I put the canvas on the easel facing the judges and pulled off the cloth.
There was a moment of silence, then an intake of breath, and then Monsieur Moreau spoke.
“A surprise indeed, but well done, Sandrine.” He had used my first name for the first time. “Very well done.” He smiled at me, and I could see that he was proud. “Brave and bold. Very well done.”
The other professors were not as forthcoming. One was frowning. Two had implacable faces that I couldn’t read.
“Thank you, Mademoiselle,” said the clerk who was recording all the entries, and I was dismissed. At least Moreau had been impressed.
Outside my classmates were waiting.
“How did it go?” Gaston asked.
“Moreau seemed pleased.”
“Now that you’ve committed your first brazen act of defiance, you must be ready for a drink,” Serge said.
And I was.
Six of us traipsed off to La Palette, where Gaston ordered a bottle of champagne and we drank to our luck.
It seemed the café was filled with nothing but art students that afternoon. Nervous, hopeful, excited, and depressed. Bottles came out full and quickly went back empty. Everyone had delivered his best, and now the wait began. The hours and days and weeks before we found out if we had been accepted loomed.
My thoughts were a jumble. I was exhausted. I’d slept so very little for the last two weeks. I’d been lonely without Julien, worried about my grandmother, and obsessed with my painting.
But there was another reason for my fatigue. I was carrying not only my own emotional burdens but also La Lune’s. Where did she end? Where did I begin? Again the smell of violets permeated the air; I felt waves of nausea rise in me.
As much as I missed Julien, so did this creature inside of me. As much as I wanted to paint something worthy of acceptance and worried about my ability, so did she. The double dose of emotions, aspirations, and expectations had exhausted and depleted me.
We had just finished our champagne when Heloise, Adele, and Stephanie, three models who posed for us in Ma?tre Moreau’s class, arrived to celebrate our accomplishment. Gaston ordered another bottle, and after we toasted with that one, we moved on to our next stop, the popular Café du Bagne.
Themed bohemian cafés and cabarets were all the rage. Built around exotic concepts, they were much more than eating and drinking establishments; their very atmosphere was entertaining, and the stranger the environment, the more popular the venue.
One of the oldest, the Chateau d’If, had opened its faux--drawbridge door in the early 1880s. Designed to mimic the prison of the same name made famous by Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, it boasted cells and dungeons.
L’Abbaye de Thélème dressed its waitstaff as monks and nuns, and patrons could hide away in medieval confessionals to sip their absinthe in private.
When we arrived at the Café du Bagne, there were queues of Parisians waiting outside, but Serge knew one of the managers, and we trooped into the club en masse. Decorated to resemble a penitentiary eating hall, the café featured gray and somber walls covered with graffiti of the kind inmates would leave behind. The long wooden tables were etched with more of the same. The waiters, dressed as convicts, dragged papier-maché balls and chains as they brought our drinks.
Serge and Gaston ordered absinthe, but I stayed with wine, not ready to succumb to the smoky depths the powerful liquor offered.
At about ten o’clock we all decided that we were hungry and went to Au Lapin Agile, where we gorged on onion soup with a thick crust of melted Gruyère cheese, spicy sausages, and crisp pommes frites.
Heloise and Stephanie and Adele were still with us, and somewhere along the way we had picked up two more models whose names I didn’t know. We were a group of eleven now. Noisy and boisterous and wanting the night to last forever.
It was there, for the third time since I’d arrived in Paris, that I thought I saw Benjamin. But this time it was certainly him. He’d arrived with two other men. One was absolutely William Lenox.
I’d been mistaken when I believed I’d spotted him on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, so I had assumed I’d been wrong about the man in the carriage on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, too. But I hadn’t been wrong. Benjamin was here and he was walking right toward me.
Chapter 35
My husband looked directly at me but didn’t recognize me. His eyes barely rested on my face. He was too busy looking first at Heloise and then Stephanie.
Of course he didn’t recognize me. I was wearing a man’s jacket, shirt and cravat, and hat. I was sitting with half-nude models and bohemian artists. No New York society matron was at our table. The woman he knew wasn’t there.
What was he doing in the restaurant? Had he tracked me to Paris, or was his being here a coincidence? Certainly, now that my father was dead and Benjamin was running the bank, he would have reason to be in Paris. The branch in New York was still tied to the French branch.
“Sandrine.” Heloise squeezed my arm. “Where did you go? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“I did,” I said, trying for levity but not sure I’d managed to keep my voice light enough.
“But there are no such thing as ghosts,” she said. “Am I right, Gaston? Serge? Are there such things as ghosts?” she called out.
“Of course there are.” Gaston laughed. “Let’s go to Hell. You can see ghosts and more there! Everyone in agreement then? Hell will be our next stop?”
The facade of Cabaret de l’Enfer screamed at us from across the street, trying to terrify and attract us at the same time. Sandwiched between ordinary buildings, the monstrous dark gray plaster face with wild eyes and Medusa-like hair opened its mouth wide and invited us in. The frightening face’s lines were sinuous and artful, and reminded me of—yes! This was the club Monsieur Dujols and his friends owned and that Julien had designed. Although he’d told me about it and promised to bring me here, he never had.
And as soon as I walked through the open mouth and over the threshold, I understood why Julien hadn’t wanted me to see this. The darkened rooms were cooler than they should have been. The lights were red and orange. It was a tour de force of horror. The walls were sculpted bas-reliefs of guillotines in action, skulls and bones, winged dragons fighting with devils, and snakes wrapped about skeletons. I felt as if I’d stepped into one of Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell. Dark corners dripped with stalactites; there were coffins instead of couches.
“Enter and be damned. The Evil One awaits you!” the ma?tre d’ snarled as he welcomed us.
Music from the opera Faust emanated from a giant cauldron hanging over a fire. The mammoth brass container was filled with male and female musicians all dressed as devils and playing various stringed instruments painted red. Incense burned coal-red inside of brass censers. The club smelled like a Roman Catholic church.
It was a magical, terrifying atmosphere, at once dangerous and tempting. The end of the world, the end of a century, and a vision of what awaited us in the next.
“I don’t I like it,” Heloise said. “It’s full of ghouls. It’s scary.”
“It’s all make-believe,” I said, and laughed.
“Don’t you mind the smell?”
I sniffed again, taking more of it in. “No, it’s wonderful.”
Heloise looked at me strangely. “It’s blasphemous.”
“To you perhaps, but I’m not a Christian. To me it’s exotic and foreign.”