For the first time since I’d come to Paris, I wished I were not there. Not faced with this untenable conundrum: accept Julien’s help, banish La Lune, and become someone he might not love, or fight him, hold on to La Lune, and lose myself.
I smelled violets, and the scent nauseated me. Her anger swirled around me, crimson, purple, and stinking of flowers and sulfur.
I was on the verge of losing the very thing she wanted, but the only sure way to keep it was to let her go.
“Please, Sandrine, please let me take you to see Dr. Blanche.”
“To be locked up like my grandmother? I said no. I am not mad!”
He let go of my hands, turned from me, and dressed without saying another word.
Before he left, he stood at the door for a moment and gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “When you are ready to be rational and let me help you find a doctor, you know where to find me.”
And then he walked out of my bedroom, leaving me alone with the glorious painting of him and a ghost who was, at that moment, as lost as I was.
Chapter 34
I returned to school a day later, bringing Moreau the paintings that he’d requested. He assessed them quickly and said he was satisfied that I’d painted them.
That was because I had.
These weren’t the paintings I’d showed him that first day but -copies—close enough to the originals to look familiar, but at the same time done in my hand.
Did he know I’d tricked him?
Now, looking back, I think he did, for he assessed them in seconds and seemed relieved to move on and discuss that day’s work.
I watched Serge watching Moreau, his eyes narrowed, his lips pursed. Was he that frightened of my talent that he would sabotage me? More than ten thousand artists submitted paintings to the Salon. Thousands competed for a prize. What difference did one more make?
After class, I tried to visit my grandmother but was not allowed in by orders from the doctor. It seemed my visits impeded her improvement too greatly. I went home and spent the rest of the day and night and then the rest of the week miserable, missing Julien, confused as to what to do next, and trying to distract myself by working on my Sleeping Cupid.
On Wednesday of the following week, a package with a label from a jeweler on rue Royale awaited me when I came home from school. Opening the fine leather box, I found a single luminous pink pearl hanging from a ruby station necklace.
Sandrine— Are you ready to exchange her necklace for mine? I miss you. —Julien
I fingered the smooth pearl. I wanted him back. Wanted to be with him. Should I submit to seeing a doctor? Would Dr. Blanche even agree to help me?
I put the necklace away and went to Passy.
Sitting across the desk from Dr. Blanche, fully prepared to discuss La Lune with him, I found I couldn’t speak. Every time I started to explain what had brought me there, I began to cough. I felt as if La Lune was inside of me, tickling my throat and holding my lips closed. I wondered if they looked bloodless to him, like the lips of the women in the paintings.
They couldn’t speak to tell their stories either.
Embarrassed and frustrated, I croaked out a question about my grandmother. I told him I was unhappy at not being able to see her and wanted to know why he was keeping me away. And I was. I had never been so alone in my life. Maison de la Lune echoed with my footsteps, and I felt as empty as the house.
I left Passy dejected and returned to rue des Saints-Pères.
The painting of Julien became the only thing that mattered to me and, other than attending classes, my only interaction with the outside world. I worked almost nonstop preparing my submission for the école. I’d come to believe that if Sleeping Cupid was accepted, Julien would come to the opening and see the painting and accept me as I was. Both the dark and the light of me.
The morning of March 1, I awoke from nightmares with a feeling of dread. It was the day submissions were due for the 1894 Salon. After dressing, I went to the studio to prepare Sleeping Cupid for the walk to the école.
The bell tower was in shadows. Without any sun shining through the windows, an atmosphere of melancholy clung to the pillows and coverlet on the daybed. It seemed to be sitting in the chairs, adhering to the walls. The only light came from the portrait sitting on the easel in the middle of the space.
Julien Duplessi depicted as an adult male Cupid. Julien’s body, his face, but with an angel’s iridescent feather wings. An erotic otherworldly creature. Luminous and shining. Long torso, longer legs, and between them, the partially erect proof of his arousing dream.
A nude painted of lust, painted in lust. It was provocative, to be sure. Too much so? Moreau would be surprised. I had brought a sketch of Leda and the Swan to his atelier, and he’d approved that. But I knew she didn’t have the chance that Cupid did. More than ten thousand paintings would be submitted, and only three thousand would be chosen. Of those, only a handful would be anointed. To be one of them, a painting not only had to be superlative; it had to stand out.
The entrance to the school was crowded with throngs of painters all dropping off their paintings on this one day. I stood on line, not seeing any of my classmates until I made my way inside. A group of them had already been through the line and were watching the goings-on from the sidelines.
Gaston saw me first, came over and told me that after I was done they’d be at La Palette if I wanted to join them.
“All year leading up to one day,” he said, shaking his head. “We deserve to get good and drunk.”
He cocked his head toward my covered canvas. “Are you pleased with how Leda turned out?”
“I’m too nervous to know.”
“That’s how I felt, too,” he said. “May I see?”
Before I could refuse, he lifted up the cloth and after a moment emitted a long slow whistle. “Now, what’s this? Not the painting you’ve been working on.”
“No, I thought this would have more of a chance.”
I was too nervous to ask him what he thought of it. But I didn’t have to. He told me.
“Are you out of your mind?” Gaston asked.
“I’d say far more clever than mad.” Serge had come over to see my painting and eyed it with disdain. “Played a trick on all of us, didn’t you, Sandrine? Pretended you were doing something tame and cautious while all the while planning a shock like this.” He paused as he stepped back to examine it from a greater distance. Other students noticed what was going on and gathered round, all examining my submission, talking and whispering among themselves.
“It’s perverse and decadent. And they will reject it,” Serge predicted. “Women are not allowed to paint male nudes. Not one has ever been accepted. And being Moreau’s darling won’t make any difference. You wasted your chance.”
I thought I detected a smile.
“Unless the committee is in the mood to prove one century is ending and the future is upon us,” Gaston said hopefully.
Other students came and went, reacting with shock and scorn. Other than Gaston, no one had a kind work to say.
Had I made a mistake? Would the committee reject my painting without even judging it simply based on its subject matter? No matter, it was too late to do anything about it.
I’d reached the head of the line. Marching into the auditorium, painting in hand, I held my head up and tried to prepare myself for what was about to happen.
Monsieur Moreau and four other teachers sat at a long wooden table at the far end of the room. They appeared weary, which was not unexpected since they’d been looking at submissions since early that morning. Judging from the lines, they would work late into the night and probably have to return the next day.
“Mademoiselle Sandrine Verlaine,” I said for the benefit of the clerk who logged in each painting and gave it a number.
“Mademoiselle Sandrine Verlaine, one thousand five hundred and eighty,” he called out.
I shuddered involuntarily at the coincidence that the number I’d been assigned was the same as the year of La Lune’s birth.