The Devil in Montmartre Read Online Free PDF Page B

dancer.“No, dear,” she whispered, “I’d never think that of you.”

    Marcia, Betsy, and Sir Henry rode in an open barouche down a shady avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, past the race course and round the serpentine lake. The weather had changed for the better. The afternoon was unseasonably balmy with a few wispy clouds in a bright blue sky. Sir Henry considered it a good opportunity for Marcia to get some fresh air and sunshine. She sat across from Betsy and Sir Henry, half-lulled to sleep by their monotonous chatter, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, and the rumble of carriage wheels.
    Marcia looked tiny sitting by herself on the broad leather seat; she seemed to be fading away by the hour. Her wasted body was wrapped in a pure white, furbelow-frilled dress, her gaunt skull half hidden under a black ribbon-trimmed and flower-bedecked straw hat and small, fringed parasol. A crocheted shawl draped her bony shoulders.
    Marcia’s bright green eyes fixed on Betsy, who giggled like a schoolgirl while flirting with the handsome English doctor. She’s far away from me now. So much the better. Marcia did not want her friend to be shackled to a corpse. Life is for the living; the dying dwell in a twilight world of their own, a sort of limbo between the quick and the dead. A wry smile crossed her rouged lips. Où sont les neiges d’antan? Villon’s poem had taken on a new meaning for her. She would soon join those beauties of yesteryear.
    Marcia turned her attention to the trees and their dying leaves. Bright red, orange, and old gold, they fell from branches, drifted in the mild breeze, floated for an instant before landing on the surface of the mirror-like lake. How beautiful. She had devoted her life to beauty, her art. But her art was dying, too. Why had she committed herself to something so ephemeral? Beauty was fragile and transitory, like the floating leaves. Truth endured, though it could be ugly. She predicted the new art would be ugly in its uncompromising honesty, reflecting a changing world, a fin de siècle ethos oriented toward darkness and despair.
    She had changed her mind; she would not return to America to die in a sanatorium. She had not yet told Betsy or Sir Henry, but she intended to remain in Paris. Marcia wanted to finish one last great testament, her painting of Virginie’s suffering, but her will had been dissipated by disease, oozing out of her like gummy sap from a dying tree. She closed her eyes and sought inspiration in a vision. The image of Virginie Ménard appeared shining through Marcia’s closed eyelids like a celestial being floating in a golden nimbus. A single tear formed a rivulet running slowly down her powdered cheek, but no one noticed.

4
    MONTMARTRE
    EVENING, OCTOBER 14;
    EARLY MORNING, OCTOBER 15
    L e Chat Noir occupied a three-story half-timbered building on the Boulevard de Clichy, not far from the Moulin Rouge. Originally located on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, the popular cabaret had opened to promotional hoopla; a torch-bearing parade of Hydropathes costumed like Swiss Guards, led by a flamboyant mountebank, Rodolphe Salis.
    Prior to opening his cabaret, Salis, an artist of modest talent, and three of his painter friends, had eked out a living by painting cheap religious paintings. Each friend contributed to the product, the Stations of the Cross, according to his specialty, drawing and painting faces, bodies, draperies, or background. But in a marketplace glutted with shoddy artwork the scheme could never prove lucrative. On the other hand, Salis’s idea for a new cabaret was, like Oller and Zidler’s Moulin Rouge, a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, meeting a demand for bawdy, avant-garde entertainment in exactly the right place at the right time.
    Salis based his interior design for the cabaret on a fanciful seventeenth-century tavern that might have been frequented by Cyrano de Bergerac or Dumas père’s Musketeers. Customers sat at long wooden tables in a hall lit