Luncheon of the Boating Party Read Online Free PDF Page A

that someone would buy a painting right out of his hands. The people of Montmartre were used to such things. He picked a study of two circus girls juggling oranges.
    He took avenue Frochot, a one-block haven of rosebushes and villas, because Jeanne Samary lived there. Someone singing the Amours divins aria from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène made him pause. It was so lovely that he was tempted to call on her to come outside and hear it too, but thought better of it. He used to be welcomed anytime, by Jeanne or her mother who stuffed his cheeks with sweets, but that was last winter.
    Liaisons in Montmartre changed quickly.
    In place Pigalle he greeted old Père Cachin, the charbonnier with blackened skin who squatted by his hole in the ground where he sold lumps of heating coal, grilling charcoal, and artists’ charcoal.
    “See? I still have your sign,” Cachin said and pointed to the cardboard drawing Auguste had made showing him in front of his hole with the words Boutique de Charbon in fancy script.
    “Has it brought you good business?”
    “Not so much in summer. But autumn will come.” The man grinned
    his toothless grin. “Days will get shorter.”
    “That’s the last thing I want to hear right now.”
    At boulevard de Clichy, the southern boundary of Montmartre, he turned left so he could use his left hand to hold his painting outward,
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    L u n c h e o n o f t h e B o a t i n g P a r t y
    sign of its availability. Passing La Libération, Pascal’s grim junk shop where the half-blind old man sold used canvases to penniless painters to reuse, he whistled a lighthearted tune to attract attention. An elderly gentleman wearing a bowler, a habitué of the Café Nouvelle-Athènes, gestured with his walking stick for him to stop.
    The man glanced at the painting. “Charming. But you’re too late.
    Pissarro has been here already. I just bought a painting from him.”
    “I don’t believe it.”
    “I had to. He has such a large family, poor chap.”
    “So, because I’ve been careful to be without children, I have to starve?
    I’m in as bad a state as Pissarro, but no one ever says ‘poor Renoir.’ ”
    What if someone from the Salon jury saw him peddling? He’d be
    mortified. It would get around. They would think him pathetic, and they would be right.
    He turned the painting inward and headed toward seedy rue Rochechouart and the Cirque Fernando, a wooden tent-shaped pavilion
    painted in garish orange, green, and violet, and smelling of hay and horse manure. Inside, a ballerina was practicing her balance on a horse circling the ring at breakneck speed. He inquired after Clovis Sagot, a clown who dealt in paintings on the side.
    “He’ll be back in an hour,” Mademoiselle La-La said.
    He hardly recognized the well-known trapeze artist sitting on a bench, knees splayed open, in a nondescript dress instead of hanging by her teeth in an orange tutu the way Degas had painted her, like a slaughtered pig in a charcuterie. Damned rotten way to make a living.
    “You can wait right here.” She thrust out her breasts, patted the bench next to her, and made sloppy kissing noises, pointing with her nose to his face. “Kiss, kiss, to make it all better?”
    What a tart. Her frizzy black hair, drawn into a puff like a bath sponge, wobbled on the crown of her head. He darted out the door, disgusted with her, disgusted with himself for being a cheapjack. Even Pascal, the junk dealer, didn’t cart around his secondhand wares on the street.
    He had an idea, one step up from peddling—Madame Camille’s
    crémerie across the street from his studio. Once, just this once he’d lower
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    S u s a n V r e e l a n d
    himself, in order to buy colors for this painting that would change everything. And then he’d never have to do this again.
    He went in. Camille looked up from drying a cup. “Auguste! What a nasty scrape. You’d think you, a painter, would have a steady hand when you shaved.”
    “I was in