing. I stood there naked for a moment but for the rubies around my neck, shimmering in the candlelight.

 

Suddenly I wanted to paint.

 

I opened the hidden cabinet, where I’d found La Lune’s and Cherubino’s drawings, and began to pull out the fabulous fabrics that I had discovered there. I stepped into a long skirt of pearl lace that only partially concealed my naked legs and the V of darkness where they met. The tiny silk vest embroidered with dragons I slipped on came to just beneath my breasts and left my cleavage and part of each nipple exposed. Slippers of silver shot through with ruby threads and gold combs studded with rubies completed the costume.

 

I stood back and examined my reflection. Since coming to Paris, I had adopted the costume of a male art student. Now I appeared a half-naked siren, a seductress.

 

I grabbed a canvas from the stack by the wall, one that had been stretched and primed but never painted on, placed it on the easel, opened my box of paints, and prepared my palette.

 

Ready, I looked from mirror to canvas, mirror to palette. I dipped my brush in burnt ochre, thinned it with some oil so it was translucent, and began.

 

With broad strokes, I sketched out her figure, standing, staring out at the viewer. Me, and yet someone else, too. I’d never looked like this. Never been a wanton, sexual creature. Never been a woman so determined. With sure strokes, even though I didn’t have a model, I roughed out the man behind her. With his arms around her, locked in a sexual embrace. While she stood watching me, it seemed, he was taking her from behind.

 

Despite the cold studio I began to grow warm as I felt his hands on my breasts and his thighs against the back of mine and his fingers on my nipples. His voice burned in my ear as he whispered urgent words of lovemaking.

 

On and on I painted, all the while shuddering as he moved behind me, his hardness asserting itself, determined to find its home.

 

He sighed. I moaned.

 

On and on I painted as he grew larger and larger inside me. He slipped out as the brush dipped in the vermilion. As the brush slid across the canvas, he slid back inside. He thrust with every brushstroke . . . again and again . . . He moved and the brush moved . . . until with a great shudder I felt all the colors on the canvas explode inside me, and I dropped the brush and the palette and sent splatters of paint in a dozen directions.

 

When my breathing returned to normal, I examined what I’d created in the white-hot heat.

 

I had thought as I worked that I was painting Julien and myself, but the people in the painting were not us. I had been La Lune painting herself and her lover, Cherubino.

 

Without taking off her clothes or jewels, I sat on the daybed, staring at the canvas, trying to make some sense of what was happening to me.

 

 

 

I woke up to bright sunshine shining through the openings in the roof of the bell tower. The room, which should have been cold without a fire burning all night, was warm. It only took me a moment more to comprehend that, along with the paints and turpentine and linseed oil, I smelled coffee. And then I understood I was not alone.

 

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