Luncheon of the Boating Party Read Online Free PDF Page B

boulevards, begun under Louis Napoléon as a display of prosperity of the Empire. The new Paris was glorious, yes, but someday people would forget the crooked medieval streets, the Roman well, the history in those stones, just as people in the future would forget how Parisians lived now, and how, in spite of bad times, Paris made itself happy again. That’s what he wanted his painting to be. A painting of happiness in his time.
    At the Comédie-Française, the concierge recognized him from his many visits to see Jeanne, and let him in the performers’ corridor. Auguste wiped sweat from his forehead. Maybe his skinned cheek and broken arm would soften her heart. He knocked at the door of her dressing room and it opened a little.
    “Jeanne?” He opened it more.
    A man in a crisp linen shirt lounged on the divan. His waistcoat had been flung over Jeanne’s rose silk dressing gown on a chair. The memory of its coolness as he’d once slipped it off her shoulders swept over him. The man yanked a fan off the wall where Jeanne had pinned it as a decoration with dozens of others.
    “She’s not here. Who are you?” the man demanded, fanning himself.
    “Pierre-Auguste Renoir. I’ve painted her many times. Even here, with that fan.” He hated having to justify his presence.
    The man tossed it onto her marble-topped dressing table and rummaged through her jumble of cake makeup, creams, powders, puffs, and brushes, shoving them about as if he owned them until he found a nail file and went to work on his thumbnail. “I wouldn’t wait, if I were you. She doesn’t want to see you.”
    He didn’t want to get into a confrontation with this presumptuous parasite. He would not allow himself to be distracted from his focus. At the concierge’s wicket, he wrote a note.
    Chère Mademoiselle,
    Please come to Chatou on Sunday by noon, or earlier, to Maison
    Fournaise on the island. If you are willing, I have a painting in
    • 22 •
    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
    mind that begs for your charms, a souvenir for future ages of life as it was lived in the summer of 1880. It is of crucial importance to me, but I can’t begin it without you. The time of year forces me to start immediately. Please wear a dark blue dress for boating, and a pretty hat. Do you still have the one you wore at the Promenade de Longchamp, the felt one with feathers and gold braid
    that makes you look so lovely? We will be outdoors. If you have any feeling left for me, if only the fond remembrance of times
    past, come.
    Je t’adore toujours,
    Pierre-Auguste
    On the bottom, he drew the hat, and folded the paper in thirds.
    “Please see that Mademoiselle Samary receives this privately.” He pressed a fifty-centime piece into the concierge’s waiting palm.
    He loped into the vast place du Carrousel surrounded by the arms of the Louvre, sacred ground for him. He’d played marbles here as a child, living in the slum of old guardhouses within the arms of the Louvre until Haussmann demolished the eyesore and moved the working class out of the heart of Paris. It grieved him that the house where he’d drawn his first real pictures, on the floor, was no more. But he had lived there long enough to know every inch of the Louvre.
    Entering the ground-floor galleries, he felt the calm of the classical marble faces he had drawn as a youth, as familiar as family. He climbed two flights of stairs to the Salon Carré, hungry for what he’d come to see. Not his favorites, Ingres and Fragonard, not even Watteau, whose paintings of fêtes galantes, aristocrats of the last century enjoying a day of love on the wooded isle of Cythera, conveyed the mood he wanted.
    He had painted hundreds of ladies’ fans with Watteau’s romantic images of Cythera in his younger days. He didn’t need to see them again.
    It was Veronese he needed now, to study his technical achievement.
    There it was, The Marriage Feast at Cana, ten meters wide and nearly seven meters tall.