Under the Wide and Starry Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

wound.
    Staring at the cottage that day, she knew she had to leave, for in staying, she felt as tawdry as the whore at the front door. The strain of Sam’s unfaithfulness brought low the whole tenor of life inside the walls of the cottage, even when he was gone. Fanny carried his dishonor like a sign on her back. How long would it be before the children, too, bore the shame that was rightfully their father’s?
    From their earliest years, Fanny had read to the children, put clay and paintbrushes into their small hands, taken them to music and dancing classes with high hopes that they would acquire a sense of beauty. She wanted Belle to have the advantage of the best art training. She wanted Sammy and Hervey to become educated gentlemen. She wanted a creative life for herself. But in the oppressive atmosphere of the house, where was the air for dreams to breathe?
    It was with these thoughts filling her mind that Fanny had packed their trunks, announced to the children they were going to Europe, and made a dash.
    Their time in Antwerp had been too short, only a few weeks. When she announced they were moving to Paris, Sammy protested, “But we just got here.” He looked out the window of their flat and asked fretfully, “Will there be dogs?”
    Gazing at her little brood as they rattled in the train coach toward France, she felt a streak of optimism.
Hervey will be back to himself in a few days. We probably should have gone to Paris from the outset.
She shook her daughter’s knee. “Are you awake?” The girl opened her eyes, nodded. “You know,” Fanny said, “I have the best feeling, Belle. I just know something good is about to happen.”

CHAPTER 5
    Fanny and Belle sat side by side at the atelier, sketching. On an elevated platform, a nude model rested her elbow on a fluted column. Rodolphe Julian, the proprietor of the academy, circulated among the aproned students who had positioned their chairs at different vantage points around the model.
    â€œPas mal,”
Fanny heard Monsieur Julian say as he examined a Russian artist’s drawing. The teacher frequently said it while observing her work, too. She believed she fell roughly in the middle of these women: not even close to the best, though certainly better than the wealthy dilettantes passing the year in Paris.
    She and Belle had hurried over to the studio early this morning. On Mondays a new model began posing, which meant vying with other early birds for the week’s best positions. Fanny attended the classes spottily at first. But Hervey had improved so quickly under the care of the American doctor that she was free to come with Belle. In the morning, the students worked on studies of the head; in the afternoon, the nude figure. One week it would be a man, whose private parts would be covered, just. The next, it would be a fully nude woman.
    This afternoon a soft light from the studio’s overhead windows fell on the model’s voluptuous body. The woman had bright red hair, but her face and breasts were not visible from Fanny’s vantage point. So she made a study of the woman’s round buttocks and full thighs, narrow ankles, sharp scapulas, and slender waist, where the impression of a skirt band remained. An elderly French student rose with a tape measure in hand and, without touching the model’s flesh, measured her legs. “Don’t torment the woman, Marie,” someone remarked in a dry tone.
    The others in the room were all women. Monsieur Julian was progressive on that point. He accepted female students but kept them separated from his male students. Someone had told Fanny that the women students were charged twice the tuition. She simply shrugged. Monsieur Julian had clearly seen a business opportunity—the squeamishness of other art schools regarding the propriety of women drawing from the nude—and seized it. Female students barred from entering the École des Beaux-Arts