LITMIR.BIZ

       For Jean-Jacques Pauvert As devoted to books As Manet was to painting

      Contents

Part One

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       Part Two

       23

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      “Giving order to chaos—that is what creation is.”

      GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

Part One

1

      I ended up feeling at home there. And, actually, I’ve been calling it “our studio” for a long time. Frédéric completely rearranged it shortly before our marriage.

      It wasn’t considered proper for me to visit him there alone during our engagement. My chaperone’s presence kept us from having any real familiarity at all, and made us all the more impatient. He slipped the ring on my finger in August 1904, a few days before my eighteenth birthday, but it took me a long time really to relax in his space, into our new life. The fear that I was just passing through never went away.

      Our plan was that, from then on, we each would have one end of the studio to ourselves. Located on the ground floor, in the rear of a courtyard on rue Chaptal, our work space is a few streets over from place Clichy. Our glass window is closed off from any passing apartment dwellers by a privet hedge perfuming the air when summer comes. With the large doorway open we can hear hoofs and the wheels of horse-drawn carriages clattering on the stone pavement, as well as loud voices: the man selling newspapers, the vegetable man, the one selling rabbit skins, the knife sharpener and other peddlers, occasionally an automobile motor . . .

      For ten years now I’ve been privileged to work on colors and patterns in a place reserved for that purpose alone. Slight shudders of anxiety, unexpected and incongruous, still take me by surprise, as if someone were about to tell me, “Pack your bags again, you have to leave.” I keep fate at bay when this happens by closing my eyes and whispering, “Never again will a train or boat be loaded with my bags . . .” Anxiety has made me sedentary.

      Being shut up, though not a prisoner, in the studio makes me happy. It’s the place where I’m able to love Frédéric, able to be myself.

      The arrangement hasn’t changed since I got here and its stability suits me.

      Frédéric put his easels, his trestle table, and his wardrobe next to the door, and my workbench and storage cabinet are set up in the back, near the steep staircase leading to the attic. In the front of the building there’s a workbench running the length of the glass window, just beneath it. It’s stained in some places and polished by the years in others

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