Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 19

1877

It was the green hour in Paris, when people drinking emerald-colored absinthe ?lled the cafes. As he hurried along the snowy streets of Montmartre, Louis glimpsed couples inside bars sipping the elixir, their arms draped lazily around each other. The absinthe lovers ?ooded his mind with memories of Mentone three years earlier, when he had gone south to recuperate  from  lung  troubles.  Alone,  free  from  his  parents,  he’d  drunk  absinthe  and smoked opium into blissful stupefaction. It hadn’t helped his health one whit, but he brie?y felt as untroubled as these people looked.

When he turned now onto Rue de Douai and spotted Fanny’s stone apartment building, a vein in his neck began to thud like a steam hammer. He looked up, hoping to spot her in one of the tall windows, leaning over the black iron balcony and waving at him, but he caught no glimpse of her. She knew he was coming. Was her heart galloping the way his was right now?

By  their  last  day  at  Grez,  they  had  nearly  stopped  talking.  It  seemed  anything  of importance had already been spoken or didn’t need to be. He could read in her eyes what she was feeling. The night before she left, he’d written a farewell poem for her.

… On the stream

Deep, swift and clear, the lilies floated; fish Through the shadows ran. There, thou and I Read Kindness in our eyes and closed the match.

She had cast those brooding eyes of hers over the paper, smiled knowingly, and put it into one of her pouches. Then she’d boosted Sammy into the old donkey cart headed to Bourron, climbed up, and waved goodbye.

Louis realized his nerves were wrecked from the fear that their separation over the past few weeks might have rubbed the bloom o? the rose. He shook away the thought and bounded up the four flights of stairs to Fanny’s flat.

“Louis!” Fanny shouted when she ?ung open the door of her apartment. Her kisses— unabashed, even loud—settled the matter. He lifted her tiny body and whirled her around like a doll. When a woman next door poked her head out into the gritty-looking hallway,

Fanny slipped from his grip and straightened her dress.
“Margaret,” Fanny said. “You remember Louis Stevenson.” The woman nodded, greeted Louis, and retreated. “She was in Grez for a bit, wasn’t she?” he asked.

“Yes. She’s a writer,” Fanny said. “We met in art class, and now we’re neighbors.” She pulled Louis into the parlor, a bare little room with a ragged sofa and an ancient pair of chairs with punctured caning.

Louis put his hand through a hole in one seat. “You could get your bum caught in there and never get out,” he said. He loved watching her laugh at his paltry jokes.
She leaned back and clasped her hands together, her round eyes half-mooning with glee. “Flea-market treasures,” she said. “I’m going to make cushions for those chairs.”
“Aren’t you a clever girl. And where might Sammy be?”

“With Belle at the circus for another hour or two. They went to see the trapeze men.” Louis looked toward the open door to her bedroom.

“What is it you have in mind, sir?” she teased.

“You,” he said gently. “Us.” He withheld what was next on his tongue. French acrobatics. With a measure of awkwardness, they went in. The last of the day’s light was fading
through the sheer curtains as Fanny removed her dress. He was struck by the white lace of her chemise, how it appeared to glow against her skin. He wound his arms around to her back to dispatch the corset, then pulled the chemise over her head. He tried to keep his eyes on hers as he undressed her, but it was a complicated set of moves that he managed with limited grace. Once she was naked, he couldn’t help gawking at the splendor of her full breasts. “Bless my eyes,” he muttered.

Fanny pulled back the sheets and lay down, stretching one arm slowly across the far pillow. Her small hand, the color of old ivory, sank into the white down. He put his cheek on her neck, felt the warm pulse of her. His mouth went down to the marvelous breasts, around and into the moist spot between them. Soon she was moving in rhythm with him, and he thought, What else matters but this?

After their lovemaking, she rose from the bed and kept her back to him as she dressed. When she was covered, she turned. “I don’t want Belle and Sam to … ”
“Of course not,” he said.

“The neighbors here … “ she warned.

“I’ll see you in the parlor.”

Fanny. Fanny. Fanny. How quickly she could shift. She was the most passionate woman he had ever slept with—leading, following, losing herself in trancelike forgetfulness. How then could she suddenly become modest?

Louis reached down to his trousers on the ?oor to remove a pencil and notebook from a pocket. On Falling in Love, he wrote, and underlined the words. And so we go, step for step, like  a  pair  of  children  venturing  together  into  a  dark  room—with  both  pleasure  and embarrassment.

Later, when they went out to walk, he told her, “I am French.”
“And the Scotch accent?”

“Well, I feel French, anyway.” He pulled up his collar to cover his ears. “A while ago I changed my middle name to the French spelling. It was L-E-W-I-S before. I took terrible ribbing from Henley for doing that. He still writes to me and uses the old spelling. I don’t care. It was my soul made the choice.

“God, how I love Paris! I love every hair on its head. The street names alone are ?t to open a novel. Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête—Street of the Headless Woman. Street of the Bad Boys. Street of the Bridge of Cabbages. When I was a child visiting Paris with my parents, my father used to make a game of ?nding street names like that. We used to go over to a crèmerie in St. Germain. It was amazing, not only for its tarts but because the owner kept the napkins of his regular customers locked up  in  a  drawer behind the register. How I wanted to have my own napkin stashed there!”

He remembered one of  those early  visits,  when  he had spied a  boy  of  about sixteen wearing a black velvet jacket and a beret. The moment had been spiritual. In that glimpse, he had found his style. How old was he then? Eleven?

Even then when he came to Paris, his senses went on high alert, like those of a bird dog in  the  ?eld.  In  those  days,  it  was  swords  and  military  paraphenalia  displayed  in  a shopwindow that could stop him in his tracks. Now he was a collector of characters. When he happened upon a big personality in a café, and he often did, he moved in close to watch and listen. He scribbled down the remarks of quieter types, too, like the dipsomaniacal bartender who adored discussing Flaubert. “I love books,” the man said, his eyes growing misty, as if he were talking of his mistress. He lifted his shoulders in resignation.  “And I

love gin.”

Other  days,  Louis  was  satis?ed  with  smaller  hints  of  character:  ambiguous  smiles, arrogant nostrils, elegant diction emerging through bad teeth. He saw venality and courage played out on Paris’s streets, and he ?lled up notepads with the details: a cheese merchant furtively sweeping the day’s detritus from his sidewalk over to the chocolatier’s doorstep; a woman with a port-wine stain over half of her face, singing  “Vive la Rose” on a street corner; a well-tailored old man with a telltale red nose whipping o? sad little watercolors of hens and chicks for drinks in a café.

During the years when Louis was ailing and needed a sunny climate, his parents had bundled him o? with them to the South of France, but they always scheduled in a visit to Paris. It occurred to him that they had come here because they needed to ?ll their own lungs with  a  little  freedom from everything  back  in  Edinburgh.  His  mother  and father always seemed more relaxed in France.

French was sweet and liquid on his tongue. Sentences, paragraphs, coherent ideas ?owed naturally, and he found himself in many a charming exchange. He read the great French classics  with  a  dictionary  at  hand,  but  he  gathered  his  spoken  French  from  butchers, waiters, and landladies.

The French could be brilliant conversationalists, honest and free from hypocrisy. But they kept a distance; he didn’t know if he would ever share a close friendship with a French person. He felt deep a?ection for Parisians nevertheless, because in their city, more than any other place, a man could devote his life to art—and be taken seriously.
Fanny admitted that she did not love the city as he did.

“I’m going to show you my Paris,” he told her. He did not have to say, “So you will fall in love with the things I love.” She understood that, and he could see she wanted to.
He took her to his favorite booksellers near Pont des Saints-Pères on the left bank, where he bought Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs, and from the slim o?erings of English-language volumes, Fanny chose a book she loved, Middlemarch, and a children’s book for Sammy. In a  public square, they warmed themselves near a  blazing brazier, along with a  circle of ragged women and men with whom he commiserated about the cold. On they went in the chill

air, stopping often at shops and cafés where he knew the proprietors. Following the advice of Will Low, they went to hear his friend Emma Albani sing the title

role  in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Théatre des Italiens. Later, they paid a visit to Will’s studio, where he was painting a portrait of the Canadian soprano. At the doorway of the building, two battered stone lions straddled the entrance wearing painted-on mustaches, courtesy  of  art  students who lived there.  Upstairs,  they  found the  raven-haired Albani, dressed in her silk Lucia costume, standing erect with folded hands in front of Will and his canvas.  The  air  smelled of  mineral spirits;  dust  particles from ground pigments ?oated through  streaks  of  afternoon  sunlight.  Louis  and  Franny  quietly  made  their  presence known, crept up to view the painting, then slid back

into the shadows where he could still see, even in the dim light, the look of pure joy on her face.

Every  park or café became their own  private place.  They  made up  stories about the people around them. “That villainous fellow over there,” Louis would begin, glancing at a portly gentleman drinking his morning co?ee at a nearby table. “Do you see his walking stick resting on that chair? Look at the top of it.”

Fanny  glanced  surreptitiously  at  the  handle,  a  carved  ivory  Turk’s  head.  “A courier, obviously,” she said, picking up the bait.  “The shaft of the cane is hollow. He’s carrying rolled up sheets of paper inside …”

“Antique erotic prints from Japan?”

“Your mind does run in a certain direction, my love,” she teased.  “They are priceless drawings, stolen, of course, and intended for that woman over there. The two of them are in cahoots.”

Louis eyed the potential co-conspirator, a plain freckled girl eating a croissant at the next table.  “She does not know what she is to intercept. She has come from Marseilles at the request of her lover,” he said, “a deserter from the Legion who has hired on as a spy for …” The games lasted as long as their own co?ee and rolls, and then they were out on the streets, where the rhythm of life swept them along past ?ower stalls and boulangeries, past display  windows  full  of  glinting  paperweights,  gloves,  Japanese  silks  and  fans,  past doorways where baking  bread or perfume or chocolate sent fragrant ?ngers out to the sidewalk to fetch them in by the nose.

Sometimes remembered buildings were gone. They wandered around the blackened stone remains  of  the  Tuileries  Palace  that  had been  burned nearly  to  the  ground during  the suppression of the Paris Commune. “I was here when it was intact,” he said with wonder.

“How changed Paris is in just ?fteen years.” Elsewhere, he discovered that the mazes of crooked  little  streets  he  remembered  from  that  early  visit  had  been  leveled  by  Baron Haussmann, the formidable mind behind the reshaping of the city. Now in their place were wide, arrow-straight boulevards lined with streetlights that imbued nighttime in Paris with a theatrical air. They walked along the lit streets as if they, and every other person on the pavement, were players in a grand, romantic drama.