George suspected that the bar with its brightly lit windows bathing the dark stream of the outer boulevard in a sheet of flames would be a good place to start. He figured that any man who grew up among the idle rich of Geneva would find solace in a place like the Folies-Bergère regardless of his circumstances. Entering through the glass doors, he made his way past the crowd to the barmaid standing at the marble-top bar stocked with bottles of champagne, beer, a tray of oranges and two roses in a glass. The barmaid was talking to a gentleman who wore a top hat. She leaned forward to whisper into his ear. He smiled. She turned to George and asked him what he would desire. She was a striking creature, her short blonde hair revealing a full face and melancholy eyes. Her body was slim, on the tall side, with heavy breasts accentuated by a black velvet jacket trimmed tightly at her waist. George was aware of her small, sinuous movements. He asked for a Pernod.
George could see himself reflected in the large mirror that spanned the length of the bar. He looked past himself to the reflection of the full saloon – the patrons talking loudly, outbursts of shouting, laughter breaking through a murmur of hoarse voices. Fists pounded on the tables, stressing the end of the joke, making the glasses tinkle. Their hands folded on their stomachs or clasped behind their backs, the drinkers formed little groups, pressed one against the other. A large crystal chandelier hung over the throng, illuminating them in starbursts. George could not see anyone clearly through the smoky haze. All George had was a daguerreotype portrait, taken twenty years ago.
When the barmaid returned with his Pernod, George said, “May I ask you a question?” She smiled demurely. “I’m looking for Monsieur Henri Dunant. He’s about fifty years old, from Geneva. He may, however, have changed his name.”
“Are you a policeman?”
“No, I’m a journalist with Die Ostschweiz.”
“A spurned lover or a husband on the run,” she said, half expecting the plot to unfold before her.
“No,” he said looking into the mirror, “but I suspect there may be a few of those in here.” George took the daguerreotype print from inside his jacket and showed it to her.
“A thief?” she said, discerning through the grainy surface of the photograph that this Henri Dunant was a sophisticate; he had warm eyes, a determined smile, perfectly groomed hair and beard; and he wore a dress jacket with a black silk bow-tie. The man who had been in here several weeks ago was very different: “He asked for work, he was wearing a dirty black overcoat. I offered him a drink, on the house, but he declined…politely. He said he wouldn’t mind an orange. I gave him one from the glass bowl. Men like him are escaping from something. In his sad, tired eyes I could see he was evading visions. He told me he’d been sleeping under the Pont des Invalides but with colder weather coming he was worried about his health. I directed him to a hospice on rue de Chazelles where he could have a room in return for services. He thanked me…he took my hand, brought it to his lips and kissed it. His hands were soft, not the hands of a working man. He smiled and left.”
There was something in her telling that George suspected – she recalled minute details but she was holding back; something was not right.
The man at the end of the bar came over to George with a suggestive swagger, asking to see the daguerreotype portrait. The man had a blond, amusing face, a silky beard and clear eyes. He was impeccably dressed in a long, black coat opened at the waist revealing a velvet vest and trousers. “If you are searching, you must be alone,” the man said, “and if you are searching for another person, they are likely alone, too; and if you are searching for another you must be among strangers otherwise you would not be searching at all.” George held back the urge to say something rude to the stranger: the French were always turning some mundane matter of the day into a philosophical rabbit-hole and it irritated George. Not because he couldn’t keep up but because it was time-consuming. “I find it fascinating, this similarity between you and this man.,” the stranger continued.
“He’s not my twin, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” said George. “And, he has aged since this photograph was taken.”
“Then the photograph will not do you much good, will it,” said the man handing it back to George and returning to his drink at the end of the bar. This further irritated George, this dramatic exit stage right with a flourish.
The barmaid turned to George “The hospice on rue de Chazelles is run by a Madame Boche. If you look north from the Parc de Monceau you’ll see a huge statue of a woman imprisoned in scaffolding. Walk towards her and you will find rue Chazelles.” She smiled. “This is Paris, Monsieur. Believe in anything.”
George spread a few coins on the bar and finished his Pernod, “My name is George Lloyd-Craig and I’m staying at the HôtelBoncoeur. If you hear from him please let me know.”
“I will.”
“And you are?”
“Aline Monast,” she said.
George smiled and walked through the crowd and out to the street. He was certain Aline had exaggerated and continued thinking so until he reached Parc de Monceau where scores of people stood in small groups or alone, motionless, all looking up to the sky to the north. When George saw it, he stopped, too. At first he thought it a mirage, a vague outline through the coal smoke pouring from the chimneys. A gentle wind blew and like a painting it revealed itself.
It was a huge statue cicatriced in scaffolding. He raised his eyes slowly to take in all of its height, fifty metres into the grey sky, sparkling of raw copper so vast it absorbed all the light, the right hand extending up to the heavens gripping a torch. The head was enormous, culminating in a crown of daggers. It was a woman. There was nothing in her eyes to indicate her personality but the line of her huge mouth and eyelids told of a resolute female gaze that did not look down upon her subjects nor up to any God, but into the horizon. On the scaffold platforms were many tiny men riveting her together, polishing the flowing stola that swept up over her shoulder down to her feet.
George continued on, making his way across the park and down an alleyway to the rue de Chazelles. The buildings were lower here, no more than two storeys. The woman with the torch loomed larger, her shadow undulating over the buildings. George looked away from the statue and saw a short man standing in the middle of the street looking at him. He walked towards George with a limp.
“This is Liberty Enlightening the World,” he said as if he were introducing a stage act. “A gift to the United States, if they ever finish it. And what is this gentleman looking for?”
“Madame Boche’s hospice.”
The man held out his hand. Not a word can be uttered in this city without a price being attached to it. George dropped a couple of sous into it. The man pointed to a doorway three buildings along.
George knocked on the door, looked up to the rows of windows spanning the four floors, their black shutters with broken slats lending an air of desolation to the expanse of wall. The door was opened abruptly by a tall woman, her face carved with deep wrinkles. “Oui, Madame Boche.” George showed her the photograph of Dunant. She stepped back and gestured to enter. He followed her up the stairs. Madame Boche told him Monsieur Dunant left about a week ago for the same reason that everyone else has left this building: no money, no hope. George looked up the empty tower of the stairwell, lit by gaslights. The last one on the fourth floor looked like a twinkling star in a black sky. They continued up the greasy steps, plaster showing through the scratched paint on the walls reeking of human sweat. George could hear the rocking of a cradle through the gaps in the woodwork, the stifled cries of a child. There was a fight on the third floor with such a stomping that the floor trembled, furniture overturned, a racket of blows and curses. Madame Boche trudged past, oblivious.
They reached the fourth floor where the corridor led off into darkness. Madame Boche stopped and unlocked a yellowed door. George followed her inside. He looked round the room, its walnut chest with one drawer missing, a wicker chair and a little stained table with a cracked water jug on it. George noticed that the wicker chair was placed precisely at an angle to the window facing north thus offering a perfect framed image of the upper torso of the Liberty statue.
Pointing to the chair, George asked, “May I?”
She nodded.“He would sit there for hours looking at her. Why is a man such as this wandering the streets of Paris as a beggar?”
“That’s what I am trying to find out.” George turned to her. “Why did you say ‘a man such as this’?
Madame Boche said in a whisper: “Solferino.”
“It was a terrible battle,” said George without any idea of how terrible it was. He was only nine years old at the time. But he’d read Dunant’s own account of the 1859 battle, A Memory of Solferino. That book had brought George to this wicker chair.
“All battles are terrible, sir, but they are more so when you lose your own.”
“I’m sorry.”
Madame Boche came into the room and looked out the window to the copper woman. “My husband, my brother, and a cousin. Not even their bodies made it back. Our lives together had only begun. In a moment it was all over, finished.” Madame Boche turned to look sternly at George. “It is not right that the images he saw that day have been forgotten.”
“That’s probably why it’s called a memoir. Memories are never forgotten. How do you know the book, Madame Boche?”
“Being the concierge of a hospice doesn’t make me ignorant.”
“I never thought that. The book was well known?”
“When five thousand Frenchman are killed in one day, yes, it becomes well known. For some it was the only account of what had actually happened to their loved ones. And there are the walking wounded, over twelve thousand of them. You met Vinent on the street? He is one of them.”
“There must be many others who need this room?”
“I’m hoping he might return. I can wait a few more weeks.”
There was a knock on the door downstairs and Madame Boche left to attend to it. George walked around the room. A pair of muddy trousers hung on the back of the door. In the centre of the mantelpiece, between two cheap metal candlesticks lay two pawnbroker’s slips. Why would Dunant have left these behind? Was he giving up any hope of having the money to buy back the items or was he shedding his past? George recalled reading A Memory of Solferino, horrific in each meticulous detail:
“…The stillness of the night was broken by groans, by stifled sighs of anguish and suffering. Heart-rending voices calling for help. When the sun came up on the 25th, it disclosed the bodies of men and horses covering the battlefield; corpses were
strewn over roads, ditches, ravines, thickets and fields; the approaches of Solferino were thick with the dead. The poor wounded men that were being picked up all day long were ghastly pale and exhausted. Some, who had been the most badly hurt, had a stupefied look as though they could not grasp what was said to them; they stared at one out of haggard eyes, but their prostration did not prevent them from feeling their pain. Others were anxious and excited by nervous strain and shaken by spasmodic trembling. Some, who had gaping wounds already beginning to show infection, were almost crazed with suffering. They begged to be put out of their misery and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the death struggle…”
Walking across the park, George looked back at the Liberty statue receding below the rooftops. He crossed rue de Courcelles jumping over the gutter flowing like a dark brown putrid stream.
Two weeks ago he had gone to the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross perched on a hilltop overlooking the clear blue waters of Lake Geneva. It was a modest four storey government building devoid of ornamentation. George had thought the story would be an easy one: he would interview Dunant, write the article and make his editor Conrad happy.
He asked the young woman at the front desk in the foyer if he could please speak with Henri Dunant. “Who?” George could not believe the response. He repeated the name. The woman shook her head. After some coaxing, he convinced the woman to fetch someone who may know the man he was seeking.
George looked at four framed daguerreotype photographs mounted on the wall behind the woman’s desk. Four? What happened to the Committee of Five? The photographs were of very distinguished gentlemen, noblemen in their own right: Gustave Moynier, the current President, was in the middle; beside him General G.H Dufour and Dr. ThéodoreMaunier; and on the other side, Dr. Louis Appia. Where was Dunant? George heard the sound of rapid footsteps echoing down the hallway. Coming towards him was a tall man with a flowing moustache and intense brown eyes. He put his arm around George as if he were an intimate, and guided him out the front doors. Once outside, the man took his arm away and faced George. “What do you want?” he asked sternly.
“Dr.Appia?”
Appia nodded. “I repeat, what do you want?”
George told Appia who he was, the story he was planning to write and that speaking to Henri Dunant was essential. Appia looked to the sky while stamping the ground with his foot. “I knew this would happen.” George wished only to tell the story of the founder of the International Red Cross, his inspiration and the genius of his original ideas. Instead he was in front of the building housing the organization Dunant founded, where his name has been seemingly obliterated, confronted by a man so angry that George feared he might punch him in the nose.
“Forget the story, Monsieur. The Red Cross is young and does not need anything to upset its progress.”
“You realize, of course, your saying that makes it all the more imperative for me to write the story. How could anything about this man upset the Committee’s progress? Where is Monsieur Dunant?”
Appia sighed deeply and shook his head. “Last I heard he was in Paris but I don’t know exactly where.”
“There is no picture of him on the wall. Are you planning to destroy all copies of A Memory of Solferino to finish the job? I already have that story. So, Dr. Appia?”
“I truly don’t know where he is in Paris. I’ll give you the name of a former diplomat there who worked with Henri when he was first seeking audiences with heads of state.” Appia scribbled out a name on a pad of paper and handed it to George.
“But what happened here? Why did he leave? Why has his name been erased?”
“There was a scandal.”
“What? A woman?”
“No, no, no, nothing like that. Bankruptcy. He spent over ten years travelling throughout Europe, attending meetings, writing letters, visiting diplomats and presidents, establishing this very complex organization. It took him two years alone to write A Memory of Solferino. It became a best-seller within weeks. But in all that time he didn’t appoint anyone to take care of his business interests. He had land and water holdings in Algeria and Italy. He was worth millions at one point and he forgot it all. He left it all for this,” said Appia gesturing with a sweep of his hand to the building. “By ’74, he was bankrupt and there were lawsuits. Investors wanted their money back but there was no money there. There was nothing.”
“I still don’t understand. Why didn’t the Committee hire him?”
“Monsieur Moynier wanted nothing to do with a scandal such as this. It would be a black-eye against the organization at a time when we need support from many governments. Governments don’t like bankruptcy.”
“Is this Moynier’s doing?”
“I cannot speak to you anymore. I must go.” Appia turns to walk back into the building.
“Don’t you find it odd, Dr.Appiathat an organization devoted to the assistance of any human being in desperate need should turn its back on the very man who conceived of the whole enterprise in the first place?”
Appia stopped. “Find him,” he said, and hurried into the building.
Appia’s diplomat contact in Paris knew nothing of Dunant’s whereabouts. George now found himself on a winding street near La Maison des Arts, following Madame Boche’s directions. He turned a corner hoping to see a street sign but there was nothing to identify this narrow wasteland of alleyways running off between the blackened walls. One alleyway led into another, each narrower than the one before until finally he emerged into a small courtyard. Four storeys above, a narrow opening admitted dull grey sunlight that cast over a storefront of dolls. The dark windows of Au Bébé Bon Marché reflected a circle of large dolls. Under the canopy were a couple of dozen smaller dolls each fitted tightly within open packing boxes as if laying in coffins. Did the store’s repair services include reviving dead dolls?
Across from the doll shop three globes clicked in the gentle wind curling through the courtyard entrance. In the pawnbroker’s window was an easel holding a painting that seemed to dance with vibrant colours, a dizzying array of swirls leaping off the canvas.
George stepped inside the pawnshop where there were more paintings covering the entire length of a wall and up to the ceiling. One painting of flowering apple trees scaling a hill; another of deep, fresh undergrowth, a seated woman, a child, a dog, a butterfly net; a maid with her charge – blue, green, pink, white, dappled with the sun; the Seine and telegraph wires and the springtime sky; a Parisienne with red lips in a blue jersey; a bare-shouldered dancer painted in yellow, green, and rust, posed laying back on a fauteuil. In front of him was a glass display counter, its shelves filled with rings and necklaces, watches and pendants, ornate vases and leather gloves. From the back room George could hear an animated discussion growing louder. A man burst through the beaded curtain, wearing glasses, engaged in an argument with his newspaper.
“Monsieur Marescot?”
“Yes, you have found him,” he said without taking his eyes off the front page of Le Figaro – Mercredi 22 avril 1885. “Can you believe these bastards annexing Tahiti? What do we need an island of sand for? To fill flower pots? Who will pay for this imperialist stupidity? Dupes like us can’t find it on a map because it isn’t on any map.”
George handed Marescot the pink slips. “Am I in the right place?” said George, walking over to examine the paintings. “These are odd for a pawnshop,” said George as he leaned in close to one of the paintings.
“When people sell off their last possessions to buy a loaf of bread, one needs art to elevate one’s spirits.”
“An expensive hobby.”
“These artists will be famous one day, especially that one – Monet,” he said pointing to a landscape painting. “Today they are considered fools by the Salon. But when they do become famous, these paintings will make me rich, so this is not a hobby. Now, where did you get these?” he said, holding up the pawn slips.
George told him of his search for Monsieur Dunant.
“Yes, I remember him well and I know who he is,” said Marescot. “One moment.” He went to the wooden cabinet behind the counter. “He took particular interest in the two Degas paintings over there. The nudes.” Angled towards the rays of sunlight the paintings were studies of nude women who appeared to be shrouded in fog: one stepping out of a bath; the other drinking a cup of chocolate being served by a fully dressed maid; both with their backs to the painter. The women were short, opulent, and lit from within by a night-light, flesh unadorned, their granular rendering blending into the dim backgrounds. “And Monsieur Dunant was interested in these?”
“He liked them all. He has a very modern eye.” Marescot returned with two small articles that he placed gently on the glass counter. “I will keep them until he can buy them back. That is why they are not on display. Most get thirty days and that’s it.”
“May I?” Marescot nods. George opens a slim black case. Inside is an elegant medal – a five star degree hanging from a red velvet ribbon.
“He is a Chevalier of the Légiond’honneur, awarded to him by the Emperor in ’65,” said Marescot. “A man must be truly desperate to pawn such an item.”
“Or he is shedding himself of his past.” The other item was a gold-plated pocket watch with a gold chain. George snapped open the lid. The watch was still keeping time, an inscription engraved on the inside of the lid: To Henri/S.E.D 1848. George closed the lid. “Do you have any idea where I might find him?”
“No. I gave him a hundred francs for these, more than I would’ve given anyone else. If you do find him, tell him I will keep them for him.”
Before leaving George stopped to look at the wall of paintings. He looked closely. “May I buy one of these?”
“Bien sûr. Which ones?”
“Well, I’m not an art expert.”
“You don’t have to be. It’s whatever you like.”
George pointed: “That one, s’ilvous plait.”
“Ah yes, Monet. Bridge at Bougival.” George pointed to another. “Oui, Degas. You realize this is a pencil and wash drawing.”
George knew the technique having done it himself when he was younger. “Yes. And I know the subject…en passant. And the nudes, please.”
“They are studies, you understand.”
George nodded. Marescat wrapped each painting in thick brown paper tied with twine. “Shall we say two hundred francs?”
“We shall,” said George, counting out the money onto the glass counter.
A letter from Conrad was waiting for George at the front desk of the HôtelBoncoeur. Conrad was giving him one more night in Paris. If he didn’t find out anything new there would be no story. It had been difficult enough to get Conrad to agree to the idea. However, Peter had instructed him well in how to prepare for the robust questions an editor might fire at him and George had answered most of them except for one: Where is Dunant? Conrad knew well enough the implications of such a story but Die Ostschweizcouldn’t afford the cost of George gallivanting over Europe looking for a man who did not wish to be found, which made George all the more curious.
He went to his room and began to write his observations in the hope he could convince him that he was making progress. It was, of course, a lie. With his account of a bar, a statue and a pawnshop, he may as well have been a tourist writing a travelogue. And there was the city, its unrelenting sounds coming through his open window from the unanimous night – the rattling of carriages, horses’ hooves clopping the wet cobblestones, the water gurgling down the gutters, the laughter curling up from the café across the street, the idle chatter of couples walking arm-in-arm, the high-pitched notes from an organ grinder and a woman singing out:
Au clair de la lune,
Mon ami Pierrot,
Prête-moi ta plume
Pour écrire un mot.
Ma chandelle estmorte,
Je n’ai plus de feu.
Ouvre-moi ta porte
Pour l’amour de Dieu.
Au clair de la lune,
Pierrotrépondit :
Je n’ai pas de plume,
Je suisdans mon lit.
Va chez la voisine,
Je croisqu’elle y est,
Car danssa cuisine
On bat le briquet.
Beyond, as far as his eye could see, the sparkle of a million gaslight stars from the streets and the rooms and the bars, the sparks spiraling from the chimneys, the matches igniting cigarettes, and the thought that somewhere in this constellation, a man who should be the most famous man in the world is inexplicably and utterly alone, penniless and forgotten.
George was jolted from his by a sharp knock at the door. He looked at his watch – one AM. He jumped from the chair and opened the door. The barmaid’s blonde hair shone under the gaslight. “Come with me,” she said.
George closed his notebooks, retrieved his coat. “Where are we going?” he asked, following Aline out to the streets.
“You never thought it odd that a man in Henri’s state of poverty would walk into the Folies-Bergère?”
George noted that Aline had referred to Dunant by his first name. “You said he was looking for work.”
“Ah, the first of many lies. He was looking for me.”
“You’re lovers?”
“Heavens, no. We are cousins. He came to me for help and I treated him much like the rest of the family did, only I gave him an orange.”
George could not resist looking at her swaying stride and the secret of her lips. He chose not to ask questions. He allowed himself to be led, willing to take the fanciful risk that maybe she might be leading him into an ambush where he would be robbed by her lover. They paused at an intersection to wait for a procession of carriages to pass. They crossed the boulevard, her pace quickening. He hurried to keep up.
“We grew up together in Geneva,” she continued. “He was ten years older than me but we were always good friends – and he indulged me. He behaved more like an uncle. He took me to the opera. He loved Mozart,” her voice trailing off. “My family moved to Paris but we kept in touch…until Solferino. After that he stopped writing to me. A few years later his book was published and I read it. It was a very different voice from the Henri I knew. A very different one.”
“What did his family do to him?”
“They threw him off.”
They crossed Quai des Tuileries and down to the black waters of the Seine, flowing with old corks, vegetable peelings and a swirl of floating garbage caught in an eddy. A short distance downstream was the arch of a bridge from where they could hear the rumble of passing carriages and omnibuses, where all they could see of the city were its roofs as though they were looking up from the bottom of a hole. From under the bridge on the embankment they could see barrels of fire.
“That’s Pont Solferino,” said Aline, pointing. “It’s ironic, no? It should be called Pont Dunant but instead they named it after the battle.”
“You think he’s there?”
“I don’t know. But if he is, I’m bringing him home as I should’ve done in the first place.”
They walked along the embankment towards the barrels of fire, passing men huddled up against the wall, their eyes hidden.
“I don’t understand why your family and Moynier treated him in that way. He may have been bankrupt but look what he created.”
They continued on while regarding each huddled shadow along the wall as closely as possible.
“Bankruptcy means a great deal in polite society. He didn’t have the air of respectability. And he never married.”
“Why is that?”
“Why do you think?”
“I don’t know. Traumatized by the experience in Solferino I would expect.”
Aline carried on in silence for several steps then said casually, “Yes, maybe that.”
They carried on along the embankment, nearing the bridge and the fires, the smell of dead fish permeating the night air. “Henri travelled all over Europe while he was attempting to secure signatories to the Covenant of the Red Cross,” she said. “He met diplomats, attachés, army generals, presidents, kings. Along the way he had liaisons with several men. He had a long relationship with an Austrian chargé d’affaires and they were discovered, in a hotel room where a conference was being held. That was it. Moynier was never going to tolerate that so he told Henri to leave the Committee – quietly or he would find himself in prison for treason. Henri didn’t want to harm the image of the Red Cross, so he left. The shame of bankruptcy was a front.”
They reached the underside of the bridge where groups of men clustered around several fires burning in large metal barrels. Suddenly one of the men bolted towards Aline, his eyes flaring, “What are you doing here, little whore. And you, what are you? Her pimp?”
George quickly stepped between Aline and the enraged man. “It’s all right, my friend. We’re looking for someone.”
“Friend? You’re not my friend. You’re the police? Yes, you’re the police. Lift up your skirt, you little slut,” he said menacing closer to Aline. “Let’s see what you have under there.”
“No, no, we’re not. We…” George shouted then froze when he saw the flash of a blade. The man lunged at Aline with a knife. George grabbed Aline by the arm, pulling her away. The man advanced on them. He flashed the knife into George’s face. “We mean no harm. Please put it away,” pleaded George. The man started to laugh. “Ah yes, I have myself a chicken.” Suddenly, another man jumped in front of George, “Stop it, Compeau!” Compeau held the knife out stiffly. “I’ll get you next time,” he said with a laugh and walked away.
“You people should be more careful,” said the man. “This is not a place for an idle stroll.” The man had a full black beard which camouflaged the nervous tick of his upper lip. His eyes darted back-and-forth but he did not slur his speech and George believed he was not a drunk.
George showed the man the daguerreotype. “We’re looking for this man. He goes by the name of Henri.”
The man tipped the print towards the firelight. “Ah yes. Henri. He’s been here many times.”
“Is he here now?” asked Aline eagerly.
“No, he left about two weeks ago.”
“How long was he here?”
“Sometimes for a week, sometimes for a month, he’d come and go. He wasn’t like any of these other men. He wasn’t here because of alcohol or opium. Why are you interested?”
“He’s my cousin,” said Aline.
“Ah…”
The man chuckled when George told him who Henri was. “Well, I suppose that makes sense. He often treated these men for their cuts and bruises and told them to stop fighting amongst themselves. Some of these poor souls have survived one war or another with their brains baked. Henri talked with them endlessly. He had the demeanor of an aristocrat. I could never quite figure him out.”
The man had no idea where Henri had gone or if he would ever come back. George gave the man a few coins. “He talked to me, too. I was at Solferino. This is what is left of me.” The man drifted off into the smoke of the fires.
George and Aline continued along the quai, passing under Pont des Invalides where there were more barrels of fire. They paused to look at some of the men but their stern gazes told them to move along. It was a hideous image to George – while Paris was expanding, its old neighbourhoods turned upside down by the widening of boulevards, there were people such as these who were being buried in its wake.
Aline led George from the Seine and through a maze of streets. Her gaze was fixed on the ground until she tucked her hand into George’s arm and pulled herself closer to him, their heads touching. George had long since lost track of time. It was the darkness of morning but lights were still on everywhere: from cafés and lamp posts and apartments casting their beams to the street below. It made it easy to see Aline’s profile bathed in fluttering shades of black and white. He realized he had seen her before in one of the paintings in Marescot’s shop – one he did not purchase.
“Yes, it was probably me,” she said to his question. “I’m a model for many of the artists in Paris. The man who spoke to you at the Bar, he is one of them. Edgar Degas. The money is all right, but sitting perfectly motionless for three hours can drive one quite mad. Did you purchase any?
“Yes. But sadly not the one of you. I should go back. I had this feeling that they were painted in the actual locale. I saw one of a party in a patio restaurant next to a river. Were you in that one, too?
“Yes. That was Renior’s Boating Party. I’m the one leaning on the railing with the flowery hat. But there too much bustle and noise in places like that. He did a sketch of the scene then painted all the characters and composed the canvas from models, like me.”
“Sometimes nude?”
“Sometimes. Degas is not my lover if that’s what you’re thinking. There is an art to being a model. It’s very difficult and not because you must be still. You must recreate in your body the image the artist is trying to achieve. When you fail, they get angry. Artists are an impatient lot.”
George trusted that Aline knew where she was going because he was utterly lost. He didn’t mind being under her control, guided through pools of light and darkness, the silver clasps of Aline’s cloak shining under the gaslights. From the moment he walked into the Folies-Bergère to see her facing him and facing away from him simultaneously with her back reflected in the mirror, he saw a woman as he had never seen one before, able to see her sensuous lips and at the same time her soft blonde hair cascading down her neck.
Aline stopped at a door, unlocked it and walked into a cobblestone courtyard. From there, she led the way up a spiral of drunken stairs to the top floor of the building. She unlocked another door and beckoned him into her apartment. Light came in through a small window, touching the curtains, the fabric of the bedclothes and the outlines of a bookshelf. She made no move to turn on the gaslight. Instead, George felt her hands loosening his cravat before he had sloughed off his topcoat. He tried to undo the silver clasps of her cloak as she pulled him towards the bed. He could hear her breathing as he pulled the fillets of cloth that held her dress together. She hunched her shoulders into him as the dress fell away. In the darkness he could see only her eyes and feel her hot mouth. Without taking their hands away from each other’s body, they managed to struggle free of their cloths and onto the bed. He did not bother to remove her garters or stockings, but took her in his arms, kissed her and penetrated her velvety wet body.
Perfect lassitude. George could now see better in the dark: the cracks in the high ceiling, a distorted rectangle of light pulled across the wall, moving over the irregularities of a picture frame and clothes draped over the open door of an armoire. He moved his arm from where it was trapped under Aline’s back and she shifted languorously, losing herself in and around his long limbs. He touched her cheek lightly with his hand. She took it into her own, cupped it and held it to her mouth, and she looked at him with the same wide-eyed gaze she held for him behind the bar only this time he heard the word chéri whispered in her lazy voice. She was warm against him and he felt the lassitude slipping, giving way to renewed caresses and urgency.
The Ovi 