Читать книгу Sisters - Brigitte Lozerec'h - Страница 7

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I ended up feeling at home there. And, actually, I’ve been calling it “our studio” for a long time. Frédéric completely rearranged it shortly before our marriage.

It wasn’t considered proper for me to visit him there alone during our engagement. My chaperone’s presence kept us from having any real familiarity at all, and made us all the more impatient. He slipped the ring on my finger in August 1904, a few days before my eighteenth birthday, but it took me a long time really to relax in his space, into our new life. The fear that I was just passing through never went away.

Our plan was that, from then on, we each would have one end of the studio to ourselves. Located on the ground floor, in the rear of a courtyard on rue Chaptal, our work space is a few streets over from place Clichy. Our glass window is closed off from any passing apartment dwellers by a privet hedge perfuming the air when summer comes. With the large doorway open we can hear hoofs and the wheels of horse-drawn carriages clattering on the stone pavement, as well as loud voices: the man selling newspapers, the vegetable man, the one selling rabbit skins, the knife sharpener and other peddlers, occasionally an automobile motor . . .

For ten years now I’ve been privileged to work on colors and patterns in a place reserved for that purpose alone. Slight shudders of anxiety, unexpected and incongruous, still take me by surprise, as if someone were about to tell me, “Pack your bags again, you have to leave.” I keep fate at bay when this happens by closing my eyes and whispering, “Never again will a train or boat be loaded with my bags . . .” Anxiety has made me sedentary.

Being shut up, though not a prisoner, in the studio makes me happy. It’s the place where I’m able to love Frédéric, able to be myself.

The arrangement hasn’t changed since I got here and its stability suits me.

Frédéric put his easels, his trestle table, and his wardrobe next to the door, and my workbench and storage cabinet are set up in the back, near the steep staircase leading to the attic. In the front of the building there’s a workbench running the length of the glass window, just beneath it. It’s stained in some places and polished by the years in others because of the artist’s habit of putting the finishing touches on some detail by daylight. Jars of powdered pigments are lined up here, along with plates for mixing them, penholders, candles, paraffin lamps, bunches of paintbrushes, rags, and any number of other things. We work there with our feet on the cans of linseed oil and turpentine stored underneath.

At either end of the studio, we have each organized our own spaces, each with a screen close at hand in case one of us feels like being more alone. Disorder prevails on Frédéric’s side; at my end I’ve meticulously organized my cabinet so it holds all the boxes of pencils, pastels, tubes, and piles of old cotton fabric cloth. I’ve also sorted papers according to size and whether they’re smooth or coarse in the drawers of a low chest. Three easels and the folding equipment I need for working outdoors stand waiting where I can reach them, like good servants always ready to go to work. A sofa for visitors, two armchairs, as well as a console table and a stove stand between Frédéric and me, like a little boudoir separating us.

We exchange glances at a distance, smiling or looking annoyed, depending on what we’re producing. There are hours when we’re both completely given over to our work, ignoring one another. But sometimes we’ll emerge and invite ourselves to take a break “in the parlor,” a steaming cup of tea before us, pipe and tobacco ready and waiting. We’re rarely in the same mood at the same moment, but if one of us should despair, that same fear of failure gnaws at the other’s inspiration and can poison it. Creation is an act of love constantly threatened by impotence. This sort of failure for an artist or a lover is like a foretaste of death. To fight it when you feel it quietly constricting your breast, chewing at your heart, and paralyzing your brain and hands, anything goes: a snack, taking a walk, hopping over to Café Prosper where maybe we’ll find some friends as full of doubt and fed up with work as we. It doesn’t matter what we do, we just have to get moving before smearing our anger all over everything; it’s a little like fogging up a mirror to avoid seeing the pimples on your own face anymore. I understand people who tear up their paintings. Maybe my turn will come to do this. There are certainly some I’ve already locked away, never again to see the light of day.

Sharing the same space, I have to keep from falling into Frédéric’s utter confusion. That’s not easy. Nor is it easy sometimes to keep from falling into each other’s arms, coming together as lovers when it’s what I want, in spite of myself, because facing my work makes me feel all dried up inside. That’s even worse. I envy Frédéric when I see him battling his picture, palette in one hand, brush in the other, as if he knows that he’ll come out the winner. I’d like to steal his energy, breathing in the strength of his will from a distance. No. I force myself to unfold the screen or turn my back on him to protect him from being invaded, protect him from the vampire deep inside me. It’s never completely asleep. I need him. When I have problems I might cry out for help, scream for him to come and save me from drowning. I mustn’t do that. But there are other times when we drown together, our bodies caught up in love, then resurfacing, both of us enriched by our passion. After the welcome of the sofa, we can go back to work. I see my canvas through new eyes. It doesn’t seem like the same picture as before, or else now I can see its problems clearly. Sometimes, after exhausting ourselves on the sofa, when I see my tubes and pots of powder, my pastels—in short, all my colors—I even dream that the hand of some genius might pick them up, mix them, and put them side by side on a canvas to produce a masterpiece. Any other hand, using the same materials, would create nothing but a worthless canvas . . . And my own? The thought makes shivers run through me. How strange it is to devote yourself to a passion that inspires doubt as much as it fuels one’s need to create. I’m still afraid, despite all my years of work, that I’ll be categorized as a mere dauber. M. Jacquier, who used to be my teacher, often told me: “Work, yes, but talent isn’t something you can develop, you either have it or you don’t. It’s a way of looking, feeling. No one can teach you that.”

The studio’s tools are eloquent in their silence. Visitors are unable to decode the messages they’re always sending—but I can. I know that there’s nobility in each object’s acquiescence, its faithfulness, its discretion. The very fact that a particular something is in one place rather than another suggests an intention, a specific movement and even thought—or absentmindedness. Objects know how to wait, they’re never disapproving. They tell stories. Permeated with their masters’ obsessions, they confirm for me at every instant that Frédéric exists and that I exist. Sometimes they make me laugh, even when I’m struggling with a project.

One day, Frédéric was mixing colors in a plate to get the blue he wanted, not just any blue but the one he had in mind, the absolute only blue, the one that was to give his canvas an extraordinary depth. He’d just spent hours doing it, after having added further hues to the ones he’d put in the day before. I was watching him from a distance, distracted from my work by the aura of brilliance surrounding him, and also, perhaps, by the grace you recognize in people who are experiencing a moment of fulfillment. His passionate stare gave his entire body a new weight, which I loved; and his hands, mixing the thick paint from his tubes the same way a careful cook works the ingredients of a sauce, fascinated me anew. The colors he was obtaining provoked such feeling in him that it permeated his entire being and emanated a wonderful sensuality. My jealous body, feeling the vibrations of his emotions, was spellbound. Abruptly I saw him stop stirring this blue soup with its pale gray and slightly purple tints. He brushed some of the color onto his canvas; then he dropped his three brushes and palette knife haphazardly onto the plate and, triumphant and full of the desire to lift his spirit up beyond every quotidian plane, turned toward me. My senses, permeated by the caresses that he’d lavished on his preparation, were in turmoil; I was weak in the knees, my lips greedy for his skin. For years now he has taught me about his pleasure and mine.

Trembling, without taking my eyes off him, dropping the soft lead pencil and the tracing paper where I’d copied a sketch I’d made the night before, I went to the sofa where he joined me. I looked at the bluish scar he’d smeared across his forehead with the back of his hand. As he kneeled close to me and reached for my blouse with fingers still stained with the colors he’d mixed, I was already unfastening my corset to give him my breasts and already he was lifting my skirt with one hand. I learned then that seconds can last forever, because this memory still moves me deeply whenever I conjure it up. I recognize our communion in it. Our glances, our caresses, our increasingly frenzied outbursts summoned fantasies, unfurled grandiose landscapes filled with sublime shapes. Together we suddenly experienced a glorious, exhilarating fall that left us exhausted and still locked in our embrace. Bit by bit we regained possession of the place, sweeping our eyes around what were, after all, our everyday surroundings, but as though we’d just landed there from another planet, changed by the incredible voyage in each other’s arms. The three brushes and the palette knife still awaited their master in his blue mixture; my tracing paper and my soft pencil called to me from the cabinet. I considered them our most faithful friends. A tool, any tool, inspires me with respect for the hand that can tame it despite the demands every tool makes on its user in the beginning—the limitations it imposes.

We have an undeviating ritual before we can move on to our “outside” life, the life with our flesh-and-blood friends, strolling around town, visiting shows and galleries—always the same, immutable rite of cleaning all our brushes to cleanse the spirit after hours of work, to prepare it for the outside world. A slow and necessary transition.

When I first met the man who became my husband, I lived with the sense of being under an invisible bell jar that separated me from the world and protected me. How was he able to break through? That’s a question I still ask myself.

I owe our chance encounter to the birth of my half-brother, when I was just about seventeen; I’d been living for more than two years at my grandmother’s, at the corner where rue Moncey and rue Blanche meet.

Grandmother was bustling around after getting a telegram early in the morning. Later I found out that M. Versoix, my mother’s second husband, had sent word that the first pains had begun and that she should come to the rue du Four on the Left Bank. My grandmother told me none of this; she would have had to put words to things about childbearing that couldn’t decently be revealed to a young girl. All I knew was that my mother was “in a family way,” since she could no longer hide it, but I didn’t know when the “event” was supposed to take place, and I’d always been taught that it’s indiscreet to ask personal questions. Unaware of what was happening, but seeing that Grandmother, in a state of great excitement, was preparing to leave the house, I took advantage of the situation to ask her permission to go to rue Amsterdam and buy some tubes of paint and other art supplies. My mother had opened an account for me there so I could replenish my stocks whenever I wanted. Actually, this was itself a pretext. I needed to get out and escape the pent-up feeling that I sometimes had in my room, where the alcove had been turned into my studio. My mother had lived there during the years preceding her remarriage, and it had also once been the room of my little sister, Eugénie.

“Well, child, Madame Chesneau can’t go with you!” Grandmother fired back, giving the impression that I should know it wasn’t the moment to ask her anything at all, no matter what.

Young girls don’t go out on the streets alone—that was something I’d known as long as I could remember. What would happen if I disobeyed? Would attackers suddenly leap out from porches and alleys or from the entrance to the metro to menace me? After six years in a convent and two years under the surveillance of a grandmother and her lady companion, I lacked all instinct for the outside world and knew nothing about the habits of what I took to be society at large. Flanked by my family when I was out walking, I deeply wanted to feel something of the real city, something of the intense excitement that never touched me because I was so thoroughly insulated. My world consisted of what I could see of the few people, the workers and servants of whom I knew only their public face, and then the few things I thought I knew of a life that was more refined, revealed to me entirely through how certain people dressed and carried themselves; I could sense subtle differences in their behavior and was curious to know more, but everything outside apparently threatened some invisible danger. What was I being protected from? That’s what I hoped to find out, if with a slight rush of apprehension.

Which brings us again to that day which began with a strange disturbance in the house, when something told me that I might take advantage of my grandmother’s panic.

“I’ll just run out and come right back, Grandmother! I promise I’ll hurry.”

She’d known for a long time that if I didn’t draw or paint every day I became impatient and aggressive, thanks to all manner of anxieties even I wasn’t quite aware of. So, with a wave of her hand, as if to brush away some flies, she murmured as she went down the hall, “Don’t take forever—I trust you! Just this one time, Mathilde!”

I raced down the staircase as fast as I could go, my coat still half-buttoned and my gloves in my hand, without even taking time to put my hat on straight—either driven by the fear that she might change her mind, or perhaps in my haste to know who I was once I was alone in the midst of strangers on the boulevards. On my way down rue Blanche the idea came to me of going to immerse myself in the lively crowds at the gare Saint-Lazare, where I’d feel life swarming around me. I laughed, lighthearted and alone, looking at the stores and cafes as if they might have changed overnight, weaving my way through the onlookers, the peddlers, the horse carriages, the junkman at the crossroads. On the other side of the road, on one of the buildings that I thought I knew very well, I was amazed to discover caryatids standing on either end of a porch and holding up a broad stone balcony. “I’ll have to come back some day and sketch them in pencil,” I thought. Just as I was about to set out to cross the congested street, I hesitated . . . If I didn’t muster my courage all these strangers would see the slight anxiety unsettling my euphoria. I might have been unaware of where the danger lay, but these strangers all knew for certain. The women all seemed happy to me and the men good-natured in spite of the overcast skies of early March. Free in their midst I’d have liked to run the way I did as a child, until I was almost out of breath and dizzy, in the lane along Marble Hill Park, where our house was next to last before a bit of meadow began, hidden by a hedge. The Thames flowed down below.

On the steps to the station, a crowd of travelers was going up and down, a rhythmic stream of people. Suddenly an invisible hand pulled me back to my childhood, to the time I’d just been thinking about. An arrow stuck in my heart made me stop short, there on the Cour de Rome. I was looking at the stone arcades, the clock, the station’s large windows, all with a fascination that was becoming more and more painful. We’d just arrived in Paris, right here, in the spring of 1895—my twin brother, William, was holding my hand, and our little sister, Eugénie, still an infant, was asleep in the arms of our mother who was dressed in mourning. It seemed to me that it was at the bottom of these stairs that happiness got away from us forever—though we didn’t know it at the time. William and I weren’t quite nine years old, and now, at almost seventeen, I saw that nothing had changed about this station or this crowd. The only thing different was that now, ever since the turn of the century, a few automobiles were mixing in among the horse carriages.

Yet how long ago that all seemed! I was there at the foot of the stone steps both in the past and in the present. As if I were arriving there to greet us. I remembered that my brother and I had been beside ourselves with the joy of our adventure when we left London. After crossing the gray swells stirred up by a north wind, then an interminable train ride, we’d arrived at this very spot. Fatigue, perhaps, had added to the excitement we felt as the children we were then, in this noisy, crowded Cour de Rome—simultaneously huge and too small. Our father, buried two months earlier in Twickenham, wasn’t really dead for us yet. We were still expecting to see him emerge from the crowd, with his arms open for us to leap into them so he could hug us and murmur “my lovely twins.” The feeling of his absence had not yet eaten into our souls, attacked our memories, gnawed away at our existence.

Dazed, I’d have stood there indefinitely, enduring the pain of standing at the frontier separating me from a lost happiness, at the foot of the steps leading to the gare Saint-Lazare. This boundary felt so real, I could almost touch it. I’d have liked to cross over it, go back in time the way I did in my incoherent dreams, and catch hold of the harmonious years spent in our home with its pretty name: Swann House, our beloved place at the end of Montpelier Row in Twickenham. All those names still sing inside me like the notes of a nursery song that might once have rocked me to sleep.

Intimidated and traipsing along behind our mother, we were approached by two women, one of them more refined looking than the other, who were waiting for us in the throng. The more I stared at them, the more I heard them ask us about our crossing, the more I knew that I knew them, but when and where had I seen them before? Which one was my grandmother? The driver, with the help of a porter, tied our baggage down on a carriage, while the horse tossed his head and pawed the ground, making me feel very sorry for him. How unhappy he must be so far from fields and forests! As for myself, lost in this crowd, all of them speaking French, laughing in French, I was sure I was the only one paying any attention to the creature. His loneliness and submission broke my heart. I hadn’t yet said hello to the two women lingering over my little sister with worried looks on their faces.

I’d willingly embraced one of the two women after she’d said “Hello, dear child,” but five months later, at the end of August, she was the one who, with her daughter, my mother, would exile me to the Sacré-Coeur convent.

Though I’d come out now with the notion of melting into the bustling city, with no thought of digging up old memories, it became obvious that it was here on the steps of the gare Saint-Lazare that our little unit had come undone, and not at the English cemetery where our father, Frank Lewly, lay at rest.

I now know that stones have memories. I looked at that façade as if I could decipher all the layered palimpsests, inscribed there ever since men and women began to arrive here to experience moments of life that were full of despondence or hope, the throes of love or abandonment as the trains went on coming and going . . . That day I discovered that streets have memories too, as do monuments and bridges.

Leaving the Cour de Rome I was unaware that I was on my way to a meeting arranged by fate on the pont de l’Europe—a meeting that was to determine the course of the rest of my life. I set out for it at a brisk pace.

I was brought back to the present by the cold gripping my feet and legs. I knew that the moment of freedom Grandmother had granted me couldn’t last, but the sketch pad in my pocket kept pulling me on.

It was my guide.

Stamping my feet to get them warm, I went up rue Amsterdam, then I turned left into rue de Londres to make a pencil sketch of the pont de l’Europe. Again. It’s an endless source of study. Its metal beams crisscrossing the entire length of the superstructure reminded and remind me of the Eiffel Tower’s meshwork. The confusion of horizontal lines supported by diagonals and a few curves just above the railway was something of a trap for an apprentice like me. I’d already spent hours there while Mme Chesneau, shielded from the sun by her wide-brimmed hat, did needlework on a little folding chair close by.

At the top of the rue de Londres, on the part of the sidewalk overlooking the rails, I had an interesting view through the grills of the junction of the six roads meeting in a star shape above the railway traffic. I wanted to render the complexity, the contrasts of the parallel rails running under the complicated bridge structures. It was a challenge; I was only a beginner, sixteen and a half years old.

Frequently a train would come in or out of the station causing an incredible racket, loud enough to cover the din of the streets. Each engine created vibrations underfoot. The locomotive’s plume of steam enveloped the great metal network of the bridge. Cars and passersby were absorbed in its coils and then emerged as the steam dissipated. That was where life was. My fingers numb with cold, having only just scribbled a few first sketches in my notebook, all I could think of was going home. My escapade had lasted long enough. Then a young man whom I hadn’t noticed came up to me with a smile on his face. He didn’t introduce himself—just started up a conversation:

“May I suggest a few changes, Mademoiselle?”

I didn’t know what to think. It was my fault, caught without a chaperone. It’s not proper to speak to a man you don’t know. But I was flattered by his visible interest in my work. He had a straightforward look, kind, slightly amused. Could his criticisms be of some help to me? How could I know?

“So, you were watching me, Monsieur?”

“It’s not just anybody who’d stop in this kind of cold to draw a few lines on a pad . . . Besides, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen you working on this bridge. That intrigues me. May I?”

A hand with strong, slender fingers took careful hold of my pencil. The young man’s self-assurance encouraged me to let him do it. With an air of great concentration, his gaze focused inward, he changed my lines with a few strong, controlled marks that gave the tangled framework of the bridge some density and balance. Then, lightly, almost caressingly, he drew a few diagonals coming together in the distance.

“That’s where the vanishing point is, Mademoiselle, you see . . . It changes things a lot, doesn’t it?”

I smiled to show I agreed.

“You can draw, I see,” I said. “But do you also paint?”

“My studio is in rue Chaptal. You’re welcome to visit . . . Are you studying at some academy?”

“I take private classes with M. Jacquier, yes, but I only started last year. Granted, it’s not an academy, but it suits me.”

“He makes stained glass windows and paints signs, if I’m not mistaken. Indeed, he’s beginning to be known!”

“Watercolors and oils as well . . . Portraits, landscapes, pictures of the docks . . . I asked my mother if I could take classes with him. His studio isn’t far from here.”

“Work, work, work. Your hand will end up moving with confidence. If you have talent it will show. Love colors, love lines, feel what you want to see on your canvas with every fiber of your being. No doubt, M. Jacquier must tell you this again and again . . . Fill the colors and shapes with your own life.”

“I have to go home, Monsieur.”

I certainly felt a bit silly; what he’d just told me was beyond me. What did it mean to “fill the colors and shapes with my own life”? I guessed it was meant to sound encouraging. But my need to paint wasn’t something I’d really thought about—I’d never analyzed it. It had been essential ever since the days when I’d spent hours with my friend, Alice, looking at illuminations in the convent library.

“Do you live in the neighborhood?” he went on.

When we realized that we were neighbors—his place was on rue Chaptal and I lived at the corner of rue Moncey and rue Blanche—we went down the rue de Liège together. We introduced ourselves to each other, if briefly. As we went along he repeated the invitation to his studio. I promised I’d go there with Mme Chesneau. Mentioning my chaperone reassured me and made it possible for me to regain some of the dignity I’d lost by allowing him to converse with me all the way to No. 1, rue Moncey.

We only had time to exchange a few scraps of information about our lives, almost nothing, and especially not the fact that I was living at my grandmother’s. I was ashamed of it. I’d have liked to be able to say that I’d go back to my parents’ home soon, that I was going to find my twin brother and little sister there, that we lived in Twickenham and were only visiting Paris. Flattered that he’d been drawn to me as an artist, I chose, however, to be silent. But what kind of artist was he? My curiosity would have to remain unsatisfied for the time being, because in a moment he was going to vanish. He was preparing to veer off for the boulevard de Clichy as I stood at the bow of the stone steamship solidly anchored at rue Moncey and rue Blanche. Then I left this stranger and climbed our stairs rapidly in order to conceal what I was feeling. I wanted to shake off all the things this encounter had stirred in me, things I couldn’t have analyzed but that made me want to visit Fréderic Thorins in his studio as soon as I could. I needed to hide how excited I’d become; I needed to hide my fear that someone would notice how I was buzzing, full of both hope and distrust, and likewise the fear that I’d been wrong to allow myself to be seen on the street with a strange man.

When I pushed open the apartment door, only the cook was there. Grandmother had gone to be with her daughter on rue du Four, on the Left Bank. Mme Chesneau had accompanied her in the fiacre because Eugénie would have to be taken for a walk while my mother was giving birth.

I then understood the panic caused by the morning message. My half-brother, François, was born in the afternoon of that unforgettable March 6, 1903.

No one could ever have imagined that I was meeting my future husband while my mother was in labor. In fact, as I climbed the stairs to the first landing, I was thinking of him as an old man. But he was only ten years older than I, and, now that our lives are bound together, I don’t see the least difference.

Curiosity was behind my asking Grandmother for her official permission to go with Mme Chesneau to visit the studio of M. Thorins; then came the interrogation: Who was the young man? How had I met him? What was his background? She reluctantly agreed but made it clear that it had to be “A short visit, of course! Mme Chesneau will tell me what she thinks of him!”

In Frédéric Thorins’s studio I found the same spirit of work and the same love of silence as I’d felt at M. Jacquier’s. But here an old sofa and two slumping armchairs invited one to rest or daydream. Behind them a screen served to camouflage very poorly the long room overflowing with bric-a-brac. Everything about this studio, except for the artist’s work, seemed to me an invitation to idleness. The old sofa brought shameful things to my mind, questionable situations, but then also animated conversations, joyous get-togethers among friends—altogether, the sorts of thing you heard about artists. None of which had ever occurred to me at M. Jacquier’s.

I liked the atmosphere in my teacher’s studio. Tall and solidly built, he wore a shirt fastened at the collar with a bow tie to work, all of a piece with this space where I was struck by the vertical lines of the furniture—very straight and upright: tall easels, armchairs with straight backs, a high table, a narrow chest of drawers, and a cupboard that seemed immense to me. You could see it was home to a spirit that was constantly seeking. Pictures hung side by side on the walls and invited you into little harbors, the marshes of the Vendée and the lives of peasants. And then, in unexpected contrast: posters for seaside resorts, spas, casinos. Elegant women wearing cumbersome hats that were wrapped in light veils that made you imagine how pleasant it would be to be driven by automobile along the twists and turns bordering the Mediterranean or on snowy mountainsides. Bold lettering, visible from a distance, spelled out the names of cities for wealthy vacationers.

M. Thorins invited us to sit down next to the stove. At that point I experienced a strange confusion. I glanced quickly at Mme Chesneau and felt reassured by her round silhouette, her skirts bouncing around her hips, her hands with their large palms and the short fingers I knew so well. Still, what was alarming about sitting here? Why did obstinate visions of little seamstresses or laundresses posing on that sofa keep bothering me? Why would it upset me to imagine the bodices that were just slightly too low cut, skirts lifted to show petticoats and tight-laced little boots displaying a delicate ankle? I imagined merry, uninhibited laughter. What had come over me? Was I remembering scenes I’d seen on the walls of the Louvre, where I frequently went with Mme Chesneau? Why should I suddenly feel warm all over? I couldn’t manage to continue the sober conversation interrupted in front of Grandmother’s house a few days earlier. There was a good chance that all sorts of inappropriate, possibly indiscreet words would pop to the surface of whatever I said, and then be reported to my grandmother.

A tin kettle on the stove soon began blowing steam through its spout. Frédéric Thorins served us some tea. His nervous laughter and the way he kept running his fingers through his short, thick, straw-colored hair showed how uneasy he felt. As if giddy with fatigue he told us that he wasn’t ready for his exhibit next month, that he still had a great deal of work to do. Though he’d seemed so sure of himself on the pont de l’Europe, I could feel his anxiety now. Today of course I know how to name the anguish of an artist afraid of losing his touch, his sense of color, the originality of his perspective and composition, or worse, an artist deserted by inspiration, an artist drowned in doubts—one whom, in this case, our visit had perhaps disturbed, or, to the contrary, rescued from his distress. Without this knowledge, I was consumed at the time with my desire to talk about the pangs I could see he was suffering. Were they the same as the ones I’d experienced? But we were only exchanging meaningless banalities. Mme Chesneau’s teacup was empty and she was already suggesting that we should go home.

I was hoping, however, to see some of the paintings by this artist. He vanished several times behind a huge curtain that covered the side wall, the entire length of the studio. After having taken five pictures from their hiding place, one by one, he turned to face me; the smile on his face was kind and distant at the same time. The same smile I’d seen a week earlier. “Here are a few I did last year . . . I’m not showing you the most recent, two or three of them will be shown at the next exhibit at Willon’s, sometime around mid-May.”

He was watching to see my reaction, but I didn’t have one. It was impossible for me to think at all, beset as I was with so many questions, and maybe also disappointed to feel how foreign his work was to me. People, still lifes, monuments, and landscapes had all been taken apart into geometrical shapes, blended with each other by means of more or less contrasting, monochromatic shades and unceremoniously juxtaposed, I might even have said flung up against each other. I’d already seen pictures of this sort, but they belonged to a world remote from mine. I didn’t think I’d be mixing with anyone who made paintings like these.

“It’s rather odd, don’t you think, that you’re the person who corrected my perspective,” I said jokingly, my only comment.

“True, it might seem peculiar. But I also know how to paint academic landscapes and even portraits—it’s just that I chose Cézanne as my master, you see. You don’t have to like them. It is how my eyes dissect the light and shadow. There’s much to be explored in this new mode.”

“I’ll probably never get used to it. I must lack a certain openness,” I stammered.

“Turn your sense of appreciation loose, that’s all. Set it free! Come, will you, to the opening of the exhibit on May 13!”

When I left, my mind was abuzz. I had a lot to learn in order to earn the right to walk the path I’d been determined to choose for myself ever since M. Jacquier had begun working zealously to teach me. Few women devoted themselves to painting, which made me very ill at ease, because I would never have dreamed of doing something that might make me conspicuous. Nonetheless, the idea of having to put my paintbrushes away forever in order to please a husband seemed to me a mutilation that was intolerable. Ever since Grandmother began talking to me about marriage I’d been wondering what sort of suitor would put up with this need of mine.

When I’d entered the convent at Sacré-Coeur, in the old Biron mansion across from the hotel des Invalides, invisible prison bars had grown up like tall trees around me. The only way I could forget those bars and come in contact with my contemporaries was through line and color . . . How could I make this happen?

I’d been full of joie de vivre, even sensuality as a child. But for what are called the pleasures of the flesh, for vice, I think, I had to wait for convent life to contract the infection, if imperceptibly. The countless prohibitions governing our life, all the suspicion, the prying eyes, the obsession with sin, the penances inflicted by our confessor after we’d listed our pitiful little misdeeds, all that and even more—if you take into account the agony of the martyrs we were given as models for our behavior—were bound to throw our souls and senses into a turmoil of over-excitement, duplicity, and secretiveness, thanks to the familiar, detestable routine of constant inquisition.

In a convent one quickly learns to see and feel everything that’s beneath the surface, all the while looking as though you are studying, praying, or embroidering. If the nuns hadn’t checked every night to make sure we’d sleep with our hands on top of the sheets and not underneath, so we wouldn’t get any bad ideas, I’d never have thought of trying to discover what was wrong with it. It took me a long time to figure out and even more time to reach the conclusion that for those ladies to hound us like that, they had to be obsessed with it . . . I’d never been quite able to think of those women, almost completely hidden beneath their veils and long black robes, as human beings. Ugly, shameful images kept coming to mind, where they were concerned; as if to bring them down from their inaccessible heaven: the headmistress on the toilet or completely naked in her bathtub washing her “unmentionables.” Did she even have those? If she did, then did she think it felt nice to touch it with her soapy fingers? I wondered if the hidden bodies of the nuns were different from those of secular women, if they wore underpants and corsets, if they had hair. I watched them as closely as they watched us. There couldn’t possibly have been eyes less discreet than mine.

We weren’t allowed to favor one friendship over any other. My forever-frustrated need to snuggle up in someone’s loving arms was making me ill. How much I needed to feel a hand touch mine, warm lips slip along my neck as they whispered tender words as our mother used to do before she turned out the light in our first life. It had not been long ago that I’d fall asleep with the smell of her perfume in my hair and on the sheets. I also wanted to sniff the milky smell of my little sister who used to burst out laughing in her cradle when I mewed like a cat as I kissed her. Any demonstration of friendship was forbidden to us boarders; I felt alone, different from my fellow students who were almost all from noble families and who proved to be well versed in the duplicity suitable to the mind-set of the place. Obsequious attention was paid to the girls who were of noble birth, especially in the parlor, where each family would gather around at a separate, round table to give the impression of being in a private salon.

I was ashamed of how insignificant I was in their midst, with my bourgeois origins, lacking a fancy family tree. I could tell that I was only tolerated there out of Christian charity because my grandmother, as she’d also done earlier on behalf of my mother, had asked for the support of the bishop, Monseigneur Gallois, to whom she was distantly related. At first I’d thought that it was only my language that kept me apart, despite the fact that I’d been speaking French for as long as I could remember. But I didn’t get the puns and local jokes, though playful language came naturally to me in English. It wasn’t a big thing—but it was huge.

Of course, to develop a real passion, there’s nothing like being forbidden to love.

I devoured Alice with my eyes; she was a girl in my class who wore her hair in long braids wrapped around her head like a fairytale princess or a saint, and I always managed to sit beside her in chapel. In the silence and cold of the stones, nothing escaped my senses during the daily service. We were supposed to read the sacred texts with visible enthusiasm, but were still half-asleep. Still, I recited each word of love composing the hymns intended for God, the Holy Trinity, or the Virgin Mary with a heart so full of joy that I thought it might crack. I thought I’d die every time, and I imagined with delight how much attention I’d get as they tried to bring me back to life. Alice would be leaning over me then, and in the moment I opened my eyes, I’d be able to see how upset she was. That would be bliss. Without Alice I wouldn’t have been so ardent in chapel. Religion, garnished as it is, most plentifully, with words otherwise intended for secular love—so delicious to say or just to hold in your mouth—filled the vast emptiness into which I’d sunk when I’d arrived. It was my guilty pleasure to contemplate Alice’s profile, like some holy image. What was it she radiated that was able to inspire in me a sort of inexpressible hope? The line of her high forehead, her slender nose, her mouth, her well-formed chin, and her crown of braided hair made my pulse erratic. These surges felt both so good and yet so painful that I could sense that I was in a state of sin without knowing why.

Now I wonder if having to get up at six o’clock in a building with no heat and being made immediately to wash ourselves quickly in cold water—by dampening our ardent desire to just let things go, be comfortable, not to mention all sorts of other lascivious temptations—didn’t have the opposite effect from the one intended, in the long run . . . In the end, convents often return girls to their families entirely depraved. All their frustrations during the years they were pent up have fed their desire for luxury, for wild extravagance, and those pleasures of the flesh. Some women try to realize these dreams when they’re returned to a worldly life, while others remain immured in themselves, as obsessed as the nuns who brought them up. The marriage of my mother to wild Frank Lewly stands as an example of the first scenario, and my life among bohemian artists as another instance of the same. I hope it doesn’t take an entire lifetime to expurgate one’s soul of the perversions with which it’s been impregnated during one’s youth. How many times, as an adult, in the midst of delirious ecstasy, have I had visions of Frédéric and myself locked in an embrace on the tiled floor between the font and the confessional of a chapel lit by stained-glass windows . . . I’ve tried and tried each time this happened to get rid of the image, because I still have the notion that some things are sacred, but back it comes, against my will, as if I still needed the place that had first inspired my secret passions in order to reach the heights of pleasure as an adult.

When finally I ended up dissolving into the mentality of that establishment, it was the workings of the outside world that came to alarm me. I would have liked to stay shut up inside, hidden beneath the veil, and when I was twelve I thought I’d made the mother superior like me when I confided to her that I wanted to become a nun when I was older. “Continue to pray, my child, and we’ll talk about it later,” she said, looking me in the eye with her hand on my shoulder. It was almost pleasant. I was moved for a moment. I felt I really existed.

Deep inside me, however, there was something else, welling up as though determined to humiliate me. I could feel it coming, and, with all my might, refused to accept it.

If I’d known when I was young that it was because my father had died bankrupt that our house in Twickenham had been sold just before our return to France, I’d have been even more miserable among those wealthy heiresses being brought up with the sole purpose of making good marriages and prolonging a respectable lineage. I did indeed feel that the death of my father had caused a great disruption, but I certainly didn’t want to listen to my intuition, especially if I might discover that my fears were well-founded. I would then have lost him for a second time. Still, a little voice inside kept whispering that, despite the fine lifestyle I’d experienced, despite the loving atmosphere at Swann House, I was worth nothing. Occasionally, I’d have bad dreams in which I saw myself barefoot, begging for a living. Clearing my mind of those images took a long time; they felt like a premonition. Though I wouldn’t have known how to put it in words, my entire being was permeated with my mother’s shame. Ruined after paying off all the debts by selling our home in Twickenham, she was forced to move back to Grandmother’s—this time with a baby in her arms and two other children in tow. She had barely any income at all, as I found out later. Though she’d been affectionate and free at Twickenham, now at the house on rue Moncey she had to stifle all rebellious instincts and, too weary to argue, consent to her mother’s strict requirements; for one, she hadn’t been able to prevent William and I from being sent to boarding school. I sensed something broken deep inside her, something collapsing with each hour of distance between England and us, as if her life were ebbing away. The day must have come when she’d had to renounce some essential part of herself and I realized that we were losing her.

She herself had been sent away to Sacré-Coeur after the death of her father, and she still had bad memories of being shut up inside the convent. There were always two or three less wealthy and less well-born little girls who were tolerated there “out of Christian charity”—as we were rather disdainfully reminded. Was it out of revenge that my mother, at the age of twenty, had married a very rich thirty-year-old man who loved parties, horses, and gambling?

Luckily for William, he was blossoming at the Lycée Lakanal. Whereas I was moping, he was playing sports and bridge and chess and studying the arts and mathematics, all with equal verve and with fascinating teachers. He formed strong friendships in this brand new institution with its revolutionary methods of education built on furthering the boys’ development with lots of outdoor exercise. And, above all, something it took me years to understand, he had escaped the exclusively feminine milieu of our family. An unspeakable distance gradually grew up between us—a loss I suffered like a mutilation.

Imprisoned as I was, I could feel memories floating back to me of the first weeks we’d spent in Paris before going out to Grandmother’s property along the Seine, near Meulan, for the summer. Every night when I was trying to go to sleep, these images would emerge one after another to fill my heart; day by day I was growing more aware that they marked the real end of our childhood. I didn’t know that, in consequence, I was cultivating an incurable nostalgia for the days when our house held only two children and two parents.

Scarcely had we deposited our trunks at the rue Moncey in April 1895 than our mother had established a new ritual—one that lasted until June. The moment we’d swallowed our midday meal she would exclaim: “Get ready, children, we’re going to citify!” and then, in a fiacre she’d engaged, we’d take off—my mother, my brother, and I, leaving the baby with her nurse for the afternoon. It was as if we were prolonging the adventure we’d begun at the station in London, after which we discovered the docks of Southampton and the train station at le Havre. I liked that expression: citifying. I didn’t know she’d made the word up; I still and will always use it to describe aimlessly strolling around the city, whether on foot or in an automobile. Much later I understood that it was a form of escapism for Jeanne Lewly and her twins, all three of them concealing their mourning deep inside a horse-drawn carriage. Our mother kept us as long as possible in a world of illusion, prolonging the complicity that had bound us so tightly together up to that time. Was she hoping to impress upon our memories forever those hours stolen from the rules of our new existence? We drove around Paris a lot that spring.

North, south, to the Champs-Elysées or the Faubourg Saint-Antoine we drove, staring open-eyed at the city. They were carefree hours when we would speak our father’s language and sing the songs we’d always sung; we also listened to our mother as she told us the names of monuments, streets, and parks, which, compared to the great gardens of London, seemed so meager. We weren’t old enough yet to appreciate the architecture and situate it in its proper period and culture. Notre-Dame didn’t seem as impressive to us as West-minster Abbey. It sat there on its island like a stone sphinx pricking up its ears and surrounded by the river flowing past in its narrow, fortified bed. What were we to make of the pathetic yet charming Seine with its elegant bridges when our eyes were accustomed to the broad Thames that it took forever to cross in the great capital of England? In London as in Paris there were quays and embankment roads piled high with crates, barrels by the hundreds, enormous piles covered with tarpaulins, unrecognizable cargo waiting to be loaded into the bilges of deep barges or onto the decks of flat ones. But in Paris there weren’t any proud three-masted schooners setting sail and leaving onlookers behind to dream! Never any tide. William and I became aware then of the sea’s influence in London . . . In Paris what we liked to see were the carts full of old books lining the parapets along the quays shaded by plane trees and poplars, and also the café terraces on the sidewalks that filled with people the minute the sun was up. So, how Paris revealed its charms to us, and likewise its hideousness, was determined by the horse’s pace, sometimes walking, sometimes at a slow trot . . .

Everything about our life was different, even our mother who’d already changed in the first few months after our father died, and had changed even more since we’d arrived at her mother’s house. Taking us out on carriage rides was a way she’d invented to fill herself with the intoxicating spectacle of the streets, all the while remaining seated safely inside a fiacre. The façades, avenues, and gardens of the city of her youth unfurled before her and it gave her obvious pleasure to show them to us. But every now and then we’d see her become strangely languid and despondent. William and I would glance at each other, worried. As soon as she became aware of this, she’d quickly reassure us: “Paris, the city of grace, the city of harmony . . . You’ll find that you love it, my children!”

One day we paid a visit in Passy to one of our father’s cousins, whom she called by her first name, Dilys. She welcomed us beneath an arbor of wisteria in full bloom. For an instant our mother rested her cheek on the shoulder of this elegant woman in her forties, then she closed her eyes as if she wanted to fall asleep right there on her feet. Her acting so familiar with someone I didn’t know caught my attention, but I saw also her thin-lipped smile: I felt she wanted to cry but was holding it in. William and I instinctively moved closer together. Seeing that we were petrified, our mother forced herself to lift her head and speak. “So, Cousin, will you treat us to some nice tea with some of your wonderful fruitcake?” Then, almost immediately, there were the charming sounds of porcelain and silverware on the garden table with its embroidered tablecloth, and we spent a merry, completely English afternoon that remains preserved for me perfectly, because it was my first contact with the woman who would come into my life, years later, as though she were a guardian sent by my father.

In two years now I’ll be thirty, my mother’s age at the time. I’m trying to get a real sense of the depth of her bewilderment in those days, even though I have no children. Right then, no matter how hard I tried to imagine her utter grief, I couldn’t see how alone she was—because we were there! I’d not yet noticed that she no longer sat down at the piano; it had been months . . . Only quite recently have I realized that she’d given it up in the months when she was expecting Eugénie.

I also remember having caught sight during our interminable carriage rides of a dark opening between two apartment buildings in a very populous suburb. The passageway plunged away toward dilapidated houses from another century. Was it over by the Bastille? Toward the fortifications? Or maybe near Montmartre where, all in the same slow but steady rhythm, men in wooden shoes wielded scythes to cut the tall grass in the square below the basilica then under construction? In that alley that I’ve never forgotten, children in rags shared the pavement littered with rubbish, with geese and scrawny dogs. They were playing in the mud. A little blonde girl stood there and followed us with her eyes; her arms were wrapped protectively around some other little ragamuffin as if she feared we might snatch him away from her. There was just time enough to catch sight of them and then we’d gone by. But I saw them. I remember being gripped by a fear impossible to describe because I could see that she was more or less my age. I was struck by the feeling that something similarly catastrophic was threatening us as well. I’d read it in the eyes of this child standing there, motionless and dignified with that chaos of blonde hair heavy on her shoulders. She stared straight at us without hatred during the few seconds it took us to go by, and the dark brilliance of her eyes alarmed me. If I’d known the word “destiny” then, that’s the one I’d have applied to the way she stood there with as much swagger as resignation: this was some sort of omen of our destiny. For a moment, remembering the sale of Swann House, I’d thought it possible that we might ourselves arrive at such destitution. An unpleasant shiver ran through me. As soon as I looked at my mother, her head held high beneath her black hat, the feeling went away, but not the fear—the fear of a fall. Yet none of these emotions and reflections kept William and me from our puns and laughter; the woman in black accompanying us played along, but was no longer the happy person we’d known.

The crowning moment in our outings was always a visit to the Café de la Paix where a glass of juice or sherbet would be set before us. My mind would race ahead then to the end of our jaunt. I thought how I’d be back with baby Eugénie before the hour was up. She’d have finished her nap and would greet us with little chortles that clearly showed how pleased she was to see me again. I’d put my dolls away in a trunk the day she was born because I was so happy to have a real little baby in the family, a doll baby in the flesh that I could hug and examine and love as much as I wanted. I made puppet shows for her with my fingers; I sang; I could see the tiny changes from one day to the next on her jolly face, so pale, so alive, and so mysterious. I’d never imagined a lovelier miracle. I didn’t like being away from her for more than a few hours, and so the sound of the horse’s trot as it went back up the rue Blanche was a joyful noise soothing my impatience to see her again.

We spent the summer after we’d come back from England at Sainte-Coulombe, Grandmother’s house on the road out of Villennes-sur-Seine, downstream from Poissy. This prolonged our carefree days but didn’t lighten my mother’s burden of grief, which could be seen in her eyes and the way her body seemed to crumple when she didn’t know she was being observed. She was well aware that our fate was already sealed. We’d hardly celebrated our ninth birthday when my brother and I were each led off to our respective boarding schools. How can I ever forget that terrible autumn of 1895?

As for William, yes, he blossomed at Lakanal.

In the well-regulated life of the convent I performed whatever gesture I was ordered to undertake, though without ever really understanding what they meant. What I did know was that they weren’t leading to the love that the nuns kept going on and on about, describing it as “divine.” Sometimes I didn’t even hear people speaking to me, haunted as I was by beloved voices from my past, letting them resound to fill the emptiness inside me. All the nuns’ rules and regulations continued to seem foreign to me. Still, I’d have liked to be satisfactory. Their criticism of what they considered my provocative attitude was enough to make me feel terribly guilty. In England we’d never gone to school. A tutor came to Swann House to teach us how to read and write and do arithmetic; he told us about distant lands that he then showed us on our globe, and recounted stories of wars waged by kings and princes. From this point on, however, my youth was going to be conducted within high walls. We’d only go outside once a month and for the holidays. I could have visits in the parlor on Thursdays. Feeling terribly abandoned, I told myself over and over that our father would never have put up with that situation.

The lavish words of adoration in the sacred texts were like honey soothing a sore throat. Through them I entered into a world of thought, unreal and magical, experiencing moments of elation that lifted me into who knows what fictional, harmonious upper reaches of reality, into flowery feelings filling the emptiness of my heart with their syrup. I became a star, or a cloud, maybe even a single longed-for raindrop on an earth that was so dry it crackled under one’s foot . . . And my self became diluted in the violent beauty of the stained glass in the chapel. Depending on the time of day and the sun’s intensity, the reds and blues in particular made me want to dissolve away into them. The dream drew me up and away to a timelessness outside of the quotidian matters of existence.

My friend Alice took me to the library where the only books to which the students had access were sacred texts, antiphonaries, or bibles. Gilt-edged volumes full of sleeping miracles: the illuminations. People, plants, and animals scrambled up the opening letter of each verse, coiled inside their curves, likewise separating chapters and running around the borders of the pages. I never got over my astonishment at these discoveries. My passion for illuminations remains intact.

We tried to copy them or invent new ones in our notebooks. I rediscovered the pleasure I’d once taken in drawing fruits, birds, rabbits, and flowers to compose a farandole of color and motion. My eyes transformed everything into miniature form, which I set down in multicolored garlands in the margins of my pages. My guilty obsessions showed up here, but you’d have had to know what you were looking for to recognize them. Who could have guessed that the leaves folded across the central vine represented hands under the sheets placed exactly at the intersection of two other stems, there, in the forbidden spot? I alone knew it, and it was wonderful not to be scolded or judged when I showed people my drawings. Nor did anyone know that when I drew a family or rabbits or a nest of birds I never was able to put the young in alongside their parents. Each member of the family had its own leafy branch or teetered on letters that were far away from each other. I was the only one who knew that they were from the same litter or the same hatching and that they were waiting for someone to bring them together again . . .

I never let go of my colored pencils. For my twelfth birthday I asked for brushes and tubes of paint.

My mother took the family as well as Aunt Dilys to the opening of the show at the Willon Gallery on May 13, 1903, scarcely two months after the birth of little François. This was a chance for her to meet Frédéric Thorins and decide whether or not he had any talent in her eyes.

She arrived looking quite haughty, with Eugénie hanging onto her gown and Grandmother, despite having her cane for support on one side, leaning on her arm. M. Versoix, my mother’s second husband, whom I still can’t call anything other than Monsieur, brought up the rear with his son from his first marriage, Alain, a fourteen-year-old boy who meant nothing to me but who had the same little brother as I. We looked at each other with a certain mistrust. We were polite when we spoke, but quite reserved. I would have liked to have William there with us at the opening, but he was preparing for his baccalaureate exams.

The personal history that I had with painting, and that I had now with this artist, whom I’d met a few weeks earlier, was turning into my mother’s business, and I had a strong sense of watching these private connections be taken away from me. Her little group, attentive to her words, followed her from room to room. She analyzed the construction of the works and went into raptures over a particular color, or, whispering to her family what they ought to think, rejected a certain style. Where did she get this knowledge? Was it profound or superficial? I had no memory of having heard her discuss painting when she was at Grandmother’s; rather, all she talked about were things she’d read, or concerts and plays that she went to with our English cousin. Had she gone with my father to art exhibits in London? My memory was completely blank on this point, but I had a question: was it because of this familiarity with art that she had not stood in the way of my taking classes with M. Jacquier? Or had that kindness been, instead, an attempt to make recompense for my abandonment in the convent?

I saw Frédéric Thorins coming toward us in the crowd and had a sinking feeling, as though he represented some wrongdoing in my life and all these people were now going to be exposed to it. Besides, I wanted to protect myself from my family’s judgment concerning the work of a person whom I hardly knew but who belonged to the world that I wanted to enter. A person who knew how to talk about things I felt passionate about. The worst of it was that their point of view might possibly influence me and I was ashamed of this in advance. As soon as he’d greeted me the reflexes instilled in me by my education came to my rescue and provided some guidance. I introduced him to my family, despite how much I regretted having brought these two opposite poles of my existence face to face when they shared no point in common.

How proud I was, however, of my mother’s natural elegance, the gracious yet haughty way she held her head . . . Since her marriage to M. Versoix, she had regained her panache. In another life I’d adored her, and perhaps I still adored her, but in a way that was more reserved, even stifled. She intimidated me, seduced me, crushed me. She still had power over me, while her own mother held all the authority. Which reminded me that I belonged to them. It was at once reassuring and appalling. William, even though he too had been shut away, seemed free to me, by contrast, simply because, being a young man, he was able take the train from Sceaux by himself, get off at the gare du Luxembourg, and hop into an omnibus to come to Grandmother’s, if he didn’t saunter instead along the streets of the Latin Quarter on his way to the home of our mother and her husband on the rue du Four . . . That’s the stuff dreams are made of! Occasionally, without the least concern on his part, he’d even give up his monthly permission to leave school in order to take part in a game of sports or go riding with his fellow students. No one even commented when he decided to do this. The entire family knew he’d begun riding lessons with our father and still was passionate about it. William, less supervised than I, took life head-on.

As I watched my mother at the Willon Gallery, she seemed larger, wiser, and more triumphant in her new existence. Her name was no longer Jeanne Lewly but Jeanne Versoix and I couldn’t get used to it, even though it was almost as though M. Versoix were giving me back the happier woman of before. Still, I couldn’t help but think that now she owed her triumphant air to him, and that it was with him and her new family that she shared it above all. We, the twins, belonged to another life that had led briskly and joyously to bankruptcy, the sale of Swann House, and our return to Grandmother’s.

Feeling the need to build up my self-confidence in the midst of this crowd, I moved toward Frédéric Thorins, who was busy talking with a man. When he caught sight of me, he waved me over and introduced me to the visitor in a manner that I found quite surprising: “Take a good look at her, she’s going to be my next pupil, and I think people will be talking about her some day!” The man, a journalist, turned to look at me, full of curiosity, then he gave Frédéric a knowing wink, which made me very uncomfortable indeed. But at the same time, because the artist himself was watching me so steadily, with eyes that were so warm, so protective, eyes shining with a gleam that was unique, a burst of joy quelled my anxiety. Not only had I just learned that he was thinking of having me for a pupil and that he believed I had a future, he’d also made me conscious of feeling something very pleasant that I was savoring for the first time—something I wouldn’t have known how to encourage. For a brief moment I saw that he thought I was pretty, and I was flattered by that and felt alive.

I had no time to enjoy my happiness. My little sister slipped catlike close beside me, fishing for compliments with a smile and a glance. Her slightly auburn hair, her green eyes, and her voluptuous lips, which were so skilled in the arts of pouting and laughter, formed an adorable mélange that would always be the perfect temptation for portrait painters. In her smocked dress and large collar she was flirtatious and stylish with all the arrogance of her eight and a half years. I’d have liked it better if she had stayed with our little brother.

Eugénie was never able to see any member of the family conversing with someone outside of our circle without forcing her way in. She talked charmingly about herself, about how her music teacher had recognized her gift for the piano, even predicting that because she was so gifted, she might have a career. Eugénie was careful not to mention that this attentive woman had added that one had to work on it every day, if one wanted to be great, which my sister didn’t do. She was always looking for compliments, but, in order to avoid provoking a tantrum by reminding of her obligations, she was left alone to practice her music however and whenever she pleased. A quick glance in my direction made her certain that I wasn’t going to contradict her in front of these gentlemen. I recognized her way of saying “See, me too!” or maybe “Me most!” without actually putting it into words. The two men, charmed with her audacity, smiled and congratulated her on her ambition. We’d interrupted their conversation, so I took the little one by her hand and led her off to our grandmother, who was sitting on a sofa. She’d been keeping an eye on us the whole time.

When our family left the exhibition, Eugénie voiced her challenge: “And what if I painted with you?”

“Would you like that, dear?” my mother replied, giving us an encouraging look.

“Yes, I’d like to learn.”

I had to say something. “If you don’t work at your piano lessons, why would you work on painting, which you’ve always found boring? You’ve always said so, even at the Louvre, not too long ago.”

“With you it would be different,” she replied.

“What a good idea, Mathilde!” my mother decided.

M. Versoix put in his opinion: “A very good idea!”

And Grandmother went them all one better: “The little one could come to my house once a week.”

This exchange completely knocked the wind out of me, right there in the street. For years I’d been hearing: “The eldest has to have the grace to give in, Mathilde—don’t make her cry . . .”

I was perfectly aware of a fact that eluded them: my little sister had simply glimpsed a door opening upon a world she didn’t know. Sensing that I wished to go through it, that I was standing on the threshold, she’d been stricken with panic. I could see it in her worried expression: she wanted to come with me, or else, barring that, to stand in my way. When M. Thorins let it be known that I might take classes with him, I’d seen it in her eyes: “Me too!” It’s possible that it occurred to her that, if I was a painter, I’d no longer be available the way I’d always been whenever I was allowed to leave the convent, from the time she took her first steps until our mother’s marriage.

Before she could even walk I used to turn up in her world every time I could get out. I had a wonderful time playing with her, I cuddled and kissed her, and then I’d vanish for another month. Soon enough she’d toddle after me, chasing me down the hallway that was canted at an angle running along the façade of the building. She knew I’d hide myself in the cupboard at the end, that I’d shut myself into it and make noises like jungle animals and she’d punctuate her delighted terror with bursts of laughter. “More, more!” she’d demand, her eyes wide with excitement. My brief visits became a celebration for us both. Thanks to Eugénie, I had happy memories with which to fill that apartment, where I had nothing save an extra bed set up in what had been our late Grandfather Nolès’s study. Eugénie lived in the large room in the alcove—the room she’d shared for several months with the English nursemaid who’d gone back to London as soon as the child was toilet-trained. It was the room they’d given me after our mother got married.

But I’d discovered reading; I began to draw; I enjoyed working on embroidery—the only thing I did with Grandmother. I still played with my little sister but now I also kept some time for myself. And I was constantly trying to find some way to make my mother less listless, trying to reach her in the tenebrous lands of sorrow or imagination she’d inhabited since the death of my father. Anything just to get her back again! She’d smile like an invalid, staring off into the distance as she stroked my cheek. In order not to annoy Grandmother, we no longer said the words “Swann House” or “Twickenham,” and certainly never spoke of our father, Frank Lewly. Making even the slightest mention of any corner of England made me feel I’d committed a sin as bad as keeping one’s hands warm under the covers.

Whenever I wasn’t devoting my time to her, the little one watched my every move. What an extraordinary thing it is to see darkness imperceptibly overtake a pair of eyes! Beneath the fine golden lianas hiding her face, my sister’s eyes could give the impression of turning black. And yet, they were still green and always would be. A remarkable, subtle phenomenon would intervene: the pupil grew larger, encroaching on the iris and engulfing the yellow specks that made for its unusual sparkle. Even if I wasn’t looking at her, I could feel her staring at me all too often, the same way as, in a small town, you can sense the inhabitants watching strangers from behind their window curtains. There was a silence deep down in Eugénie’s staring eyes. The silence of a waiting animal hidden in its burrow, making not a sound, senses on the alert.

I sometimes wondered what this child still remembered of the tribulations following the too sudden death of our father, as if there might be, perhaps, some link between her inquisitive attitude and that absence. How could one grow up without having deep inside the memory of a father so full of life, a man who loved the hunt, who would take us on great picnics in Kent or Cornwall with other families, and play card games that lasted so long that we’d go upstairs to bed long before they’d finished? I had thought grownups didn’t sleep, that they lived on a different plane in the cloud created by their cigars. Was my little sister still invisibly imprinted with the few weeks during which she’d seen our father, had heard the voice of that man who loved the great outdoors, who continued to exist so powerfully in the lives of her older brother and sister? Had she heard his voice? What did she want from me, spying on me like that? Her silent, intense observation gave me the sense that I was entrusted with memories that I had to pass on to her.

Animal-like, she gradually set herself to protecting the place that she considered was rightfully her territory in the rue Moncey apartment. In a few months I saw by the way she looked at me that she considered me an intruder. All I had to do was use Grandmother’s sewing basket for an instant and she would grab it, screaming and putting it back into our grandmother’s old hands with their brown spots. It did no good at all for Grandmother to tell her to give it back to me—she’d refuse. And if she saw me paying attention to my embroidery, or, worse, absorbed in reading, she’d hit the book until I’d seize on any game at all to distract her. Only then would I find my cheery and cuddly little girl again. The worst for her was hearing me speaking English with William on the rare occasions that we had the pleasure of being under the same roof. The child would start screaming “No! No!” blindly punching at both of us. Our need to rekindle and relive our complicity could only be fulfilled in the language of our early years. We refused to forget. She couldn’t stand it—any more than she could stand seeing me in conversation with our mother and our grandmother. I knew her less with every month and felt her searching eyes begin to weigh me down with accusations. It was only in her earliest years that we were really close. And always, coming from a room opening onto the hallway or at the entranceway rotunda, there would be a voice reminding me that “the eldest has to give in to the littlest, Mathilde!”

Like so much else, I wouldn’t have been able to put words to the anxiety I felt in those days. I think that it frightened me and I chose to repress it. My only role in the apartment was to entertain the child. Avoiding her upset her and consequently upset the grownups. But it was what I really wanted to do. “Go take her a cookie!” they’d say, “Go see why she’s crying!” and I’d dash to the end of the hall where I’d find her leaning against the cupboard door as if she were counting to twenty, as when we played hide and seek . . . But she wasn’t counting, she was sniveling pitifully just loud enough for us all to hear. Sometimes our mother’s voice spoke more firmly: “Take her into the parlor or go in her room with her!” I’d soon be dragging a recalcitrant little girl by her arm and she’d be screaming as if I’d beaten her black and blue.

How hungry I was behind the convent walls for someone who would focus sweetly and tenderly on me alone. But I found out that, on my monthly visits home, I was the one who had to do just this for the baby. In my first life, when I’d been younger, this attention had been there for me and somehow I fervently hoped that my mother would give it to me once again. I began, however, to doubt that I’d ever really known happiness. Were my memories only a dream? Even my brother was finding fulfillment somewhere else, as if disavowing our past—the past that I was huddling around like a miser bent over his treasure. William talked about how much he liked his multifaceted life: he got to spend as much time outdoors and playing chess and bridge as he did in the classroom. Had my mother not remarried, had my grandmother not stopped eating because she was driven to despair by the departure of her daughter and little granddaughter, I’d have remained in boarding school. For who knows how long? It wasn’t for my sake that they took me out of the convent, but for Grandmother’s well being. This thought brought me up short—and it hurt. It’s only now that I understand where this unceasing nostalgia comes from, and why an invisible hand draws me firmly back to the past as soon as I put down my pencil or brush and lose touch with the life that Frédéric offered me. I leapt right into it however; I know that I was destined to be with him.

The true gathering place for the three Lewly children was Sainte-Colombe, the house in Villennes. A two-story stone house overlooking, though not too high above, the slow, twisting riverbed of the Seine downstream from Poissy. It was set on the nearly flat portion of the meander, on the bank facing the limestone hill where the river came up against it to flow back in a curve. The meadow gently curved inward to the embankment below the terrace. We each had our own room and we’d always find the same atmosphere of reassuring habits there when we returned, which dated back to when Grandmother was herself a child. For decade upon decade the house filled, spring and fall, with every sort of preserves; as soon as the weather was nice the linens were spread out on the meadow on the other side of the hedge, while herds of cows used to be led, morning and the evening, by their herder down the sunken lane behind the outbuildings to be milked in the stable. All this permanence gave me a sense that existence was coherent after all, and that I had a real connection to it.

When we were there, I spent my time drawing and painting. Soon now I’d be joined by my little sister, since that’s what she’d said she wanted. Our departure was planned for mid-June.

Nonetheless, I found that being surrounded by the people I loved was wonderfully exhilarating.

We all arrived, mother, grandmother, lady’s companion, and children, just as the cherries and strawberries came in season. Eugénie and I picked basketfuls of them to make into preserves; one of us would perch on a ladder and reach for all the mouthwatering “earrings,” while the other crouched down, lifting the leaves in order to get at the berries. Deducting our tithe, we sampled the red fruit until we felt sick, bursting with laughter and joy as if we were the same age. We picked, while the cook, meanwhile, brought great copper basins of the fruit to a boil, then filled the scalded jars lined up on a clean dishtowel with the steaming, unctuous puree. All summer long the house was filled with the fragrance of strawberries, cherries, raspberries, apricots, plums, and blackberries, and finally apples . . .

I’d never expected we’d be so lighthearted and gay.

As the days went by, Grandmother’s friends and cousins came from Orgeval or Bazemont to pay neighborly visits. Then it was our grandmother’s turn to ask that the carriage be hitched so we could go as a family to return the compliment. Sainte-Colombe rejuvenated her and she ruled supreme, even more than in Paris.

Given the profusion of blooms, I started an album of pressed flowers to carry the colors of the meadows and garden back with me to my room in Paris. Eugénie too began to dry leaves and flowers in the large books in Grandmother’s library. Seeing Eugénie take pleasure in creating her own collection made my pleasure all the greater. She was finally taking pains to achieve something concrete. As I became deeply absorbed in contemplating each flower, I enjoyed again a sense of wonder very like the feeling I’d had long ago examining the illuminations. Ten years later I still have my albums with their notes on a shelf in the studio, but the colors have faded with time. All I have to do is to reinvent them in my paintings. As if I were dipping my brushes in skies, gardens, flowerbeds, and distant landscapes, their colors softened by an invisible mist, the seasons returning all at once.

Eugénie was part of everything I did that summer, and it plunged me back into my oldest habits of always sharing things with an accomplice: first my brother and then with blonde Alice, with whom I’d long corresponded. From birth I’ve only been whole when there were two of us.

Until William came at the end of July we moved around inside our exclusively feminine world, the only representative of the stronger sex being little François, if you didn’t count the caretaker, who was also the gardener, the driver, and the cook’s husband.

When we were around the infant, under the watchful eyes of our mother and grandmother, my sister and I were very careful to keep things quiet. Throughout his first months I felt once again the fascination I’d had for Eugénie, and was surprised to see that, unlike my little sister, who had a completely round head barely covered with reddish down, and a chubby-cheeked face pale as bisque porcelain, this baby had a skull shaped like an egg set on an angle, and his features were almost triangular, like Grandmother’s. The arch of his eyebrows was clearly marked and there was something indefinable about his cheekbones and his dark eyes that was enough to indicate that, even sound asleep, this baby was no little girl. I didn’t understand why, but visitors always commented on this. His tanned skin next to the white sheets made one think he’d been exposed to the sun ever since he was born. What did he have in common with those of us whose skin was light?

When his carriage was put in the shade of the big linden tree, he’d suddenly launch into happy, high-pitched babbling; maybe it was the movement of the mosquito netting or how a branch waved in the breeze that set it off—or maybe just seeing his hands flying above him like birds was enough, not knowing they belonged to him. My sister and I would come running as soon as he was awake and our interpretations of how he used his mouth, his little noises as he stretched his tiny hands out to us, sent us into gales of laughter. I watched how his face changed from one day to the next, and listened with delight to the little crablike chirps that came out of his mouth along with the clear dribble drawn out by his fist, which he liked to chew on. His almond-shaped eyes stared at us so intensely that the mysteries deep down in their fathomless depths, of life and death and who knows what else, made me dizzy. In a fraction of a second his gaze could change from solemnity to amusement. You’d have thought he was trying to begin some intelligent conversation with us, so it always seemed surprising to me that he still couldn’t talk. Sometimes his face would briefly resemble that of a toothless old man. I kept having thoughts like this, ones I’d never had when I looked in Eugénie’s cradle. I even thought I might have caught a glimpse of God in the depths of his pupils. But then it occurred to me that Bluebeard, Attila, and Jack the Ripper had all been babies too, in the arms of a mother or a nurse, and they had made the same little enchanted sounds to welcome the life that they were just beginning to experience. It came to me that such a sweet, vulnerable being could become either the best or the worst, and I felt a sort of animal fear rising inside, fear of this infant, this stranger. To get rid of this feeling I lifted my eyes to look at the landscape with all its copses, its wheat fields and prairies dotted with poppies and cornflowers, the peaceful villages on the hill across the river. I calmed down right away, left only with surprise that I’d ever had any such thoughts. But I could never completely erase them. Like the memory of some mortal shock.

I’d never dared dream of having our mother and her two little ones all to myself, so I took full advantage. I considered Grandmother a person to be obeyed, but not one with whom I could share things; she was in charge of running the household, that’s all. Our getting along so well brought an air of celebration to our lives. We probably had M. Versoix to thank for our happiness, because he must have gone, as he often did, to his preserve in Divonne-les-Bains. For two generations now, the family lands and forests, looking down on the spa resort that was becoming increasingly developed, had been growing more and more valuable. He used to go there regularly, but of course I had no idea what he did or how much the two branches of the Versoix family were involved with the expanding town and the company that ran the spa. Really, the only benefit of it that I could see, that I could enjoy, was that this second husband had given my mother back the lifestyle to which she had been accustomed—her panache and her happiness, as I’ve mentioned. After the exhibit at Willon I’d started calling him “Godfather,” as Eugénie did, and in return, his attitude toward me had softened somewhat—his smile, anyway: the way he looked at me.

Our mother often rested in the shade on a chaise longue with baby François beside her and a book in her hand. Then I’d take out my drawing box, my pencils and pad, and Eugénie did the same. But I didn’t sketch my mother—I devoured her with the point of my pencil, whole or in bits and pieces: the curve of her neck with the little strands of hair escaping from her hat, the way her stole draped over her shoulder, her ringed fingers preparing to turn the page of a book, doing minutely detailed openwork on a piece of delicate lawn; or even, when there were visitors to serve as bridge partners, plucking a card from her hand, which was fanned out before her, organized by suits. She’d glance at me from time to time, laughter in her face, as if to say, “I know what you’re doing. I have eyes in the back of my head!” I could tell she was flattered. I wanted to see every detail of my mother so I could catch her every expression and gesture. I felt an almost physical pleasure in possessing her that way. And the fact that I could share the experience with Eugénie greatly increased my pleasure, because my little sister was positively jolly when she was with me. Sometimes she would even suggest posing for me herself, so long as she didn’t have to spend too much time in front of my easel. I discovered how beautiful a fine ankle and a curving foot could be as I made studies of this charming model. I could never do enough sketches of my little sister, even when she was in her little nightgown, washing, her feet in the tub. The various parts of her began to take on their own existence in my eyes, like a vase or a lamp. Soon enough, I’d begin again drawing from a different angle, if she hadn’t gotten bored. But she never liked doing the same thing for long.

Less and less did we hear scales floating from the open parlor window. But I liked hearing the piano, even when the notes were just repetitions, when Eugénie was practicing. There was something about that sound which was like the voice of a child stumbling over her reading every day. Behind all the blunders, the breaks in the rhythm, there was a will: concentrating on loosening her fingers and her mind through daily work, applying itself to growing up. I sent her encouraging thoughts for her efforts while I worked hard at my own practice, perfecting a still life or a landscape on paper or canvas.

But Eugénie was giving up on the piano.

Drawing at my side became more and more important for her. With each pencil she put to her pad she was sharing not only the reassuring comfort of our feminine clan, but also the impression that she possessed the land around us, simply because we were imprisoning stretches of the panorama in our notebooks. “The part from here to the mill belongs to me, what about you?” one of us would say and the other would reply, “The whole island, the village and the forest across the way . . .” The next day we’d trade our properties in a serious tone of voice, as we thought businessmen must do. But really, if I felt that anything really belonged to me, it was the ephemeral colors of the landscape, impossible to count because they multiplied so rapidly, merging, one shade running into another or standing out distinctly, depending on where the sun was in the sky—and the reflections in the water beneath that changeable sky, which wasn’t even faithful to itself. I could never have invented the variations of color constantly at play in the light, so that, though every day I was seeing the island, the mill, the village on the other bank, it was never the same river, the same hill, the same little village, the same island. As I sought to discover what was truly before me, it seeped into my flesh before flowing with great difficulty onto my canvas. Our game, however, made it more fun, and all the time we spent together bridged the gap between us. Both of us needed this, one as much as the other. And yet, there was a sort of devotion in the way she looked up at me that was a crushing burden despite being so flattering. It was the same way I looked at my mother. I knew the powerful, silent expectancy that lay behind her eyes and sometimes it frightened me; I didn’t feel I had it in me to give her whatever it was she wanted. She was making me responsible for some essential thing that was beyond my means. I didn’t know how to give Eugénie a portion of the treasure that I felt entrusted with, nostalgic for: the wealth stored up before her birth.

M. Jacquier had encouraged me to give landscapes the colors I saw, not the colors that might, objectively, be there for everyone. That wasn’t easy. What I got from it, however, was the pride of discovery. “Work, work, work!” M. Jacquier kept repeating. M. Thorins hadn’t told me anything different. Still, he’d suggested—yes!—that I speak to my mother to get her permission to take lessons from him to supplement the things I’d learned from M. Jacquier. I hadn’t yet asked her, afraid perhaps of breaking the spell of our days in the country. I thought about it constantly, but still kept it to myself. Because, ever since the exhibit at Willon Gallery, I’d felt proud simply because of the flattering manner in which Frédéric had introduced me to that journalist. And I still felt shaky when I remembered the way the men had looked at me. I was sorry that I’d only been back to see Frédéric twice in the intervening time, always with Mme Chesneau, if for no other reason than to see his eyes again and find in them the same depth and brilliance that had so shaken me, the strange play of emotion on his face when it lit up in a smile. I went over and over it all in my memory, those fleeting moments that had made me conscious of a new way of feeling.

When Eugénie and I were at our easels, Grandmother would sometimes come to see what we were up to. She couldn’t resist a need to make observations, judgments based on the academism of her youth. That day the problem was my tree. And not just any tree—the willow I was so fond of. It was not gray-blue with glaring green specks the way I’d painted it, she exclaimed indignantly, and it didn’t lean so far over the flow of the Seine, which, moreover, was not really so yellow either. Holding tight to M. Jacquier’s advice, I didn’t change anything. Having watched that willow for years, seeing it lean far enough to dip its leaves into the sandy water at the tip of the island, I thought, each time I saw it, that I might be seeing it just at the moment it would finally fall. After each winter, when we arrived, the first thing I’d do was go to see if it was still standing. My stubborn insistence on painting it in such unlikely colors was shocking to Grandmother, who thought this was just about equivalent to a child’s scribbling. She walked off grumbling, “Well, after all, if you’re having fun . . .” in a condescending tone of voice, the way you’d dismiss someone engaged in something trivial. I knew she didn’t take my desire to live for painting seriously. Eugénie, in a burst of solidarity with me, offhandedly called after her, “You’re not the one taking lessons, she knows what she’s doing!” I was shocked at my sister’s boldness but Grandmother didn’t bother to turn around, she just lifted her cane as if to say, “I really don’t care!” I never got used to the fact that Eugénie was so willing to speak to our grandmother so informally, as though she were a friend on the street, whereas William and I always addressed her solemnly as “Grandmother.” And the tone of voice she’d used took my breath away. Deep inside, however, I envied the freedom shared by my grandmother and her granddaughter.

Eugénie used to go and get a book of the tales of the Comtesse de Ségur in order to have her mother all to herself, asking her to interrupt whatever she was doing to read more of the story they’d started the evening before. Sometimes our mother would balk and say, “You know how to read for yourself now! Just sit here quietly next to me . . .” But my little sister would insist until she got what she wanted. Then mother and daughter, their blonde and red hair mingling, would bend together over the printed pages. One ran her index finger along the lines as she read, the other followed with her eyes, lulled by the adored voice. It gave me pleasure to sketch this scene. But it wasn’t a pure pleasure. Great waves of jealousy had me glued to this almost unbearable image of the little one resting her cheek on the beautiful bosom I no longer even dared brush against, leaning there the way I’d done once upon a time. (Between then and now, in the convent, I’d been made to see evil in all sorts of places I’d never suspected of harboring it.) Fixing the two of them on a sheet of paper was the only way I had to possess them, master them, and anesthetize the pangs piercing my heart. I’d been an affectionate child, but I’d had to learn to restrain my impulses. A month away from my seventeenth birthday it still hurt me to see that beautiful scene. I’d have liked to smother my mother in my loving arms and I was ashamed to be looking at them like a jealous little girl. Then, all of a sudden, Jeanne Versoix would proclaim to all present, “It’s time to take a walk!” And she’d lead us off on a grand tour that inevitably ended on the towpath.

The air in the tall meadow grass smelled like summer, like freedom.

William arrived at the end of July on the same train as our cousin Dilys Lewly—a cousin whom, for that matter, we called “aunt,” because she was ten years older than our mother.

I was immensely surprised when I saw that young man with shiny curls the color of ripe chestnuts falling around his laughing face step down from the train, as if it had been years since we’d seen each other. How had I been able to do without my brother? How could there have been any flavor to existence in his absence? All the greetings, all the happy, welcoming jokes suddenly emerged in English among the four of us. At the train stop in Villennes, which wasn’t yet a station, and then in the carriage, our euphoria was like some secret between us, an indulgence in our kinship from across the Channel.

Today I think that Grandmother had only invited Dilys out of sheer politeness. It was a way of thanking her for the lessons in English conversation that she gave me every week, ever since I’d noticed, to my great despair, that I was losing my ability to speak the language, since I was no longer using it regularly. My mother had gone to see the mother superior, who’d set the condition that I had to have a lady from the convent go with me to Passy every Thursday afternoon, if I wanted these lessons so badly. As the years went by, I became wildly attached to Aunt Dilys, whose life seemed colorful to me, full of mystery. In time I learned she’d met many of the people that she associated with through her friendship with the Natanson brothers, the creators and directors of the Revue Blanche. Their pages were open to both known and unknown artists, writers, poets, and journalists; they promoted exhibits and had sided with Captain Dreyfus, whose name was not to be mentioned in Grandmother’s house. Aunt Dilys used to meet with people of a sort we’d never seen, and she even dined with them, something I found very exciting. I found out, just by chance, that it was at one of her parties in Passy our mother had met M. Versoix.

In the carriage taking the four of us to Sainte-Colombe, you’d have thought that even our laughter had an English accent. A cool shower after a long walk in the noonday sun couldn’t have made me feel any better. Ah! If only the horse weren’t trotting so fast!

William’s voice was done changing. I saw him less and less as my twin; instead, he seemed a big brother who was waiting without much anxiety for the results of his baccalaureate exams. I was as impressed by this as if he’d digested the entire encyclopedia. I was above all impressed by how, just by being his assertive self, he stood out in any group. His presence exuded an inner strength that was enviable, a quiet confidence in himself and in existence. He didn’t speak too loudly and never said things just to be saying them. Now that his arms no longer looked too long for his body and his head didn’t resemble a peony perched on a yielding stalk, his body had a natural balance that gave him a remarkable presence. He looked at people when they were speaking, listened attentively, and always gave the impression that he thought that person was very important.

August was beginning under the best of auspices.

And yet, once we were through the gate and around the turn in the driveway, I knew even before the horse stopped moving that things wouldn’t be that simple. Grandmother was waiting there on the doorstep with our little sister hidden in the folds of her gown. I knew my sister well enough to know that this was a sign not of some discreetly hidden happiness on her part but of her great anxiety. I had no trouble sensing when a situation had wound her up. I was burdened by this, but I couldn’t pretend to be insensible to her feelings; I could read them too easily for that.

How could I have expected that, just because we’d been close for one summer month, our relationship had really changed? She’d grown up being treated like a little queen by her mother and grandmother, and this continued when her mother became Mme Versoix and she moved with her to the rue du Four. She’d always regarded William and my natural rapport with something more than suspicion. She would never get over the pain this had caused her, and I knew it. Even when my brother and I weren’t actually talking to each other, she would watch us closely and try to interfere. But then, speaking English when we were not with the rest of the family was for us something more than a necessity—how could she deprive us of that? You could tell by the way she acted that she’d have liked to make us repudiate our first nine years and see us become amnesiacs; I couldn’t help but recognize Grandmother’s influence in all this. When she was very little, our sister would sneak after us to the study that served as my bedroom at the house on rue Moncey. Usually, William and I would hide out there to talk in the language we’d shared since birth. Because she didn’t understand us, anything—whether we were building with blocks or playing games, or just talking or reading—was an opportunity to blame us for abandoning her.

Those precious moments prolonged a life in which she hadn’t had a part. Worse, they were proof of a history that was still so real for us, and still had such power, that she could only imagine our enthusiasm coming from some Eden on the banks of the Thames. How many times did she stammer out something of this nature through uncontrollable sobs? As if we were depriving her of something just for the pleasure of making her sad. She was fighting an imaginary war against ghosts. But, basically, she wasn’t wrong; it was our paradise, and she would never have access to it. It was no use telling her again and again that she couldn’t fill the gap of the nine years that separated us. She ended up by setting herself up as our enemy and trying to pick fights using her tears and threats, which was terribly exasperating. I’d sometimes look at her and think that even having her mouth awry and her hair sticky with tears and mucus wasn’t enough to make her look ugly. I’d be charmed and yet still want to give her a good slap so she’d leave us in peace. As long as we were alone together, our grandmother respected the powerful need that William and I had to go back to our roots together by immersing ourselves in the language of our childhood, but as soon as there was a witness . . .

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