Under the Wide and Starry Sky Read Online Free PDF

flocked to this place for training in academic figure studies, and they paid whatever fee was demanded. That was how things worked, and she wasn’t going to change it.
    The atelier was especially crowded on Mondays. The women shared stories of shoes bought cheap over the weekend, of romantic interests, of difficult roommates. They laughed about a previous model who had been forced to hold the pose of the Dying Gladiator for a full hour. He had patiently arranged his body as if it were collapsing but kept himself upright with one arm. He curled his lips and wrinkled his forehead as the expiring soldier did in the famous statue. One of the American girls shaped the model’s hair into clumps to appear sweaty from battle. When the poor man was due his break time, the old Frenchwoman, Marie, had handed him a robe and sent him to the basement for coals for the stove. He never came back. The mention of his name, and the image of the fuming gladiator stumbling out onto the snowy streets of Paris in a robe, sent them into bouts of wicked laughter.
    The artists settled into quiet concentration. Fanny’s nose detected two or three perfumes, and coffee, and an unfinished salami sandwich buried in a lunch tin. She felt joyous to be working in this airy room alongside these gifted women.
This is what I love,
she thought.
The beginning.… the possibilities.
At the School of Design in San Francisco she had accompanied Belle to classes and, in the process, discovered her own knack for drawing, as well as a thrilling new social circle. She had thought herself rather sophisticated in her painter’s coat and white cravat. Virgil Williams’s school attracted some fine Califoria artists. But Paris drew pupils from around the world.
    The schools here—the École des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Carolus-Duran’s atelier—were of a different caliber entirely. Brilliance was common in these hungry painters who’d found their way from Russia, Sweden, Spain, England, Belgium, Poland, and a half dozen other countries.
    One of Fanny’s fellow students Margaret Wright, was an American journalist with a wry sense of humor. Twice widowed, she was living abroad with her daughter, an artistic girl who was Belle’s age, and a son just a bit younger than Sammy. Margaret had come over to Europe a year earlier and was supporting herself by sending articles to newspapers back home about life in England and France. Fanny admired her spunk and they forged a quick friendship. This morning she was sitting on Fanny’s left. “Did you go to the Louvre?” she asked.
    â€œWe did,” Fanny whispered. “Saw the actual
Venus de Milo.
It took my breath away.”
    â€œI know. It just causes people to fall silent.”
    Fanny began to laugh.
    â€œWhat is so funny?” Margaret asked.
    â€œI was just thinking about when San Francisco got a copy of the statue as a gift from the French government. When the crate was opened, they discovered the statue had no arms and there was a huge outcry. The Art Association sued the shipping company for damages. And do you know, they won.”
    Margaret rolled her eyes. “Americans can be such boors,” she said.
    Fanny scanned the room to see where Monsieur Julian stood among the easels. He came in every morning and spoke to no one as he rolled up the cuffs of his white shirt. To spare it from charcoal, he said once, though of course it was to enter his role as master, and to show off his arms, muscled as a barbell lifter’s. Monsieur Julian cultivated a mystery about himself, but everyone knew he was once a wrestler. His drawings were tacked up around the walls, along with the work of his students. The master was bent over an American girl’s drawing.
“Proportion!”
he exhorted as he slashed heavy charcoal lines on her composition. The girl, eighteen at best, with brown hair cut in a flat fringe across her forehead, blinked at