Sisters. Brigitte Lozerec'h

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.

2

      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,