The Swan Thieves

I imagined her life.

She is not permitted to go out unchaperoned. Her husband is away all day, but she can't speak with him by telephone--that strange invention won't be installed in most Parisian homes for at least another twenty-five years. From early morning, when her husband leaves home in his black suit and tall hat and overcoat to take a horse-drawn omnibus along Baron Haussmann's wide boulevards to his job directing postal operations at a big building in the center of the city, until the time he arrives home, tired and sometimes smelling faintly of spirits, she does not see him and she hears nothing of him.

If he tells her he has worked late, she cannot know where he's been. Her mind sometimes wanders over possibilities that range from hushed meeting rooms, where men in suits, white shirt-fronts, and soft black ties like his gather around a long table, to what she pictures as the pointedly tasteful decorations of a certain kind of club, where a woman dressed only in a silk camisole and stays, ruffled petticoats and high-heeled slippers (but otherwise respectable-looking, with nicely coiffed hair), lets him trail his hand over the top half of her white breasts -- scenes she knows only vaguely from whispers, a hint in a novel or two, hardly part of her upbringing.

She has no proof that her husband visits such establishments, and perhaps he never does. It isn't clear to her why this recurrent picture inspires little jealousy in her. Instead it gives her a sense of relief, as if she is sharing a burden. She knows that the genteel alternatives to these extremes are restaurants where men--mainly men--eat their midday dinner, or even their evening meal, and talk together. Occasionally he comes home needing no supper and reports pleasantly that he's had an excellent poulet r?ti or canard ¨¤ l'orange. There are also cafes chantants where both men and women can sit with propriety, and other cafes where he can sit alone with Le Figaro and a late-evening cup of coffee. Or perhaps he simply does work late.

At home he is attentive: he bathes and dresses for their evening meal if they dine together; he puts on his dressing gown and smokes by the fire if she's already eaten and he has dined out, or he reads aloud to her from the newspaper; sometimes he kisses her on the back of the neck with exquisite tenderness when she sits bent over her work, crocheting lace or embroidering dresses for her sister's new baby. He takes her to the opera in the glittering new Palais Gamier and occasionally to the nicer places to hear an orchestra or drink champagne, or to a ball in the heart of the city, for which she dons a new dress in turquoise silk or rose-colored satin. He makes it clear that he is proud to have her on his arm.

Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork in the style she has seen with him at the more radical new exhibitions. He would never call her a radical, of course; he has always told her she is simply a painter and must do as she sees fit. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life, that the light-filled new landscapes move her. He nods, although he adds cautiously that he wouldn't want her to know too much about life--nature is a fine subject, but life is grimmer than she can understand. He thinks it good for her to have something satisfying to do at home; he loves art himself; he sees her gift and wants her to be happy. He knows the charming Morisots. He has met the Manets, and always remarks that they are a good family, despite edouard's reputation and his immoral experiments (he paints loose women), which make him perhaps too modern--a shame, given his obvious talent.

In fact, Yves takes her to many galleries. They attend the Salon every year, with nearly a million other people, and listen to the gossip about favorite canvases and those the critics disdain. Occasionally they stroll in the museums in the Louvre, where she sees art students copying paintings and sculpture, even an unchaperoned woman here and there (surely Americans). She can't quite bring herself to admire nudes in his presence, certainly not the heroic males; she knows she will never paint from a nude model herself. Her own formal training was in the private studios of an academician, copying from plaster casts with her mother present, before she married. At least she has worked hard.

She wonders sometimes if Yves would understand if she elected to submit a painting to the Salon. He has never said anything slighting about those few paintings at the Salon that are by women, and he applauds whatever she herself puts on canvas. In like fashion, he never complains about the household, which she runs so well, except to say politely once a year that he would like something cooked a little rarer or that he wishes she would put another arrangement on the table in the hall. In the dark now and then, they know each other in a completely different way, with a warmth, even a fierceness, that she cherishes but doesn't dare think about during the day, except to hope that one morning she will wake up realizing she hasn't recently needed to get out those neatly folded clean napkins for her underclothing, the hot-water bottles, the glass of sherry that takes the edge off her monthly cramps.

But it has not yet happened. Perhaps she thinks about it too often, or too seldom, or in the wrong way--she tries to stop thinking about it at all. She will wait instead for a letter, and that letter will be her main diversion for the morning. The post comes twice daily; it is delivered by a young man in a short blue coat. She can hear his ring through the rain, and Esme answering the door. She will not seem eager; she is not, in fact, eager. The letter will appear on a silver tray in her boudoir while she is dressing for her afternoon calls. She will open it before Esme goes out and then tuck it into her desk, to reread later. She hasn't yet taken to putting the letters inside the bodice of her dress, carrying them on her person.

In the meantime, there are other letters to write and to answer, meals to order, the dressmaker to see, the warm coverlet to finish for her father-in-law's Christmas present. And there is her father-in-law himself, the patient old man: he likes to have his drinks and books brought by her in person after he naps, and she actually looks forward to the moment when he strokes her hand with his transparently veined one and gazes at her with almost empty eyes, thanking her for her care. There are the flowering plants she waters herself instead of leaving them to the servants! and most important of all there is the room next to hers, originally a sun-porch, that contains her easel and paints.

The maid sitting for her these days--not Esme but the younger Marguerite, whose gentle face and yellow hair she likes--is hardly more than a girl. Beatrice has begun a painting of her sitting by the window with a pile of sewing; since the maid likes to busy her hands while she poses, Beatrice is happy to let her mend collars and petticoats, as long as the girl keeps her drooping golden head sufficiently still.

It is very light in there; even when rain streams down the many panes, they can get a little work done together, Marguerite's hands moving on the delicate white goods, the cotton and lace, and Beatrice's measuring shape or color, reproducing the roundness of the young shoulders bent over the needle, the folds of dress and apron. Neither speaks, but they are united by the peace of women at their tasks. In those moments, Beatrice feels that her work is a part of the household, an extension of the lunch simmering in the kitchen and the flowers she arranges for the dining table. She daydreams about painting the daughter she does not have, instead of this silent girl she likes but hardly knows; she imagines that her daughter reads poetry aloud to her as she paints, or chatters about her friends.

In fact, when Beatrice is actually working, she ceases to worry about the significance of her paintings, whether they are good, whether she could ever raise with Yves the notion of submitting one to the Salon--they are not good enough yet for that anyway, and probably never will be. Nor does she worry about whether her life has a wider meaning. She finds it enough for now to contemplate the blue of the girl's dress, perfectly matched at last by a smear on the palette, the curling stroke that gives color to the young cheek, the white that she will add the next morning (it needs more white, and a little gray, to convey that rainy autumn light, but she has run out of time before lunch).

If painting fills her mornings, then the afternoons when she does not feel like painting more, and doesn't make calls or receive them, can be a little empty. The characters in the novel she is reading seem with a certainty dead, so she writes instead a letter she's been gathering in her mind, an answer to the one now sitting in a pigeonhole of her painted desk. She crosses her feet at the ankles and tucks them under her chair. Yes, her desk sits in the window; she moved it there last spring, to take advantage of the view of the garden.

As she writes, she sees that this is one of those strange days that sometimes come to Paris in autumn, the driving rain turning to sleet, then snow. Effet de neige, effet d'hiver --she saw that phrase at an exhibition last year, where some of the new painters were showing not only sunlight and green fields but snow as well, accomplishing revolutionary things out in the cold. She stood, humbled, in front of those canvases the newspapers reviled. Snow, when it sits on the ground, contains flecks of gray. It contains blue, depending on the light, the time of day, the sky; it contains ocher and even brown or lavender. She has already stopped seeing snow as white herself a year ago; she almost remembers the moment when she recognized that, examining her garden.

Now, the first snow of a new winter materializes in an instant before her eyes; the rain has transformed itself without warning. She stops writing and cleans her pen on the flannel pen-wipe at her elbow, keeping the ink away from her sleeve. The wilted garden is already covered with subtle color--indeed, it isn't white. Beige, today? Silver? Colorless, if there is such a thing? She adjusts her paper, dips her pen, and begins to write again. She tells her correspondent about the way the new snow settles on each branch, the way the bushes, some of them green all year, huddle together under their weightless veil of nonwhite, about the bench, bare in the rain one moment and collecting a fine soft cushion the next. She feels him listening, unfolding the letter in his graceful, aging hands. She sees his eyes, with their restrained warmth, absorbing her words.

When the post comes later, there is another letter from him, one that is lost to posterity but that tells her something of himself, or of his own garden not yet covered by snow--he would have written it earlier in the day or the evening before; he lives in the heart of the city. Perhaps he deplores--with humorous charm--the emptiness of his own life: he has been a widower for years, and he is childless. Childless, she remembers sometimes, like her. She herself is young enough to be his daughter, even his granddaughter. She refolds his note with a smile, then unfolds it and reads it again.