I ran to my locked door and hollered for the housekeeper till my voice was hoarse. She never came. Of course she wouldn’t. My grandmother had obviously given her instructions to stay away from my room. And besides, Grand-mère had most probably taken the key.
I collapsed onto my bed. Trapped like an animal. And why? I had not done anything. Cousin Jacob had been sick. That he chose that moment to succumb to his illness was no more my fault than the appearance of the stars at night.
For about a half hour I lay atop the coverlet and felt sorry for myself and fury at my grandmother. I would not be jailed like this. I would take revenge. When she returned, I would leave her, and she’d be sorry. She herself had said I was all that was left. Her only immediate family.
I wouldn’t have to bother with a hotel or finding any other place to live. I’d move into the bell tower. I’d get Julien to block it off when he turned the rest of the Maison de la Lune into a museum. He could build me a secret entrance. No one would ever discover me there. Or perhaps I could entice or convince him to break off his engagement and we could live there together. Charlotte and Julien had been affianced before he met me, before he knew that someone could touch his soul. Surely he could not marry her now that we had met.
I was growing bored sitting in the simple room, concocting fantasies about the future.
There was nothing to watch out the windows, and the room offered little distraction. Oh, it was lovely enough, with pale yellow curtains that puddled on the mustard-and-lavender rug and even paler yellow walls trimmed with lavender molding. There were half a dozen prints of various purple flowers framed in gold and hanging on the walls.
Unlike the opulent and fantastical rooms in La Lune, this bedroom was certainly not decorated by my grandmother, but rather by whomever she was renting from. Grand-mère’s style was nowhere to be seen.
I already had read the one book in the room, the one I’d brought from home, The Picture of Dorian Gray. There were dozens of novels downstairs in the library, but they were out of my reach now. I picked up the Oscar Wilde novel and started to reread it:
The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
After three chapters, I couldn’t keep reading. My father’s annotations were like little stabs, and I closed the slim volume. I tried to sleep but was too worked up.
I needed to do something or I might go mad. That’s when I thought of my paints. I pulled the box out from under the bed. Just touching the fine wooden case that I’d bought from Sennelier began to soothe me.
Opening it, I caressed the brushes. Moreau had drummed it into us that we must be rigorous in cleaning our supplies. He said if we showed them respect they would be more willing to do our bidding. My brushes were pristine. My tubes of color were squeezed only from the bottom up. My palette was wiped clean every night.
The siren call of the brushes and the paints was undeniable. I longed for the state of bliss that always settled on me as I swirled the silken colors into one another and dabbed them on the canvas.
I knew I would be fine if I could just paint the hours away, but I had no canvas with me. I looked around the room. Was there anything I could use? No, nothing.
Except . . .
I undressed, since I was used to painting either in my masculine garb in public or wearing nothing but my shift over my naked body when I was in the bell tower. Corsets and stays and petticoats hampered my movements.
Stripped down, I threw on my silk robe, not even bothering to fasten it. Next I removed all the prints from the walls so that I had large, empty surfaces. Then I prepared my palette. Holding it in my right hand, I picked up a brush in my left.
With so much space, my mind was as unencumbered as my body, and I began to paint. I wasn’t conscious of making up the story I painted. Rather the story seemed to be whispering to me, begging me to give it life. To commit it to form and figure, color and shadow.
The mural told a saga worthy of an opera, but it was not written by some Italian master. It was a drama worthy of being enacted on the stage but was not a play penned by Molière. No, this was the true and actual story of the making of La Lune. The tale of how my ancestor came to be who she was.
In the first panel, she was a young courtesan entertaining a string of lovers. Lounging on an opulent scarlet velvet daybed, she looked not at the men awaiting her attention but out at me with a challenging expression. We shared fiery reddish-brown hair and almond-shaped topaz eyes. Her mouth was more petulant than mine, and her full lips a darker cranberry.
Like a ripe piece of fruit, she looked ready for the picking.
Outside the door to her bedroom were three older men dressed in bejeweled silks and satins and a fourth, a younger man, dressed in simpler clothes.
In the next four scenes, each man presented her with a gift: the first, six strands of fat pearls; the next, an overflowing casket of gold chains; and the third, an ebony box brimming with diamonds, one having fallen at her feet, glinting in the candlelight.
In the last scene in this sequence the younger man knelt at her feet, holding out a bunch of paintbrushes, like flowers. Her hand was reaching out, about to accept his offering.
This was the man she had chosen. On his jacket was the clue to his identity: a pair of intertwined Cs embroidered in gold on brown velvet. This was Cherubino Cellini, the great Italian painter whose work hung in museums all over the world, who had met La Lune and asked her to be his muse.
Everything about his face and body and the way he carried himself was sensual. I remembered the feelings I had as I painted his coarse black curls and his bony nose and the scars on his face and hands, and I felt surges of desire that made me want to put down my brushes and touch myself.
I fought the urges and continued painting instead, illustrating the tale of the young woman who accepted Cherubino Cellini, not because he was the wealthiest of those who came to call but because he offered her the one thing the others could not: Access to the world that she wished to belong to. The world forbidden to women. The world of artists.
Cherubino was in Paris on a commission from King Henry to paint a series of frescoes in the Louvre, and in his search for a model for his Virgin of the Rocks, he visited La Lune. All through art history, prostitutes had modeled for artists and wound up as Virgins and saints. La Lune was not the first and would not be the last woman to pose as the mother of Christ. But she was one of the most provocative.
Initially it was a business arrangement between La Lune and Cherubino. She modeled for him, and he paid her by teaching her to draw. He started with simple things. A wooden cube. An egg. It was difficult because she was impatient and not a good student.
He was falling in love with his paintings of her, and she was falling in love with learning to sketch, but they were not yet lovers.
Once the king saw the first fresco featuring La Lune, he insisted on meeting her and found her so fetching, he took her as his paramour. For her ministrations he bestowed so many gifts on her that she didn’t have to take other men to her bed. Not then or for the rest of her life.
In addition to all the jewels he bestowed on her, the king gave La Lune a plot of land that sat between rue des Saints-Pères and rue du Dragon. Once a church had occupied the spot, but now there was a fine house in only slight disrepair that was connected to an abandoned bell tower. She hired an architect to help her restore what would become Maison de la Lune.
Cherubino painted La Lune more than twenty times for the king during the next year, and for every sitting, she received a drawing -lesson. That was all.