Sisters - Brigitte Lozerec'h French Literature

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      Stamping my feet to get them warm, I went up rue Amsterdam, then I turned left into rue de Londres to make a pencil sketch of the pont de l’Europe. Again. It’s an endless source of study. Its metal beams crisscrossing the entire length of the superstructure reminded and remind me of the Eiffel Tower’s meshwork. The confusion of horizontal lines supported by diagonals and a few curves just above the railway was something of a trap for an apprentice like me. I’d already spent hours there while Mme Chesneau, shielded from the sun by her wide-brimmed hat, did needlework on a little folding chair close by.

      At the top of the rue de Londres, on the part of the sidewalk overlooking the rails, I had an interesting view through the grills of the junction of the six roads meeting in a star shape above the railway traffic. I wanted to render the complexity, the contrasts of the parallel rails running under the complicated bridge structures. It was a challenge; I was only a beginner, sixteen and a half years old.

      Frequently a train would come in or out of the station causing an incredible racket, loud enough to cover the din of the streets. Each engine created vibrations underfoot. The locomotive’s plume of steam enveloped the great metal network of the bridge. Cars and passersby were absorbed in its coils and then emerged as the steam dissipated. That was where life was. My fingers numb with cold, having only just scribbled a few first sketches in my notebook, all I could think of was going home. My escapade had lasted long enough. Then a young man whom I hadn’t noticed came up to me with a smile on his face. He didn’t introduce himself—just started up a conversation:

      “May I suggest a few changes, Mademoiselle?”

      I didn’t know what to think. It was my fault, caught without a chaperone. It’s not proper to speak to a man you don’t know. But I was flattered by his visible interest in my work. He had a straightforward look, kind, slightly amused. Could his criticisms be of some help to me? How could I know?

      “So, you were watching me, Monsieur?”

      “It’s not just anybody who’d stop in this kind of cold to draw a few lines on a pad . . . Besides, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen you working on this bridge. That intrigues me. May I?”

      A hand with strong, slender fingers took careful hold of my pencil. The young man’s self-assurance encouraged me to let him do it. With an air of great concentration, his gaze focused inward, he changed my lines with a few strong, controlled marks that gave the tangled framework of the bridge some density and balance. Then, lightly, almost caressingly, he drew a few diagonals coming together in the distance.

      “That’s where the vanishing point is, Mademoiselle, you see . . . It changes things a lot, doesn’t it?”

      I smiled to show I agreed.

      “You can draw, I see,” I said. “But do you also paint?”

      “My studio is in rue Chaptal. You’re welcome to visit . . . Are you studying at some academy?”

      “I take private classes with M. Jacquier, yes, but I only started last year. Granted, it’s not an academy, but it suits me.”

      “He makes stained glass windows and paints signs, if I’m not mistaken. Indeed, he’s beginning to be known!”

      “Watercolors and oils as well . . . Portraits, landscapes, pictures of the docks . . . I asked my mother if I could take classes with him. His studio isn’t far from here.”

      “Work, work, work. Your hand will end up moving with confidence. If you have talent it will show. Love colors, love lines, feel what you want to see on your canvas with every fiber of your being. No doubt, M. Jacquier must tell you this again and again . . . Fill the colors and shapes with your own life.”

      “I have to go home, Monsieur.”

      I certainly felt a bit silly; what he’d just told me was beyond me. What did it mean to “fill the colors and shapes with my own life”? I guessed it was meant to sound encouraging. But my need to paint wasn’t something I’d really thought about—I’d never analyzed it. It had been essential ever since the days when I’d spent hours with my friend, Alice, looking at illuminations in the convent library.

      “Do you live in the neighborhood?” he went on.

      When we realized that we were neighbors—his place was on rue Chaptal and I lived at the corner of rue Moncey and rue Blanche—we went down the rue de Liège together. We introduced ourselves to each other, if briefly. As we went along he repeated the invitation to his studio. I promised I’d go there with Mme Chesneau. Mentioning my chaperone reassured me and made it possible for me to regain some of the dignity I’d lost by allowing him to converse with me all the way to No. 1, rue Moncey.

      We only had time to exchange a few scraps of information about our lives, almost nothing, and especially not the fact that I was living at my grandmother’s. I was ashamed of it. I’d have liked to be able to say that I’d go back to my parents’ home soon, that I was going to find my twin brother and little sister there, that we lived in Twickenham and were only visiting Paris. Flattered that he’d been drawn to me as an artist, I chose, however, to be silent. But what kind of artist was he? My curiosity would have to remain unsatisfied for the time being, because in a moment he was going to vanish. He was preparing to veer off for the boulevard de Clichy as I stood at the bow of the stone steamship solidly anchored at rue Moncey and rue Blanche. Then I left this stranger and climbed our stairs rapidly in order to conceal what I was feeling. I wanted to shake off all the things this encounter had stirred in me, things I couldn’t have analyzed but that made me want to visit Fréderic Thorins in his studio as soon as I could. I needed to hide how excited I’d become; I needed to hide my fear that someone would notice how I was buzzing, full of both hope and distrust, and likewise the fear that I’d been wrong to allow myself to be seen on the street with a strange man.

      When I pushed open the apartment door, only the cook was there. Grandmother had gone to be with her daughter on rue du Four, on the Left Bank. Mme Chesneau had accompanied her in the fiacre because Eugénie would have to be taken for a walk while my mother was giving birth.

      I then understood the panic caused by the morning message. My half-brother, François, was born in the afternoon of that unforgettable March 6, 1903.

      No one could ever have imagined that I was meeting my future husband while my mother was in labor. In fact, as I climbed the stairs to the first landing, I was thinking of him as an old man. But he was only ten years older than I, and, now that our lives are bound together, I don’t see the least difference.

      Curiosity was behind my asking Grandmother for her official permission to go with Mme Chesneau to visit the studio of M. Thorins; then came the interrogation: Who was the young man? How had I met him? What was his background? She reluctantly agreed but made it clear that it had to be “A short visit, of course! Mme Chesneau will tell me what she thinks of him!”

      In Frédéric Thorins’s studio I found the same spirit of work and the same love of silence as I’d felt at M. Jacquier’s. But here an old sofa and two slumping armchairs invited one to rest or daydream. Behind them a screen served to camouflage very poorly the long room overflowing with bric-a-brac. Everything about this studio, except for the artist’s work, seemed to me an invitation to idleness. The old sofa brought shameful things to my mind, questionable situations, but then also animated conversations, joyous get-togethers among friends—altogether, the sorts of thing you heard about artists. None of which had ever occurred to me at M. Jacquier’s.

      I liked the atmosphere in my teacher’s studio. Tall and solidly built, he wore a shirt fastened at the collar with a bow tie to work, all of a piece with this space where I was struck by the vertical lines of the furniture—very straight and upright: tall easels, armchairs with straight backs, a high table, a narrow chest of drawers, and a cupboard that seemed immense to me. You could see it was home to a spirit that was constantly seeking. Pictures hung side by side on the walls and invited you into little harbors, the marshes of the Vendée and the lives

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