The Green Muse Read Online Free PDF Page B

but all I saw in that mirror was a girl with unruly brown hair and eyes far bluer than I thought I had. My nose was quite familiar, with its little uptilt, but my lips pinker than I expected, and my skin darker than I would like it to be. In the windowpane I am not as pretty as in the mirror, but in the mirror I am not as pretty as I would wish. I have to admit that my vanity has been fed and is hungry. I go to look at Yvette’s mirror at least once a week now.
    But I make faces in the mirror, too, Maman doesn’t know that. And Yvette makes faces, , and we pantomime all sorts of emotions into it and pretend we are on the stage. She talks of going on the stage, but I know that she will marry Jean-­Pierre, the baker’s son, and have babies and grow fat. But I know that someday I really am going to Paris, and I will act upon the stage. It seems such an ordinary schoolgirl dream, but it’s not. One day I will stand at the railway station, next to the clock that keeps Parisian time, with my bag and my secret, listening for the rumble of the locomotive that will come into the station quite precisely at ten after ten, and in the space of three minutes will set me free.
    Louis Mouret opened a bookshop in our town eight months ago. It was a brave act, as we are still practically in the provinces and quite unsophisticated. Many of our women still wear the traditional costume of our village, the blue skirt and cornflower-­blue cap, with its characteristic strings at the back, as their daily dress.
    Louis’ bookstore is not the only innovation. A photographer opened a studio next to the train station last year, and it has been doing a steady business. Papa was even able to persuade Maman to go there to have our family’s picture done, for which we stood in front of a great façade of a forest scene complete with waterfall. There was a plaster rock for Maman to sit on; for once she forsook her wooden clogs for leather shoes, and she looked lovely with her hat high atop her hair, which she had had shaped and filled out over a horsehair mold. Her hair is still thick and dark (although not thick enough for fashion, which makes demands few women can meet), and her skin is fashionably fair because she never leaves the house. Papa tells me what a great beauty she was in her youth. In the family portrait she sits with tightened lips. She does not trust this black glass eye that is making magic in front of her. At the breakfast table that morning she asked nervously how far away from these new cameras must we stand, and was there any danger, and what if it stunted my growth? I told her a thousand times, as Papa resolutely read his paper, that cameras are not new, that they have been around longer than she has been, much longer, forty years. But she would worry about the chemicals, and whether the skin on our faces would be burned.
    I barely remember standing for the photograph. I was so excited, and it took such little time! We were set up and shot in no time at all.
    And when I see the girl in the picture I do not know her at all. I look like a country bumpkin, such a child, with my corset laced so loosely I hardly have a waist, and my skirt so short you can see my ankles even though I am almost fourteen. Maman had almost made me wear my hair down, and I remember how I cried and pleaded with her to put it up, not in a loose, high chignon the way a woman would wear it, but at least off my face, as befitted a young lady. I stand forever fixed in children’s garb between my parents, and my father wears a peasant’s hat on his head. I showed him a whole page of men’s hats from the Bon Marché, the Ladies Paradise that Zola writes about. But although Papa could easily afford one, he brushed away the paper and insisted that the one he wears to church on Sunday was good enough for any portrait. I must say he cut a fine figure, though, in his Sunday suit, looking proudly at the camera, showing for