“He was a good employer, then?”
“Of course. I would not have stayed with an inferior employer. He was the best, madame. Generous. Liked my cooking. Of course I learned to cook the sort of food that Americans like, and he learned to appreciate the finer ways of French cooking.” She glanced up at the windows, now with shades drawn. “I won’t say he was the easiest man, especially if he was working. He did not like to be disturbed. And he liked to get his own way. One could not cross him. But that is how the great men are, isn’t it? Great art means great temperament.”
“And he lived here alone, all this time?” I asked.
“I was in residence, madame.”
“But I meant that he never remarried.”
“He had a wife at home in America, madame.” She sounded shocked.
“I knew this,” I said. “But she never came to visit him—never once in all these years?”
“No, madame. There was a falling out, but she was a good Catholic. She did not believe in divorce.”
“And he never found anyone else?”
She looked at me suspiciously. “You show great interest in this. Who sent you here? You are from a newspaper in America?”
“No. Nothing like that,” I said. “I show interest because I came here with a message from Mr. Bryce’s family.”
“He had no family,” she said sharply.
“No immediate family, that is true. But his second cousin Louisa. Did he not mention her? He was always fond of her when she was a child.”
“I don’t recall…” she said. “Maybe. I never detected him expressing any sentiment for a family member.”
“Anyway, she still has fond memories of him.” I had rehearsed this speech and made sure I could deliver it smoothly in French. “She was very young before he went to Paris, of course. However now she has married well and has now moved into a fine big house in Boston. She dearly wanted to have one of her cousin’s paintings on her walls so she asked me to call on him and see if there were any pictures he had recently painted and hadn’t sold.”
“He has not been painting much recently,” she said. “And she should understand that his paintings now command high prices—higher still now that he is no more, I should think.”
“Money is not a problem for her,” I said. “She was prepared to pay the correct price, you understand, but she wanted something fresh and new, not a painting that someone else had owned before.” I was rather pleased with this approach. It was something I thought up during my shower this morning, something simple that would arouse no suspicions and make no difficult claims for me. It appeared to have worked.
“Ah,” the old woman nodded. “She wishes to buy a painting.”
“The lady in Boston knew I was coming to Paris. ‘Please select a painting for me, my dear,’ she said to me. ‘I give you carte blanche to buy one. Tell Cousin Rennie it is for me and he will help you select a good one.’”
The housekeeper shifted her feet uneasily. “As I said, I don’t think you will find new paintings that remain unsold. He has hardly touched a canvas in a year or more. In fact I thought that maybe he had given it up all together. But then recently he found the urge to paint again. Not the charming landscapes he had been painting like his friend M. Monet, but a very different subject, you understand. Not one I approved of at all.” She glanced up at the windows with a frown, then looked back at me, shaking her head.
“This new painting, is it finished?”
“He only just started it.”
“And there are no other paintings in his possession that would now come up for sale? His cousin in America will be so sad to learn he has died.”
“Indeed she will, madame. We are all sad. M. Bryce is a great loss.”
“So I really hope his cousin Louisa will have a painting to remember him by. I wonder if it might be possible to see around his home and inside his studio for myself, so that I can write to her and describe which paintings his cousin might wish to purchase.”