​

My mother is a formidable woman. Her grandmother was part of the women’s march on Versailles. My mother prides herself on having the same angry fortitude and boisterous determination that had my great-grandmother and her compatriots first storming the city council, and then helping to drag a cannon from the Hôtel de Ville in Paris to Versailles, where they called for the King Louis XVI to come to Paris and see to the citizenry, and his Queen Marie Antoinette to be thrown to the mob. My great-grandmother claimed she was one of those who slipped into the palace through an unguarded gate and eventually killed a guard at the Queen’s apartment, causing Marie Antoinette and her ladies to flee to the locked door of the King’s bedchamber to pound on it for several minutes before being let in.

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We all know how life eventually worked out for Louis and his Queen.

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I do not remember my great-grandmother, as she died before I was born, but I can recite the stories from memory that my mother has regaled me with about her family. My mother told me many times that after her grandmother died—her husband having died many years earlier—her parents took the meager money that my great-grandmother had saved from working for a fromagerie in the Les Halles market, combined it with their own meager savings, and used it to buy a partial interest in a porcelain factory in the Passy neighborhood of Paris. My grandmother, always artistic according to my mother, became a porcelain painter of considerable skill. My grandfather, although also from meager beginnings, became an accomplished businessman. A decade later, they owned the whole factory, and a shop where my grandmother sold their wares, and the family was elevated from market sellers to upper-middle-class manufacturers and merchants by the time my mother was a young adult.

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My mother was a beautiful young woman. She remains so—beautiful, I mean—by many accounts. When my mother met my father, he was from a well-known, wealthy banking family, but a nephew, not a son of where the real money lay, taken in by his relatives when his parents died at a young age. Still, he was quite a match to have been made by a girl from the nouveau rich middle class that my mother and my grandparents belonged to, and he had a very solid job in the family bank and an inheritance from his parents.

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My father walked into his future in-laws' shop to buy a vase as a birthday present for his Aunt and spied my mother at the counter. When my mother tells the story, she talks about her long chestnut hair shining in the sunlight streaming through the shop window, her pretty green eyes, and her slim waist. They were married shortly after that, perhaps due to the imminence of my brother’s birth.

I can’t be positive, my mother refuses to speak about the shortness of their engagement and says they were so in love they could not wait to be married.

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My parents sleep in rooms at different ends of the house. My father spends most of his time, when he is home and not at the bank, locked in his study, presumably working. This has been what is normal in the house for as long as I can remember.

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They must have spent some time together for me to have come along a dozen years after my brother.

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In truth, I barely know my brother. When I was four, he was sent off to study at the university, and eventually became a priest. My mother’s vocation has been spending the last years trying to get him into our local parish, but it is quite a plum job in the diocese to be the priest in a parish inhabited by so much of the Paris Elite and those trying to buy their way in. My mother has to travel to a poorer parish to see my brother, even after years of prostrating herself before our Parish priest and the Bishop and Archbishops of Paris, and insisting my father tithe to the church far beyond what others give. She spends many hours at church, praying in the Lady Chapel dedicated to the Mother of Christ. It’s almost as if she thinks that the fact that she gave birth to a priest makes her especially beloved of the Virgin Mary. Perhaps I am ignorant, and she is.

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My brother is my mother’s favorite child.

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I am not my mother’s favorite because I have inherited the artistic proclivities of my grandmother, and I am a painter. I am an artist with a paint-splattered jacket and dirty fingers. A throwback of sorts, a black sheep among the pure white lambs of privilege. I did not study at the university like my brother did, I studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. This impresses my grandmother, but sometimes, when I tell people in my mother’s presence that I am an artist, I would swear that I see her cringe.

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Mother wishes me to be a banker. But, although my father has done more than well investing his inheritance from his to-soon-dead parents, and working for his uncle who is soon to retire, my uncle has three sons. There is no more room in the family for another banker, at a bank that does not belong to my father. And I do not wish to be the poor relation bank clerk, living on the implied but not actual largesse of my cousins.

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My mother does not like being reminded that she is the daughter of the merchant class. My grandparents sold their factory and their shop, and retired to Dijon where my grandfather’s people are from. They live a comfortable life on a small farm. It is a trip by train to visit, so we did not go there often when I was growing up, and my mother says her parents do not like to travel in their old age so do not want to come to Paris. I think perhaps it is my mother who does not want them to come to Paris very often. She prefers to show off the tree she has grown into while ignoring the roots that allowed her to do so.

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Do you wonder why, dear reader, if you have carried forward long enough in this missive, that I would tell you in so intimate a voice about my family and myself? It is because I wish you to understand everything that happened in the story I am about to tell you.

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I had just finished a series of portraits for a client of my father, who owns the largest porcelain factory in Paris. The gentleman wished to have himself and his wife immortalized in separate paintings to hang over facing fireplaces in their grand salon. Then, his wife decided a painting of their daughter would be an excellent idea. I managed to deemphasize her underbite in my painting and give a gentle swell to her bosom that is absent in real life. I flirted with her constantly as I painted. It made her smile and her eyes light up, and her face look less horsey. I incorporated her happiness over my attention into her portrait. Mademoiselle Genevieve Dufort has been quite pleased with the finished work. And with me, too.

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The money was very good. It is not the earnings of a banker, but I am the son of a banker and I live in a cottage at the back of my father’s property and pay him a pittance in rent, so I enjoy the life of the rich and the life of a bohemian at the same time. I am not in a hurry to saddle myself with responsibility. The cottage suits me.

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I was sitting on the small table in the garden, a bottle of wine for company, when my mother emerged from the main house with a basket and a pair of shears. Knowing my mother, I was sure she had been watching from the windows and, incensed by my indolence, was using the gathering of a bouquet as an excuse to barrage me with demands of why I am not more like my saintly brother or hardworking father.

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As if making Mademoiselle Dufort’s jutting jaw disappear is not hard work.

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“I see you have nothing to do today,” My mother said as she snipped a perfect white lily and laid it carefully in the basket. “Have you finished the work for Monsieur Dufort?”

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I took another sip of my wine. I did not offer to go into the house and retrieve a glass for my mother. I  was almost certain all my other glasses were filled with brushes and turpentine and paint. I reminded myself that I should cajole Madam Rousseau, my parents’ housekeeper, into cleaning the cottage this week.

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The little house in the garden is mainly my studio. My parents bought the acreage ten years ago when the estate holder behind us was in dire straights and unable to pay his taxes. My father took advantage of the situation to increase our property, and I claimed the cottage as my own. I have a fireplace for colder days, and a stove in the corner held over from the days when the land it sits on belonged to the estate next door and the cottage was the home of the gardener, but I mostly take my meals in the house with my parents. I kept the original furniture it came to us with, mainly because it irritated my mother that her son was sleeping on the mattress of a gardener and sitting at the table of a common laborer. Emile, my father’s valet, helped me drag a few old pieces from the attic to placate my mother’s sensibilities.

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It suites me, the little cottage in the corner of the garden. Sometimes I imagine it as the house of my great-grandmother, who helped drag a cannon to Versailles.

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“Perhaps you should ask Monsieur Dufort if he has associates or clients that are in need of a portrait painter.”

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“I am fine, Mother. And I have plenty of money to pay the rent. Did you want me to get the francs for you now?”

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I take another sip of wine and do not bother to get up because I know my mother will say no. She and my father have no need of the money. She is not concerned with the rent. She is concerned with my artist’s soul, and how it would be better as the industrious soul of a banker, or at least a businessman. A businessman married to a woman of good breeding, from a good family with a sufficient amount of money, and who will fill my home—which will not be a century-old cottage with a blackened ancient stove in the corner and a bed in a loft above a studio filled with paint and canvas and half-finished paintings—with children my grandmother can tell the history of her family to.

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“No. I do not want to carry your money around. Use it to pay Madame Rousseau. I will send her out to clean the cottage on Friday. I looked in the windows yesterday, and it looks like a herd of pigs ran through it.”

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“I have not seen any pigs, Mother. An artist’s studio is a disheveled place. Creativity is chaotic. Art is unkempt.”

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My mother sighed, placed another lily in the basket, and set it down on the cobblestones garden path.   She laid the shears carefully in the basket and took off her gloves, methodically pulling on the tip of   each finger before finally pulling first one glove and then the other off at the thumbs. She smoothed her skirt with her hands, and then reached up her hands to check that her hair is still being held up by its pin, a gesture I have seen her do a thousand times. She walked over and sat in the chair next to me, in front of the table in front of the shabby house I pay them a pittance to live in.

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“You need a wife, Etienne. And a real home.” She took my glass from in front of me, filled it from the bottle, and took a large gulp before setting the glass down in front of herself. “Being an artist is a fine hobby for a young man, but the time has come for you to take life seriously. You cannot spend the rest of your life mining our friends for portrait painting jobs, entering art exhibitions a few times a year, and living in the gardener’s cottage.”

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“I am twenty-two years old, Mother. I still take classes at the Académie. There is talk next year of me teaching my own class. Paris is full of artists who make a living being artists. I am not ready yet to settle down with a daughter of the elite who will then proceed to birth a litter of children while I lock myself in a tobacco-scented study and scribble in ledgers.”

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I reached for the glass, drank down the wine, and poured the last of the bottle into my glass. I decided to go to Dijon to visit my grandparents, and spend a month painting landscapes and whatever else I choose. Anything but rich heiresses with jutting jaws. Anywhere I would not have to listen to my mother’s voice.

***

My grandparents’ house on their farm is fine, in a hearty, bound-to-the-earth way. The chateau is one hundred years old and made of stone the same color as my grandfather’s hair and mustache. There are thick wooden beams, slate and tile floors in the kitchen and the back rooms of the house, and parquet floors and plaster cornices in the more refined rooms downstairs and in the bedrooms. It is a fine house for the country. There is a stone barn and outbuildings. There is a pond where I sometimes fish with my grandfather in the afternoon.

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It is a fine house for the country, but I can see why my mother’s aversion to it. She is not like her mother, my grandmother, who gathers eggs in the morning and tends to her kitchen garden with Colette, the young women who helps the cook and is also a kind of ladies’ maid to my grandmother. Colette is young and beautiful, like a flower just beginning to bloom in a garden. Her hair is the darkest brunette and falls to her waist in waves that curl on the ends when she wears a kerchief on her head to hold it back from her face. Framed by perfectly arched brows, her eyes are hazel, her pupils ringed in green that turns to brown. Her figure is lithe, with little mounds of breasts. I can tell she doesn’t wear a corset.

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There is also an older couple that helps with the house. Mrs. Aubert does the cleaning and the laundry, and Mr. Aubert is a kind of Jack of all trades. He oversees the farm workers, and keeps everything working. He takes care of the farm animals. He can put on a suit and pretend he’s a butler if there is a need for one. It is the country, after all. They live in a little cottage on the property. My grandfather says they worked for the previous owner and it seemed logical to keep then on when he bought the property.

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Mrs. Aubert, on the days when she is working at the house, has developed a habit of watching me as I watch Colette. I cannot help it. I desire Colette like a starving man desires a meal. I long to see what hides behind her simple skirts and the muslin blouses that she no doubt has embroidered herself. She wears a colorful scarf as a belt around her slender waist, and I obsess over walking up behind her and untying it while I bend down to place a kiss on the spot where her slender neck meets her shoulder.

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I am determined to make her my model and to paint her. In my mind I imagine the myriad ways I would pose her, and what I would have her wear, or not wear, and how I would have her peek through the dark veil of her hair tumbling down. Or how I would paint nude, in the act of putting up her hair, her erect nipples pointing upward and the heaviness of her breast swelling like ripe round fruit underneath them.

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I am distracted by my memories. You must excuse my nostalgia for my youth, and for Colette’s youth. She was sixteen to my twenty-two years. Not so great a difference in our ages if I had been thirty and she 24, but that was not the place we were.

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We must rise early in the morning and then I help my grandfather until we go in for the midday meal. My grandfather does not work the fields himself; he has men that work for him. He is a gentlemen farmer after selling his factory. He greets the men that he hires from the village in the morning, and then He talks to Mr. Aubert. I help my grandfather with whatever small tasks he has given himself, or sometimes the three of us work together on something.

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After we have eaten le déjeuner, my time is my own to paint. I have taken the bedroom in the back of the house with the sitting room, and I set up my easel and paints there, but most of the time I am out and about in the country painting plein air. Sometimes I borrow my grandfather’s bicycle and explore the countryside.

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I have put away my tailored suits for the plain trousers and linen shirts of a farmer. My mother would be appalled. My fine leather boots are the only thing that gives me away, but half the time I take them off in the fine weather and paint with my feet in the grass.

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My mother writes me letters from Paris. I put them in the drawer of the dresser and ignore them. My grandmother reads the letters my mother sends to her. My grandmother tells me my father is feeling unwell, according to the letters she receives from my mother. He has gone to a spa in Aix-les-Bains

 

I am happy here in Dijon, away from the hustle and bustle of Paris. I have no social obligations, no homely heiresses to paint with flatterly, and no mother to tell me constantly what I should be doing or not doing with my life. I am free from all that for the moment. But mostly I am happy because I have talked my grandmother into talking to Colette for me and seeing if she will consent to be my model. I have promised to pay her well. My grandmother says she and my grandfather took her in and gave her a job after her parents died, and that she dreams of going to Paris and becoming a dressmaker’s apprentice.

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I dream of taking Colette to Paris and keeping her in my cottage as my muse, painting her in the languid hour after we have exhausted ourselves in the old gardener’s bed. I would arrange her with her tangled curls tumbling over her breasts and the sheets damp with our sweat crumpled around her naked body.  

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***

 

Today another letter came from my Paris with my mother’s neat, slanted writing spelling out my name and my grandparents’ address. I threw it in the dresser drawer with the others. I am too busy painting Colette, and seducing Colette, to be interested in what is happening in Paris. I lie in bed when the house is asleep, and I think about her on the floor above, lying in her simple bed in her plain servant’s room. I imagine the thin cotton gown she must be wearing, no doubt embellished with the same floral embroidery and crocheted trimmings she works on when she sits with my grandmother, talking about when she will have saved enough money to go to Paris and become a dressmaker's apprentice.

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Sometimes she does work for one of the dressmakers in Dijon, who no doubt passes off Colette’s work as their own. My grandmother says Colette is a good girl and a hard worker, and she has no doubt that one day Colette will go to Paris and accomplish exactly what she wants to accomplish.

Every day when she is done with her work for the cook and my grandmother and I am done helping my grandfather, Colette models for me.  I have painted her sitting on the kitchen porch at the back of the house, shelling peas from the garden, her kerchief on her head and her long dark curls tumbling down.  I have painted her standing in the flower garden, her arms crossed in front of her, hands to elbows, causing her young breasts to strain against the material of her shirtwaist. In that portrait, she has a Mona Lisa smile, and her dark eyes are shining. I imagine that she knows how much I want her, and that she has to physically hold herself back from rushing forward to give herself to me.

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Every night I imagine myself climbing up the back stairs to softly open her bedroom door. I picture her awake, waiting for me, knowing I would come one night.

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Tonight, my blood is too hot, my longing too much, my passion cannot be contained a moment longer The moon is full and bright and I feel the pull of it as the glow from it floods the room. I get out of bed, and I tamp down the part of me that wants to run and grasp and consume and break apart and devour, and I softly creep up the back stairs to the small room next to the attic. The door is cracked about six inches wide, and I lay my hand against it and softly push it open. The light from the moon coming in through the window is even brighter on this side of the house. She is lying on her side, her back to the door. The bedclothes are bunched to the side of her, one slender leg has escaped from her white nightgown and is thrown over them, and I think of her restless and wanting and holding herself in this room as I was restless and wanting and holding myself in mine, and then she turns towards me and in her eyes, I see everything I need to know and everything I want.

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***

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Today my grandparents have gone to Dijon for the day and I am painting Colette lying on the couch in my study. It is not my cottage in the garden, but it is a fine place for her to be. She is reclined on the pillows I have piled up behind her until she is almost sitting up. Her right arm is up above her head, her elbow bent. Her other hand is in her lap underneath a quilt that comes to her waist but leave her breasts bare. I thought that provocative, knowing any man would wonder what her hand was resting. I’d arranged her tumbling curls carefully, laying one lock so that it encircled her one pert brown nipple.

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She had the satisfied look of a woman who has just been made love to. Because she has. When I have finished highlighting the fold on the white sheet, I think I will make love to her again.

I hear the doorknob turning and when I turn around, my mother is walking through the door into my study. She is wearing a hat with a giant bright blue bird on the side of it, and I can’t take my gaze from that bird, so realistic does it look. All I can do is wonder how she’s managed to force even the birds to do her will.

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I hear Colette scramble off the couch, run into the bedroom and slam the door.

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“Your father is ill,” my mother said. “You must return to Paris.”

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***

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I told Colette I would return for her. I swore on my life. I wiped the tears from her cheek and told her that my love would never end. That I would never be able to put a brush to canvas again if we didn’t find our way back together. I whispered all this with my mother harumphing by the door, probably thinking about how much she had to pay to have the carriage waiting outside.

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My mother hadn’t said a word to Colette. She told me that my father was ill, and that because I hadn’t answered her letters she’s been forced to take the train to Dijon and then hire a carriage to drive here. My brother was with my father now, but he had responsibilities in the church. I would have to come home.

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Of course, I am not a nurse. I love my father but I am not the one a normal person would ask to take care of him. Shouldn’t he have a professional nurse? Wasn’t Dr. Laurent taking care of him?

Colette emerged from the bedroom at the moment. She was dressed, her hair pinned up and her cheeks flushed. She gave my mother the stupidest little curtsey and I wanted to kiss her and kick her behind at the same time. Mother told her go to the kitchen and make some tea, and Colette scurried off.

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She never drank the tea. She stood there while I packed up my things. We left a note for my grandparents. I had the few whispered moments Colette, and two hours later we were on the train back to Paris.

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I left the unfinished portrait.