Sisters. Brigitte Lozerec'h

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?

5

      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