Moonlight Over Paris (7 page)

“I'm glad . . . I mean, I should hate to think of Miss Barney being harassed in any way. She and her friends . . .”

“Yes?”

“I envy them, that's all. They were so confident. So assured. I do hope I'll make friends of my own at school.”

“Of course you will. Simply keep an open mind and a smile on your face and you'll be awash in friends in no time.”

H
elena arrived at the academy early, that first morning, and dutifully queued for her
carte d'étudiant,
an
horaire,
and a shapeless artist's smock that was far too large for her slight frame.

“Excuse me,” she called out, trying to catch the clerk's attention. It was no easy task, given the general din in the room and crush of students, all just as eager to be done with their paperwork. “May I exchange this for another size?”

“One size, Mademoiselle. Next!”

Rather than make a fuss, and possibly incur the enmity of everyone else in the queue, she retreated to the hallway, and then, finding it full to bursting with yet more students, ventured upstairs. Presumably the timetable she'd received, now rather crumpled, would include details of her classes' locations as well as their times.

She walked to the end of the corridor, where it was somewhat less congested, and unfolded the
horaire
.

Mlle H. Parr—septembre 1924

lundi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon

mardi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon

mercredi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon

jeudi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon

vendredi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon

They'd made a mistake. In the school's prospectus, the curriculum for intermediate students had included classes in watercolors, pastels, and oils. No sculpture, which had been a shame, but everything else had definitely been mentioned in the brochure. On her timetable, however, she was only enrolled in one two-hour drawing class each day.

“Oh, bother,” she muttered. Now she would have to go downstairs and brave the masses again.

“Is anything the matter?” asked a young man standing nearby. He was dressed in the shabby, informal way that amounted to a uniform among the artists of Montparnasse: a worn and none-too-clean coat, a wrinkled shirt with an open collar, and no hat whatsoever. He was also astonishingly good-looking, with beautiful green eyes and straight brown hair so long that it brushed his shoulders.

“I think there's a mistake. I've only been signed up for the drawing classes, but I'm sure there—”

“Turn it over,” he said, smiling. “Voilà. There are the classes for October.”

Feeling terribly silly, she looked on the reverse of the page, and there it was:

Mlle H. Parr—octobre 1924

lundi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon; 13 h à 15 h, pastels, salon B

mardi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon; 13 h à 15 h, aquarelles, salon C

mercredi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon; 13 h à 15 h, pastels, salon B

jeudi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin, grand salon; 13 h à 15 h, aquarelles, salon C

vendredi, 10 h à 12 h, dessin à modèle vivant, grand salon

“Thank you. I was worried I'd have to go downstairs and join the queue again.”

“And that is a fate worse than death, hmm?”

“Nearly. How do you do?” she asked, remembering her manners. “I'm Helena Parr.”

“And I am Étienne Moreau, and very pleased to make your acquaintance.” He had a lovely voice, his accent just noticeable enough to make everything he said sound charming. Smiling again, he shook her outstretched hand. “Shall we go in?”

Behind them, halfway down the corridor, students were streaming through a set of open doors. Her first class was beginning.

The
grand salon
was a large but not enormous room, and most of its space was taken up by sets of easels and stools, around forty in total. At its front was a low platform about five feet square and half as high. Light streamed in from a huge bank of windows; even on a dull day, she saw, the salon would be bright enough for work without artificial light.

Mr. Moreau took a spot on the left side of the salon, near the back, and she sat next to him, her heart pounding. She had never been given to attacks of nerves before, so why was she so anxious now?

“
Courage,
” her new friend whispered, using the French pronunciation. “And put on your smock. We're using charcoal today, and you don't want to ruin your clothes. Shall I help you roll back the sleeves?”

“I think I can manage, but thank you.”

“Excuse me, but is this seat taken?” A young woman,
American by her accent, now stood by the last stool and easel in their row.

“It isn't—please do take it.”

“Thank you so much. I galloped nearly all the way here,” she said, rummaging through her handbag, “and I was late all the same.” Finding a handkerchief, she patted invisible drops of perspiration from her brow. “Thank heavens I got here in time. Oh—you're wearing your smock. I'd better put mine on, too. I wish it wasn't so big.”

Helena smiled at her, and was about to say something reassuring when she realized that a man had entered the salon and was standing at the front. Rather than ascend the stage, however, he stood next to it, his expression impossible to read.

He was middle-aged, perhaps in his early fifties, and was dressed more like a banker than an artist, with a collar and tie and rather old-fashioned coat. His hair, which he wore swept back off his brow, was less conventional, for it was dark and wavy and fell almost to his shoulders, and he had a carefully trimmed Vandyke mustache and beard. She wasn't sure if he was handsome, or merely striking. Either way, he wasn't the sort of man one ignored.

He waited, his demeanor unchanging, until the room was entirely silent, and only then did he speak.

“I am Fabritius Czerny. I expect one-quarter of you, perhaps as many as a third, to flee by the end of this week. I make no apologies. This is a difficult course of study, and far beyond the talents of many here today. If you find the work I give you too challenging, you are free to withdraw from the course, or you may wish to join our class for beginners.”

His voice was soft and low, and only lightly accented. Under different circumstances, Helena might even have thought it beautiful.

“I will be blunt: I am not a pleasant person. I am not, as the Americans among you might say, ‘a nice guy.' I am not here to be your friend or your mentor, and I have no interest in your thoughts or opinions.

“We shall begin from the beginning. You may think you know how to paint, but you do not. You know
nothing
. And so you must unlearn all the rubbish you have been fed, like so much pap, by your other teachers. You must forget all so you may learn all.”

He surveyed the room, a dark-maned lion assessing a herd of terrified gazelle, but rather than hide behind her easel, as others were attempting to do, Helena straightened her back and didn't look away when his gaze swept across her. She was made of sterner stuff, and she'd faced disapproving stares before. Compared to the first ball she'd attended after Edward had ended their engagement? This was nothing.

“Most of you are American or English, so I shall teach this course in English. If you have difficulty understanding, ask a neighbor, and don't even think of bothering me. You shall now embark on a series of sketches. Before you is paper sufficient for the exercise, as well as a selection of charcoal.”

Maître Czerny set a tall stool upon the center of the stage and then strode to the side of the room, to a set of shelves that was crowded with objects of every color, shape, size, and substance. He selected a bowl of apples and, returning to the stage, placed it on the stool.

“You may begin. You have ten minutes. Do not bother to prepare the paper; simply draw. Draw what you see before you.”

Never in all her life had Helena been as apprehensive of a task as she was now. Withdrawing a stick of charcoal at random from the cup on her easel, she sketched a light outline—but
she had chosen a piece of soft charcoal by mistake, and it left a thick, almost jet-black line on the paper. She scrubbed at it with a lump of putty eraser, and succeeded only in smearing the paper. Praying Maître Czerny wouldn't notice, she flipped the paper over, found a thin stalk of vine charcoal, and began again. Outline. Shadows. Shadows softened.

She needed to remove some of what she had added, and so add highlights, but the light in the salon was coming from two sources, the bank of windows and the electric lights that dangled overhead, and was reflected in quite different ways by the apples, which she was certain were papier-mâché or wax, and by the bowl, which was made of a dark, almost opaque glass. She needed to—

“Enough!” Maître Czerny carried the bowl and apples back to the shelf and returned with an ornate and heavily tarnished silver candelabrum. “Take up a fresh sheet of paper. This time you have five minutes. Begin!”

Her hand flew over the paper, trying in vain to capture what her eye saw, but she got the proportions all wrong, and she hadn't the time to erase what she'd done, and the finer details of the silver were vanishing into a misshapen blur that bore more resemblance to a dead tree than a piece of antique silver, and—

“Enough!” He removed the candelabrum and replaced it with a wreck of a violin, its strings broken and tangled. “Two minutes!”

The shape of the instrument was easy to capture, but she'd barely sketched its outline when the dreaded order came—“Enough! One minute!”—and the violin was replaced with an enormous conch shell, pale ivory with a delicate pink interior, its curving lines so—

“Enough! That is all for the moment.”

Helena set down her charcoal, her hands shaking so badly that she had to fold them into her lap. Her sketches were crude, unfocused, and amateurish, while Mr. Moreau's—she couldn't help but glance at them—were elegant and effortlessly graceful.

“Choose the best of your efforts, and set it on your easel,” their teacher commanded.

Maître Czerny walked along the rows, muttering to himself in French and what Helena took to be Czech. Periodically he would groan loudly, or run a hand through his hair. Two or three times he examined a sketch for a few seconds longer, and then, before moving on, nodded curtly.

At last he was at their row. He paused by Mr. Moreau's sketch, a marvel of simplicity that captured the conch shell in four or five sweeping lines, and nodded approvingly. For Helena's sketch, he offered no response, instead moving past as if he hadn't even seen it. A moment later, she knew she'd been lucky to escape so easily, for his groan of disdain upon seeing the American girl's work was accompanied by yet more hair-pulling and grumbling.

When he had finished his inspection he returned to the front, scrubbed his hands over his face, and raised his eyes to the heavens. “Terrible. Simply terrible. Try again,” he commanded the entire class.

Ten minutes to sketch a vase filled with ostrich plumes, five minutes for a heap of red and gold brocade, two minutes for a forlorn and moth-eaten stuffed pheasant, and finally one minute for a green glass fisherman's float.

“A few—a
very
few—of these sketches show promise,” he said upon his return to the front of the salon. “The rest belong in the bottom of a chicken coop. There is only one thing to be done: you will start at the very beginning.

“Cone. Cylinder. Sphere. Cube. Torus.”

Someone at the front must have grumbled, or made a face, because Maître Czerny was across the room in a flash, looming over the poor fellow, all but shouting in his face. “Did I not say I care nothing for your opinions?”

He paced the width of the salon, back and forth, pulling his hair back from his brow so forcefully that Helena's eyes fairly watered at the sight.

“You long to be successful, do you not? You long to be the young new painter everyone is talking about. But you do not wish to do the work. And you cannot become great without learning how to
draw
.

“It does not matter if you wish to paint like an Old Master or a Cubist—the education is the same. If you cannot draw, you are nothing. And your art? It is
nothing
.”

He went once again to the shelves, and this time took down a plain wooden cylinder. This he placed on the stool. “I will give you one half hour to draw this cylinder. Begin.”

Calm yourself, Helena thought. Calm. She could draw a cylinder in half an hour. This, she could do.

Helena decided to prepare the paper before she began—not as painstakingly as she would ordinarily do, but enough to provide some depth to the sketch's background. She dug a flat piece of compressed charcoal from the cup on her easel and, holding it flat against the paper, spread an even layer of light gray across its entire surface. No rag had been provided, so she used the cuff of her smock to blend the charcoal to a pale, even wash of silver. Turning the stick on end, she sketched the cylinder's outline in quick, confident strokes. Shadows came next, and then highlights, which she created with swift, sure touches of her putty eraser. She worked carefully, pausing now
and again to survey her progress, blocking out all thoughts of Maître Czerny and the other students.

“Enough!” he called. “We have only enough time for one more shape. Shall we see what ruin you can make of a sphere? Begin.”

Moments later, it seemed, the bells at Notre-Dame Cathedral began to chime the hour. It was noon.

Maître Czerny went to the door, issuing a final directive before departing. “Take your work with you. I have no use for it. For tomorrow, I expect you to prepare one example of each shape, executed to the best of your sadly limited abilities.
À demain
.”