Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 5

Fanny and Belle sat side by side at the atelier, sketching. On an elevated platform, a nude model  rested  her  elbow  on  a  ?uted  column.  Rodolphe  Julian,  the  proprietor  of  the academy,  circulated  among  the  aproned  students  who  had  positioned  their  chairs  at different vantage points around the model.

“Pas mal,” Fanny heard Monsieur Julian say as he examined a Russian artist’s drawing. The teacher frequently said it while observing her work, too. She believed she fell roughly in the middle of these women: not even close to the best, though certainly better than the wealthy dilettantes passing the year in Paris.

She and Belle had hurried over to the studio early this morning. On Mondays a  new model  began  posing,  which  meant  vying  with  other  early  birds  for  the  week’s  best positions. Fanny attended the classes spottily at ?rst. But Hervey had improved so quickly under the care of the American doctor that she was free to come with Belle. In the morning, the students worked on studies of the head; in the afternoon, the nude ?gure. One week it would be a man, whose private parts would be covered, just. The next, it would be a fully nude woman.

This  afternoon  a  soft  light  from  the  studio’s  overhead  windows  fell  on  the  model’s voluptuous body. The woman had bright red hair, but her face and breasts were not visible from Fanny’s vantage point. So she made a study of the woman’s round buttocks and full thighs, narrow ankles, sharp scapulas, and slender waist, where the impression of a skirt band remained. An elderly French student rose with a tape measure in hand and, without touching the model’s ?esh, measured her legs. “Don’t torment the woman, Marie,” someone remarked in a dry tone.

The others in the room were all women. Monsieur Julian was progressive on that point. He accepted female students but kept them separated from his male students. Someone had told Fanny that the women students were charged twice the tuition. She simply shrugged. Monsieur Julian had clearly seen a business opportunity—the squeamishness of other art schools regarding the propriety of women drawing from the nude—and seized it. Female students barred from entering the école des Beaux-Arts ?ocked to this place for training in academic ?gure studies, and they paid whatever fee was demanded. That was how things worked, and she wasn’t going to change it.

The  atelier  was  especially  crowded on  Mondays.  The  women  shared stories  of  shoes bought cheap over the weekend, of romantic interests, of difficult roommates. They laughed about a previous model who had been forced to hold the pose of the Dying Gladiator for a full hour. He had patiently arranged his body as if it were collapsing but kept himself upright with one arm. He curled his lips and wrinkled his forehead as the expiring soldier did in the famous statue. One of the American girls shaped the model’s hair into clumps to appear  sweaty  from  battle.  When  the  poor  man  was  due  his  break  time,  the  old Frenchwoman, Marie, had handed him a robe and sent him to the basement for coals for the stove. He never came back. The mention of his name, and the image of the fuming gladiator stumbling out onto the snowy streets of Paris in a robe, sent them into bouts of wicked laughter.

The artists settled into quiet concentration. Fanny’s nose detected two or three perfumes, and co?ee, and an un?nished salami sandwich buried in a lunch tin. She felt joyous to be working in this airy room alongside these gifted women. This is what I love, she thought. The  beginning.…  the  possibilities.  At  the  School  of  Design  in  San  Francisco  she  had accompanied Belle to classes and, in the process, discovered her own knack for drawing, as well as a thrilling new social circle. She had thought herself rather sophisticated in her painter’s  coat  and  white  cravat.  Virgil  Williams’s  school  attracted  some  ?ne  Califoria artists. But Paris drew pupils from around the world.

The schools here—the école des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Carolus-Duran’s atelier —were  of  a  di?erent  caliber  entirely.  Brilliance  was  common  in  these  hungry  painters who’d found their way from Russia, Sweden, Spain, England, Belgium, Poland, and a half dozen other countries.

One of Fanny’s fellow students Margaret Wright, was an American journalist with a wry sense of humor. Twice widowed, she was living abroad with her daughter, an artistic girl who was Belle’s age, and a son just a bit younger than Sammy. Margaret had come over to Europe a year earlier and was supporting herself by sending articles to newspapers back home about life in England and France. Fanny admired her spunk and they forged a quick friendship. This morning she was sitting on Fanny’s left. “Did you go to the Louvre?” she asked.

“We did,” Fanny whispered. “Saw the actual Venus de Milo. It took my breath away.” “I know. It just causes people to fall silent.”

Fanny began to laugh.

“What is so funny?” Margaret asked.

“I was just thinking about when San Francisco got a copy of the statue as a gift from the French government. When the crate was opened, they discovered the statue had no arms and there was a huge outcry. The Art Association sued the shipping company for damages. And do you know, they won.”

Margaret rolled her eyes. “Americans can be such boors,” she said.

Fanny scanned the room to see where Monsieur Julian stood among the easels. He came in every morning and spoke to no one as he rolled up the cu?s of his white shirt. To spare it from charcoal, he said once, though of course it was to enter his role as master, and to show o? his arms, muscled as a barbell lifter’s. Monsieur Julian cultivated a mystery about himself, but everyone knew he was once a wrestler. His drawings were tacked up around the walls, along with the work of his students. The master was bent over an American girl’s drawing. “Proportion!” he exhorted as he slashed heavy charcoal lines on her composition. The girl, eighteen at best, with brown hair cut in a ?at fringe across her forehead, blinked at the ruined sketch. “Hang it all,” she muttered, crumpling the paper and starting over.
The  room  held  its  fair  share  of  Americans.  Fanny  suspected  they  were,  as  she  was, positively gleeful to be out of their old element. When Belle learned one of them was the sister of Louisa May Alcott, she nearly fell off her chair. “It’s Amy!” she had whispered.
For  every pas  mal Fanny garnered from the instructor, her daughter received a  more enthusiastic appraisal. It was slowly dawning on Fanny that it was too late for her to be an accomplished  painter.  When  she  ?rst  arrived  at  Académie  Julian  a  month  ago,  she harbored fantasies of  becoming  good enough  to make a  little money  with  her art.  She worked hard to improve, as she had done with her writing. Now she saw her talent with a brush was rather ordinary compared to others’ in the class. Oh, she may have won a silver medal for her work at Virgil’s studio in San Francisco, but here, she saw she was outclassed. Belle had a chance, though. More than once, Monsieur Julian had put up her drawing as the best of the day. If only she opened her eyes to it, Belle could experience a ?ner kind of beauty in Paris than Fanny had encountered in Indianapolis or San Francisco. With enough study, she could actually be a  professional artist—a  portraitist rather than  a  painter of pottery.  That  was  what  many  of  these  women  would  do:  return  home  and  make  a reputation by doing portraiture or pursuing teaching.

Fanny glanced at the clock and saw their time was nearly up. She worked faster, adding shadow to her study. But the model was breaking her pose. The woman stepped o? the platform and slipped a  camisole over her head. The sight of her red pubic hair caused Fanny to feel awkward. An underskirt came next, then a dress. This is no place for modesty, she reasoned. And yet it seemed somehow unprofessional for the model to be so abrupt as she slipped out of her classic pose and climbed into her clothes right there in front of all the students. The models should go behind a screen to avoid creating the reaction Fanny was feeling now—as if a lovely dream had been interrupted.

apartment on Rue de Naples was in Montmartre, the highest point in the city. Fanny was  pleased to  get  a  whole  ?oor  for  ?fteen  dollars  a  month,  plus  two  dollars  for  the concierge. It had a formal dining room with tall mirrors, and a kitchen with a porcelain stove and a hydrant that brought artesian water up to the apartment at no extra charge. Her building was full of artists and poets who had formed a tight little community.
Once Hervey’s health was improving, Fanny went out with the surgeon she’d met on the ship from New York. He would show up with a liveried attendant whose sole purpose was to remove the surgeon’s elegant cape when he arrived, and put it back on him when it was time to leave. Fanny didn’t doubt Hendricks’s interest and delight in her, but she suspected he was only pretending to be a  serious suitor, and that his annual trips were personal dramas in which he acted the dashing American abroad. He needed a ladylove on his arm, and she found it amusing to play the part as he gadded about Paris looking romantic, with his shirt collar turned up and his cravat tied in a bow à la Byron.

Mr. Hendricks would help Fanny into his perfect carriage and ride through Paris with her, seeking cheap furniture for her ?at. They delighted in looking for the whimsical old painted tin signs that designated a particular business. Enormous gray eyes peering through round spectacles signaled an eye doctor. They saw huge scissors above a tailor’s door, a Napoleon-style red and gold bicorne hat outside the milliner’s, a  black tin lobster for a ?shmonger,  and  an  enormous  fork  for  a  hotel  restaurant.  When  they  found  a  sign portraying a chair, they knew they were in the right neighborhood. Mr. Hendricks ordered the driver to halt.

“I’m an old hand at making silk purses out of sows’ ears,” Fanny told her friend, who looked confused standing in the middle of one dusty shop after another. Hendricks was

clearly  an  innocent when  it came to junk  stores.  “It just takes some imagination,” she explained. She bought the cheapest possible chairs and tables, after which the sweet fellow whisked her into his waiting carriage and called out to his driver the name of a restaurant in  a  better  neighborhood,  where  he  treated  Fanny  to  a  meal  of  oysters, mignonnettes d’agneau, and vintage Veuve Clicquot, interspersed with tender squeezes of the hand.

“You  get  good  light  in  here,”  Margaret  Wright  said  the  ?rst  time  she  visited  Fanny’s apartment. They stood looking out the window of her parlor, with its view of windmills at the top of the hill, and below, the city’s battered buildings.

“It’s not the Paris my friends back home crowed about,” Fanny said. Dora  and Virgil Williams had seen Paris in the days before the Prussians blasted the city to rubble.
“It’s a  ruined battle?eld,” Margaret observed.  “I know a  woman who was one of the Commune people. She’s quite poetic when she talks about those glory days. All the workers rallying  to  be  heard  in  the  new  government  after  the  siege,  women  demanding  new rights  … This neighborhood was a  main outpost for them, you know. Awful how it all ended. So many Communards executed, maybe right around here—and only, what, ?ve years ago?”

“Five years ago,” Fanny said thoughtfully. “I was carrying Hervey and setting up a new household in Oakland. I knew almost nothing about it.”

“How brave those people were, to stand up that way,” Margaret mused. Fanny  realized  that  when  her  new  friends  talked  about  the  siege  and  the  uprising
afterward, she lost interest. She saw signs every day of the war that had been waged in these streets; on  either side of her building, the former houses were piles of stone and boards. She had only to walk around the neighborhood to see abandoned cannons strewn here and there. But it was somebody else’s war, not her own.

“Your Communard friend would probably despise me,” Fanny said to Margaret. “I’m not very political. I can’t bear the type of woman who makes a profession of going around giving speeches. Oh, I believe in women’s rights in a general sort of way. But truth be told, I’m more of a clinging-vine type.”

Margaret burst out laughing. “You? A clinging vine?”

Fanny shrugged. “I don’t want to be an oak that stands alone. It makes me lonesome to think of the oak with no shelter, no support, except what it provides for itself.”

“Now, that surprises me,” Margaret said. “You are the woman who left her husband and brought her children over here so you could paint, for goodness’ sake.”
“I know. How can I say it? I don’t want to live the rest of my life without a man. Some day I would like to ?nd another … a good man. Right now, though, what I want from Paris is some beauty in our lives, some peace and happiness. And do you know? I think Paris, after what it has been through, wants the same things.”

Once  Fanny  had  settled  her  family  in  Montmartre,  once  Hervey  began  to  return  to himself, a wave of freedom washed over her. Away from Sam and her family and neighbors and  even  her  artistic  friends  in  San  Francisco,  she  felt  a  sense  of  contentment  unlike anything she had known since she was a child. Six thousand miles it had taken, but at last, the seething hurt inside her calmed. She commenced taking notes for a story she would write about the new Paris growing up around her. Maybe a story about construction of the basilica of Sacré Coeur, which was under way at the top of Montmartre. People seemed to like stories about European cathedrals. There wasn’t much to see yet, but she might be able to sell a piece on the hilltop church to a magazine, the way Margaret had done, and make a bit of money to supplement Sam’s monthly check.

She loved the anonymity of Paris. In Antwerp she had been a curiosity. Here, there were single women from around the world, going about their business with nary a second glance. Fanny was not new to the bohemian style of life; she had befriended writers and painters back home who ?t the category. But the women at the San Francisco School of Design were subdued compared to these free spirits. We are living among the lotus-eaters, she wrote to Rearden.

She and the children were surviving cheaply, as most of the artists were, yet they hardly noticed it at ?rst. For very little, she could buy cooked vegetables and slices of meat that required only heating. Her mother had always been fond of the saying “You can’t get blood from a turnip.” Well, there’s one point on which you and I don’t agree, Ma. Fanny had always possessed a knack for making something out of nothing. When the spirit moved her, she threw together onions, chicken backs and carrots into a pot and invited a group of students from the atelier to a jolly dinner.

Later, when she tried to recall the early weeks in Paris, she wouldn’t be able to remember one moment of pleasure from that time. For by December, Hervey had fallen desperately, deliriously ill.