The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Read Online Free PDF Page A

hit us. Dizziness—a numbness of the extremities—headaches, forgetfulness? Unusual behavior? Bouts of crying, waking in the night? What do you think? Is it a case of railway spine? This is what the medical men are interested in, to the extent that they can bill you for it . . . Paris is a powder keg.
‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Through these gates you pass into the city of woe—’
To hell with a broken arm; I have Claude for that.” He tipped up his glass, swallowed, and closed his eyes. “The entire railway concept is a wreck of human consciousness, of our conception of time. Barman, a glass for mademoiselle! Mademoiselle—?”
    â€œRigault.” I supplied the name warily. “Who is Badinguet?”
    â€œThe lady’s hotel has a curfew,” said Claude. But he slid a glass down the bar.
    â€œ . . . Hotel?” Pierre Chasseloup looked at me for the first time. Heat rose in my cheeks.
    â€œI have just arrived in Paris.”
    The man tipped a finger of absinthe into my glass and set up the spoon for sugar. I poured again and watched the liquid turned from green to cloudy white. Its scent was heady, thick with field flowers and weeds; licorice and mint and something sweet. The taste of it was bitterer than its scent and the liquid trickled down my throat like hot wax, all the way down my hollow interior. In the mirror over the bar, I saw a pale girl with tumbling dark hair, head to head with a stranger, and my hand went to my brow. My own injury (now dressed with a tincture from the pharmacy, including some concealing powder for the bruise) was still tender and aching.
    â€œBadinguet is the carpenter who lent his trousers in order that this pretension-to-a-name, Louis Napoleon, could escape from his English jail cell, convince the peasantry of his glorious identicalness to his imperial uncle, sneak into Paris, and steal France after the economy had collapsed. Thus. ‘Badinguet,’ we say, to cut him back down to size. Are you here to model, Mademoiselle Rigault, did I see you on Monday on the rue Bonaparte? Your bones have an Italian proportion.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œBecause I have to paint like a madman over the next few weeks.”
    â€œWith a broken arm?” I eyed the dingy bar-towel bandage.
    â€œWith or without, like a journalist who must have the story out in the morning, whether or not it is true.” He gave a short laugh. “So if you are not a model, are you a relation to that self-advertising brigand of the Left Bank cafés, Rigault? . . . No again? Names are portents. As for mine, the wolf is chasing me; and I must turn things around ere I perish in its teeth.”
    â€œSir, I think that I might—need some air.” The liquor was tightening around my head like a band of iron, blurring my vision. All of the silver and glass was catching sparks of hazy light, and I had to eat something or faint. Chasseloup slid his long body off the stool with a bouncing slide, as though his bones were made of India rubber, as perhaps they were, by then.
    â€œAbsinthe is best taken serially,” he said. “Let’s go.” I glanced anxiously for Claude; the barman caught my eye and waved.
    The street cobbles were wet, and the chill had seeped through to my skin by the time a cab pulled up, leaking a stream of gaseous heat from the brazier as the door swung open. Here it was, a ticket to Claude’s
soupe
—or—what? Stephan’s startled eyes rose before me.
    â€œClimb in,” Chasseloup said. “I’ll take you—where will I take you? For a nightcap at the Gare du Nord?” He stood next to me, waiting.
    â€œHey,” shouted the coachman, “that’s my coal you’re burning.” In the warmth of the cab’s brazier that drifted into the night air, through the lingering scent of absinthe, the artist’s arm smelled of linseed oil and pigment, like