“How do you manage it all?” Helena asked. “I can scarcely keep my head above water, and I only have to take care of myself.”
“I don’t really have a choice, do I? It’s not so very hard. Of course there are days when I am very tired, but then I remember how fortunate I am. My husband returned from the war, though many did not. I have a roof over my head, enough to eat, family to share my work. I have a child who is happy and healthy. I am a very fortunate woman, am I not?”
Mathilde stood, the same soft smile upon her face, and turned to look down at Helena. “Shall we be on our way?”
Helena returned her smile gratefully. Given what she had just learned, she wouldn’t have been surprised if Mathilde had hated her and Daisy on sight. Her friend carried so many burdens, and unlike Helena she never complained about them—she didn’t even whine about Ma?tre Czerny.
“Where would you like to go now?”
“Would you mind if we visited the cathedral? It’s on the way home for both of us, is it not?”
“It is. Allons-y, then.”
Walking north, Helena and Mathilde continued until the Seine was before them and they were facing the grassy prow of the ?le de la Cité. They bore east for half a mile, to the narrow Pont au Double, which led them across to the busy forecourt of Notre-Dame Cathedral.
Long ago, she knew, the church’s great west fa?ade had been brightly painted, though she couldn’t recall if the colors had been stripped away or had simply faded over the centuries. She tried to imagine what the cathedral would have looked like six or seven hundred years earlier, when its stonework had mimicked the stained glass of its windows. Modern eyes would find it jarring, no doubt, but it must have suited medieval tastes.
Helena hadn’t returned to Notre-Dame since her first exploration of Paris in early September, but it promised peace, and sanctuary of a sort, as well. With Mathilde leading the way, they slipped inside, dodging the tourists and their guides. They paused to make certain that Mass was not being said, then walked down the nave toward the high altar.
As they neared the transept, Helena bent her head, keeping her eyes fixed on the worn marble floor. She passed the first row of chairs and walked a yard or two farther, until she was at the center of the crossing. Only then did she turn to the right and raise her face to the jeweled radiance of the south rose window.
She had first visited Notre-Dame as a child, and she had overheard someone, possibly a guide, advising a fellow visitor to do the same. The beauty of the cathedral had moved her beyond words, and the light from the window sustained and nourished her even now. She would likely never achieve perfection in her own work, but someone else had, and the simple thought of this, of its possibility, comforted her beyond words or sense.
“Do you wish to stay here, or come with me to the chapel of St. Geneviève? I won’t be long,” Mathilde whispered.
“You go. I’ll sit here for a while.”
The choir had gathered, it seemed for a practice, and rather than linger before the altar Helena found a seat on the southern aisle of the nave. Sitting in the shadow of a looming pillar so high she could scarcely discern its terminus, she listened to the gathered voices, rising and falling, singing the same words in exquisite counterpoint: Dona Nobis Pacem. Give us peace.
She sat and listened, and presently she noticed a large plaque that had been affixed to a nearby pillar.
TO THE GLORY OF GOD
AND TO THE MEMORY OF
ONE MILLION DEAD
OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
WHO FELL
IN THE GREAT WAR
1914–1918
AND OF WHOM THE
GREATER PART REST
IN FRANCE
A million dead across the empire, and millions more in Europe and beyond. How was she, or anyone else, to make sense of such numbers? Of such suffering?
Of those dead, how many had been artists? It wasn’t the sort of thing that was summarized in war diaries and official histories, but many hundreds, even thousands, must have been artists like herself. They, too, had struggled and doubted themselves and wondered if they might be better suited to some other occupation. And now they were gone.
A year or so after the Armistice, she’d bought a book of poems by Wilfred Owen, who, she later learned, had been killed just before the end of the war. The poems had been difficult and troubling, raw in their beauty, and she’d read them over and over, using them to make sense of her own, pathetically insignificant sorrows.
“Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were,” he had written. Millions were dead, though they ought to have lived—ought to be working and loving and standing in the nave of Notre-Dame as the spangled light of the south rose window fell across their faces. Millions more, men like Mathilde’s husband, had been left disfigured, maimed, and tormented.
What were her troubles, compared to that?
She would not despair. She would make the most of this chance to study, to learn, and she would remember to look up and see the beauty that surrounded her.