Alone In Paris Page 2

  Millions of francs flowed in and it had been the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Guibert, who had decided that the Basilica should be erected in Montmartre.

  “It is here,” the Prelate cried, “that the Sacred Heart should be enthroned to draw all to itself. On the summit of a hill a monument to our religious rebirth should be raised.”

  The Church looked so beautiful now with the sun shining on the white stone that Una thought it was impossible that Montmartre could be as wicked as the girls at school had told her it was.

  She was not a Catholic, for both her father and mother, being English, were Protestants.

  But, living in the Convent where nearly all the other pupils were Catholic, Una had learnt how important their religion was to them and how deeply it coloured their lives.

  She was sure that however sinful Montmartre had been in the past, the Church, which by now was nearly completed, would sweep away all that was wrong and diffuse an air of sanctity over the whole place.

  The road that led to Montmartre was certainly as steep and as difficult as the ascent into Heaven itself.

  The horse was going more and more slowly and now Una could see how different the people looked from those she had passed in the streets and boulevards below.

  Men with velvet jackets and great flowing ties walked with women wearing what almost appeared to be fancy dress.

  They looked strange and at the same time rather exciting and she tried to guess which were errand girls and boys, laundresses, shopkeepers and poor artisans.

  There were some men who Una thought were obviously Apaches and she wondered if the stories she had heard of their fights with knives and pistols in dark alleys were really true.

  There were artists sketching on the pavements and congregating in a square where the chestnut trees were in bloom.

  The scene was so pretty and the whole place had such an air of gaiety about it that Una drew in her breath with excitement.

  It was even more thrilling than she had imagined it would be and she hoped that her father would allow her to walk round and look at the people and perhaps he would know some of the artists.

  She was so busy looking round her that she was surprised when the carriage drew to a standstill outside a tall building that was badly in need of a coat of paint.

  It looked drab and had a slight air of desolation that made Una feel apprehensive.

  “Here you are, m’mselle!” the cocher said, shouting at her over his shoulder.

  “Thank you,” Una replied.

  The man climbed down slowly because he was elderly and rather fat and opened the door of the carriage for her. Then he lifted her trunk down onto the pavement.

  She paid him and then he asked,

  “Shall I carry the trunk in for you, m’mselle?”

  “That would be very kind,” she answered.

  She went ahead through the open door of the house and saw a staircase in a narrow, unfurnished hall that looked both dusty and dirty.

  “Which number are you going to, m’mselle?” the cocher enquired.

  For the first time Una realised that her father did not own the whole house, as she had imagined, and it obviously contained several studios.

  She was just about to reply that she had no idea, when she saw three names stuck to a board.

  One of them she saw with relief was that of her father.

  The cocher saw the board too.

  “Well, at least you know who’s where,” he said.

  “My father lives at number three,” Una answered.

  “That’s up the stairs,” the cocher said in a voice of resignation.

  Putting her trunk onto his shoulder, he climbed up the stairs ahead of her.

  They were uncarpeted and creaked ominously under his weight.

  On the first floor there was a door on which was inscribed roughly in black paint, JULIUS THOREAU.

  Excitedly Una squeezed past the cocher on the small landing and knocked.

  There was no answer and she opened the door tentatively.

  She had expected the studio to look strange but certainly not anything like the large room before her, which was remarkable for its disorder.

  There was a sofa, chairs and a table, all mixed up with several easels, a model’s throne, a high stepladder and propped everywhere were unfinished canvasses.

  On the walls hung a number of unframed pictures and on the floor were books, boots, dumbbells, an incredible number of empty bottles and some women’s clothes, stockings, scarves, an embroidered Chinese shawl and an open sunshade.

  Una looked about her in bewilderment.

  The cocher put down her trunk.

  “Looks as though a good tidying-up wouldn’t do any harm, m’mselle,” he said jovially.

  Then, before Una could reply, he had left her, his heavy footsteps clumping down the stairs.

  Una stared round her, wondering how anyone could live in such a mess.

  Then she saw at the far end of the room a narrow wooden staircase and guessed that it must lead to a bedroom.

  It passed through her mind that her father might be ill, which would account for his not coming to meet her.

  Gingerly she picked her way across the room, dislodging a ball and seeing a piece of beautiful china, broken in two, lying beside an old boot without laces.

  She climbed the staircase and found, as she had expected, a small bedroom, containing a large divan as a bed and a chest-of-drawers with one leg missing propped up on books.

  There were several broken chairs and the walls were decorated with strange, brilliantly coloured murals of half-naked women.

  Una looked at them and felt embarrassed.

  As there was no one in the room, she felt almost as if she was spying on something secret and climbed down the stairs back to the studio.

  There was a large window with a North light and in front of it stood an easel on which she could see a half-finished picture.

  She manoeuvred her way across the room to look at it.

  She recognised that it was her father’s work, but he had certainly changed his style a great deal since she had last seen one of his paintings.

  He had always used colours in a different manner from other artists.

  There had been something unusually beautiful in the manner in which he had brought light into his paintings, giving what he painted a brilliance that made it hold the attention, while the background faded into insignificance.

  Una tried to understand what he wished to convey in his paintings, for he had told her that a real artist painted what he felt rather than what he saw with his eyes.

  But she found the picture on the canvass entirely incomprehensible, just a mass of swirling colours mingling with one another and without even a recognisable pattern.

  ‘Papa will have to explain this to me,’ she reflected.

  She heard footsteps coming up the stairs and waited with a leap of her heart.

  Now she would see her father again.

  Now everything, which at the moment was rather frightening, would be all right.

  The door opened.

  Her lips actually moved to exclaim, “Papa!” when she saw that it was not her father who stood there, but a middle-aged man, very smartly dressed.

  He had a top hat on the side of his head and a pearl tiepin in his cravat and his clothes were fashionably cut, so that with his gold-topped Malacca cane he seemed strangely out of place in the untidy confusion of the studio.

  He walked into the room with an air of authority and for a moment did not see Una standing by the easel.

  In fact he walked in the other direction, towards a picture that hung on the wall just below the steps that led to the bedroom.

  Only when he was halfway there did he become conscious of someone else present in the room and he turned his head to see Una.

  She was standing in the sunshine streaming in through the window, which haloed the childish schoolgirl’s hat she wore on the back of her head and glistened
on the gold of her hair as it curled round her oval forehead and the sides of her cheeks.

  “Who are you?”

  The newcomer’s voice was sharp and Una replied a little nervously,

  “I-I am waiting for my – father.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. He told me to come to him in Paris and I thought he would meet me at the station – but – perhaps I – missed him.”

  “Your father is Julius Thoreau?”

  The gentleman spoke slowly, as if he was choosing his words and thinking as he did so.

  “Yes. I am his daughter, Una.”

  “And he told you to come to Paris? How long ago?”

  “Eight – no, nine days ago. He sent me a telegram at the Convent in Florence.”

  “Nine days! Yes, that is possible.”

  There was something in the way he spoke that made Una say quickly,

  “Is anything – wrong? Is Papa – ill?”

  The gentleman walked towards her.

  He had to circumnavigate a chair piled with some broken crockery and a cardboard box that contained a number of black and white ostrich feathers.

  Una did not move, but her eyes were very large in her small face.

  “What is it? What is wrong?” she asked as the gentleman reached her.

  “I am sorry to tell you,” he said gently, “that your father was buried yesterday.”

  “B-buried?”

  It was difficult to say the word, but she went on,

  “What – happened? How is it – possible?”

  The gentleman’s eyes shifted and she had a feeling that he was not going to tell her the whole truth.

  “Your father had a fall,” he said. “It must have affected his heart, because, when they picked him up, he was dead.”

  There was no point in telling this child, he thought to himself, that her father had been fighting drunk, that his fall had been down a long flight of stairs and that he had broken his neck in the process.

  Una clasped her hands together.

  “How could – anything so – terrible have happened?” she asked as if she spoke to herself.

  “Perhaps in a way it was a merciful death,” the gentleman said consolingly. “Your father did not suffer.”

  “I am – glad of that.”

  There was a little pause and then she asked,

  “Are you a – friend of Papa’s?”

  “I knew your father for many years,” the gentleman replied, “and I think he would say I was his friend. In fact, whenever he sold a picture, which was not often, it was I who arranged the sale.”

  Una gave a little exclamation.

  “Now I know who you are!” she said. “You are Monsieur Philippe Dubucheron!”

  “That is right. Did your father speak of me?”

  “It was Mama who used to say,” Una replied, “‘Do tell Monsieur Dubucheron, Julius, that you have finished a picture’.”

  She did not add that the end of the sentence was always, ‘we need the money’.

  “I must admit,” Monsieur Dubucheron said, “that I had no idea your father had a daughter, nor one, I may say, who is so pretty.”

  Una looked a little shy at the compliment and he thought that he had never seen anything so attractive as the faint colour rising in her cheeks and the way her eyes with their long lashes flickered before his!

  They were very unusual eyes, he thought, green with touches of gold in them and to his surprise they made him think poetically that they were like sunshine on a stream.

  There was something clear and transparent about the girl that he did not remember seeing in another woman for a very long time, if ever.

  Then he told himself that he was not familiar with girls from a Convent, who were not usually visitors to Julius Thoreau’s studio.

  Then suddenly he remembered and it came back to him.

  He had come to the studio ten days ago, or it might only have been nine, and, as he had reached the top of the stairs, a woman had come bursting out through the door, shouting the foul obscenities that were characteristic of the women who frequented Montmartre.

  He had entered to find Julius Thoreau at his easel with a paintbrush in his hand. At the same time he had seen immediately that he was not in a fit state to paint anything.

  He was drunk, as he had been continuously drunk for the last three years, since he had come to live in Montmartre.

  As it happened, Monsieur Dubucheron had already sold a picture on which Julius Thoreau was engaged.

  It had been almost finished two days ago. It annoyed him to find that no further work had been done on it in the meantime and he knew that the woman who had just left was the model for the figure in the foreground.

  “What do you think you are doing, Thoreau?” he had asked irritably. “You told me that picture would be ready today. I have a client waiting for it who is leaving Paris tonight.”

  “Then he can leave without it!” Julius Thoreau had answered, slurring his words.

  “Nothing annoys me more than breaking my promises,” Philippe Dubucheron replied, “and what is more, you need the money.”

  As he spoke, he thought that that was unmistakable. Julius Thoreau was wearing a ragged shirt that needed washing and his trousers were smeared with paint.

  On his feet were a pair of disreputable felt slippers and it was obvious that he had not shaved for twenty-four hours.

  He had once been a handsome distinguished-looking man, but drink had taken its toll of his figure and his looks.

  He was bloated and, Philippe Dubucheron thought fastidiously, he smelt, as did the whole studio.

  “Very well,” he said. “As you have not finished this picture in time, I cannot sell it. Let me know when you wish to see me, because I will never, and this is a promise, Thoreau, sell a picture of yours again until it is completely finished and in my hands.”

  I’ll finish it, I’ll finish it!” Thoreau moaned. “It’ll only take me a few hours.”

  “Without a model?” Philippe Dubucheron enquired.

  “Damn the model! Damn the avaricious little harlots! All they want is money, francs, more francs! That one wouldn’t even sit until I paid her!”

  “They have to earn their living too!” Philippe Dubucheron said sharply. “Stop being a fool, Thoreau. You cannot finish the picture without a model. Get her back!”

  “I wouldn’t have her back now if she went down on her knees!” Julius Thoreau shouted. “I want a model who understands what I’m trying to do, not a piece of wood without a thought in her head except money!”

  “You will find no one who will work for you without payment in Montmartre,” Philippe Dubucheron said cynically.

  There was silence for a moment.

  Then suddenly Julius Thoreau gave a loud shout that made the dealer start.

  “I have it!” he exclaimed. “I have the model I want! She won’t badger me for money. She’ll sit for me because she loves me, do you hear? Because she loves me!”

  “I hear you,” Philippe Dubucheron said, “although why any woman should love you, God only knows!”

  Disgusted, he walked towards the door. When he reached it, he turned back to say,

  “When you have a picture complete and ready for sale, I will come and see you. Otherwise, goodbye!”

  He walked down the stairs in a bad temper, angry because he had been fool enough to believe Julius Thoreau when he said that he would finish the picture and disliking more than anything else that he should disappoint a client.

  It was not easy to sell pictures at the moment and if it had not been for other much more lucrative arrangements, Philippe Dubucheron might in fact have felt the pinch.

  But he was too astute and too clever at selling whatever people wanted, not to grow richer and richer year by year.

  His silence now made Una feel uneasy.

  As if she sensed that there was something behind it that she did not know, she asked in a very low voice,

  “Can y
ou– tell me where – Papa is – b-buried?”

  “Yes, of course,” Philippe Dubucheron replied.

  Una turned away to stand at the window with her back to him and he knew that she was hiding her tears.

  “Papa seldom – wrote to me,” she said, “but when he did – he sounded as if everything was going – w-well for him. I had no idea – he – lived like this.”

  Philippe Dubucheron thought it not surprising that she was shocked by the appearance of the studio.

  “I expect the woman who cleaned for him has not bothered to come in now that he is dead.”

  There was silence.

  Then after a moment Una turned round.

  There were tears in her eyes, but he could see that she was making a gallant effort at self-control.

  “It seems – wrong to ask you at this – particular moment,” she said, “but does – everything here now belong – to me?”

  “For what it is worth,” he replied scornfully.

  Then suddenly a thought struck him.

  “You have some money, I suppose?”

  Una shook her head.

  “N-no.”

  “What do you mean – no?” he asked. “All these years when you have not been with your father, you must have had something to live on or been with relatives.”

  “I have been – at school.”

  “And who paid the school fees?”

  “Mama – when she died she left everything she possessed to be spent on my education.”

  That had been a wise move, Philippe Dubucheron thought, because otherwise Thoreau would have drunk it away.

  “What made you come now to stay with your father?”

  “I wrote to Papa to tell him now that I was eighteen the money had all been spent and it was time I left school. Most girls leave when they are seventeen.”

  Philippe Dubucheron calculated that it was this letter that had made Thoreau think of sending for his daughter for an entirely selfish reason.

  “Well, what we must arrange,” he said briskly, “is, now that your father is dead, for you to go to your relatives in England.”

  “I – cannot do – that,” Una said quickly.

  “Why not?”

  “I have no idea who they are or if I have any relatives alive. After Mama ran away with Papa, they never spoke to her again.”

  Philippe Dubucheron stared at her in astonishment. “Is that true? Are you really telling me that you are completely alone in the world?”