Sisters - Brigitte Lozerec'h French Literature

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fact that I could share the experience with Eugénie greatly increased my pleasure, because my little sister was positively jolly when she was with me. Sometimes she would even suggest posing for me herself, so long as she didn’t have to spend too much time in front of my easel. I discovered how beautiful a fine ankle and a curving foot could be as I made studies of this charming model. I could never do enough sketches of my little sister, even when she was in her little nightgown, washing, her feet in the tub. The various parts of her began to take on their own existence in my eyes, like a vase or a lamp. Soon enough, I’d begin again drawing from a different angle, if she hadn’t gotten bored. But she never liked doing the same thing for long.

      Less and less did we hear scales floating from the open parlor window. But I liked hearing the piano, even when the notes were just repetitions, when Eugénie was practicing. There was something about that sound which was like the voice of a child stumbling over her reading every day. Behind all the blunders, the breaks in the rhythm, there was a will: concentrating on loosening her fingers and her mind through daily work, applying itself to growing up. I sent her encouraging thoughts for her efforts while I worked hard at my own practice, perfecting a still life or a landscape on paper or canvas.

      But Eugénie was giving up on the piano.

      Drawing at my side became more and more important for her. With each pencil she put to her pad she was sharing not only the reassuring comfort of our feminine clan, but also the impression that she possessed the land around us, simply because we were imprisoning stretches of the panorama in our notebooks. “The part from here to the mill belongs to me, what about you?” one of us would say and the other would reply, “The whole island, the village and the forest across the way . . .” The next day we’d trade our properties in a serious tone of voice, as we thought businessmen must do. But really, if I felt that anything really belonged to me, it was the ephemeral colors of the landscape, impossible to count because they multiplied so rapidly, merging, one shade running into another or standing out distinctly, depending on where the sun was in the sky—and the reflections in the water beneath that changeable sky, which wasn’t even faithful to itself. I could never have invented the variations of color constantly at play in the light, so that, though every day I was seeing the island, the mill, the village on the other bank, it was never the same river, the same hill, the same little village, the same island. As I sought to discover what was truly before me, it seeped into my flesh before flowing with great difficulty onto my canvas. Our game, however, made it more fun, and all the time we spent together bridged the gap between us. Both of us needed this, one as much as the other. And yet, there was a sort of devotion in the way she looked up at me that was a crushing burden despite being so flattering. It was the same way I looked at my mother. I knew the powerful, silent expectancy that lay behind her eyes and sometimes it frightened me; I didn’t feel I had it in me to give her whatever it was she wanted. She was making me responsible for some essential thing that was beyond my means. I didn’t know how to give Eugénie a portion of the treasure that I felt entrusted with, nostalgic for: the wealth stored up before her birth.

      M. Jacquier had encouraged me to give landscapes the colors I saw, not the colors that might, objectively, be there for everyone. That wasn’t easy. What I got from it, however, was the pride of discovery. “Work, work, work!” M. Jacquier kept repeating. M. Thorins hadn’t told me anything different. Still, he’d suggested—yes!—that I speak to my mother to get her permission to take lessons from him to supplement the things I’d learned from M. Jacquier. I hadn’t yet asked her, afraid perhaps of breaking the spell of our days in the country. I thought about it constantly, but still kept it to myself. Because, ever since the exhibit at Willon Gallery, I’d felt proud simply because of the flattering manner in which Frédéric had introduced me to that journalist. And I still felt shaky when I remembered the way the men had looked at me. I was sorry that I’d only been back to see Frédéric twice in the intervening time, always with Mme Chesneau, if for no other reason than to see his eyes again and find in them the same depth and brilliance that had so shaken me, the strange play of emotion on his face when it lit up in a smile. I went over and over it all in my memory, those fleeting moments that had made me conscious of a new way of feeling.

      When Eugénie and I were at our easels, Grandmother would sometimes come to see what we were up to. She couldn’t resist a need to make observations, judgments based on the academism of her youth. That day the problem was my tree. And not just any tree—the willow I was so fond of. It was not gray-blue with glaring green specks the way I’d painted it, she exclaimed indignantly, and it didn’t lean so far over the flow of the Seine, which, moreover, was not really so yellow either. Holding tight to M. Jacquier’s advice, I didn’t change anything. Having watched that willow for years, seeing it lean far enough to dip its leaves into the sandy water at the tip of the island, I thought, each time I saw it, that I might be seeing it just at the moment it would finally fall. After each winter, when we arrived, the first thing I’d do was go to see if it was still standing. My stubborn insistence on painting it in such unlikely colors was shocking to Grandmother, who thought this was just about equivalent to a child’s scribbling. She walked off grumbling, “Well, after all, if you’re having fun . . .” in a condescending tone of voice, the way you’d dismiss someone engaged in something trivial. I knew she didn’t take my desire to live for painting seriously. Eugénie, in a burst of solidarity with me, offhandedly called after her, “You’re not the one taking lessons, she knows what she’s doing!” I was shocked at my sister’s boldness but Grandmother didn’t bother to turn around, she just lifted her cane as if to say, “I really don’t care!” I never got used to the fact that Eugénie was so willing to speak to our grandmother so informally, as though she were a friend on the street, whereas William and I always addressed her solemnly as “Grandmother.” And the tone of voice she’d used took my breath away. Deep inside, however, I envied the freedom shared by my grandmother and her granddaughter.

      Eugénie used to go and get a book of the tales of the Comtesse de Ségur in order to have her mother all to herself, asking her to interrupt whatever she was doing to read more of the story they’d started the evening before. Sometimes our mother would balk and say, “You know how to read for yourself now! Just sit here quietly next to me . . .” But my little sister would insist until she got what she wanted. Then mother and daughter, their blonde and red hair mingling, would bend together over the printed pages. One ran her index finger along the lines as she read, the other followed with her eyes, lulled by the adored voice. It gave me pleasure to sketch this scene. But it wasn’t a pure pleasure. Great waves of jealousy had me glued to this almost unbearable image of the little one resting her cheek on the beautiful bosom I no longer even dared brush against, leaning there the way I’d done once upon a time. (Between then and now, in the convent, I’d been made to see evil in all sorts of places I’d never suspected of harboring it.) Fixing the two of them on a sheet of paper was the only way I had to possess them, master them, and anesthetize the pangs piercing my heart. I’d been an affectionate child, but I’d had to learn to restrain my impulses. A month away from my seventeenth birthday it still hurt me to see that beautiful scene. I’d have liked to smother my mother in my loving arms and I was ashamed to be looking at them like a jealous little girl. Then, all of a sudden, Jeanne Versoix would proclaim to all present, “It’s time to take a walk!” And she’d lead us off on a grand tour that inevitably ended on the towpath.

      The air in the tall meadow grass smelled like summer, like freedom.

      William arrived at the end of July on the same train as our cousin Dilys Lewly—a cousin whom, for that matter, we called “aunt,” because she was ten years older than our mother.

      I was immensely surprised when I saw that young man with shiny curls the color of ripe chestnuts falling around his laughing face step down from the train, as if it had been years since we’d seen each other. How had I been able to do without my brother? How could there have been any flavor to existence in his absence? All the greetings, all the happy, welcoming jokes suddenly emerged in English among the four of us. At the train stop in Villennes, which wasn’t yet a station, and then in the carriage, our euphoria was like some secret between us, an indulgence in our kinship from across the Channel.

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