Luncheon of the Boating Party Read online

  LUNCHEON OF THE

  BOATING PARTY

  ALSO BY SUSAN VREELAND

  Life Studies

  The Forest Lover

  The Passion of Artemisia

  Girl in Hyacinth Blue

  Susan Vreeland

  Luncheon of the Boating Party

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) · Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England · Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) · Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) · Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India · Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) · Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2007 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Susan Vreeland, 2007. All rights reserved

  La Maison Fournaise by Jacques Bracquemond (gravure au burin).

  Copyright Association des Amis de la Maison Fournaise, Chatou, France.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Vreeland, Susan.

  Luncheon of the boating party / Susan Vreeland.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0228-9

  1. Renoir, Auguste, 1841–1919—Fiction. 2. Renoir, Auguste, 1841–1919. Luncheon of the boating party—Fiction. 3. Painters—France—Fiction. 4. Impressionism (Art)—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3572.R34L86 2007

  813'.54—dc22 2006035324

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To him who is specially hers,

  Joseph Kip Gray,

  from she who is singularly his,

  In memory of his brother,

  Michael Francis Gray

  To my mind, a picture should be something

  pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There

  are too many unpleasant things in life as it is

  without creating still more of them.

  —PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

  Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin

  it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  Contents

  1. La Vie Moderne

  2. Paris on the Run

  3. To the Left Bank and Back

  4. Reflections on the Seine

  5. Colors, Credos, and Cracks

  6. Looking for Mademoiselle Angèle

  7. Dans l’ Avenue Frochot

  8. Glorious Insanity

  9. Models, Friends, Lovers

  10. Cork in the Stream

  11. Cycle of Pleasure

  12. Paris Encore

  13. Hats on Sunday

  14. En Canot with the Baron

  15. School for Wives

  16. Remembrance of Times Past

  17. The Convocation of Flâneurs

  18. In the Time of Cherries

  19. Confession en Canot

  20. A Ride in the Country

  21. Circe’s Stripes

  22. Moonlight and Dawn

  23. Repairing to Paris

  24. Peaches at Camille’s Crémerie

  25. The Blue Flannel Dress

  26. Au Jardin Mabille

  27. Allons! To Work!

  28. An Errand in Paris

  29. Aux Folies-Bergère

  30. In a Closed Field

  31. Not One Canotier Song

  32. The Deal

  33. Love Made Visible

  34. À La Grenouillère

  35. Les Fêtes Nautiques

  36. À l’Atelier

  37. So Brief a Pair

  38. The Awning

  39. The Last Luncheon

  40. Incandescence

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  LUNCHEON OF THE

  BOATING PARTY

  CHAPTER ONE

  La Vie Moderne

  20 July 1880

  He rode the awkward steam-cycle along the ridge to catch glimpses of the domes and spires of Paris to the east, then turned west and careened headlong down the long steep hill toward the village of Bougival and the Seine. With his right elbow cast in plaster, he could barely reach the handlebar, but he had to get to the river. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now. Idleness had been itching him worse than the maddening tickle under the cast. Only painting would be absorbing enough to relieve them both. Steam hissed out of the engine, but it built up inside of him.

  He reached down to open the throttle wider. The soft morning light would be flattened to a glare by the time he got there if he didn’t let her go all out. The piston beat faster in the cylinder until it became a whir of sound, the poplars and chestnuts along the road a blur of greens, the blooming genêts a blaze of yellow, with the blue-green sweep of the river coming closer and closer. A painting! He was plunging into a painting! Down and down he plunged. Warm summer air filled his nose with the fragrance of honeysuckle, and the low-pitched honk of a tugboat urged him onward. At the base of the hill, he checked behind him to see that his folding easel, canvas, and Bazille’s wooden color box were still strapped on.

  The three-wheeled cycle took the humped bridge at Bougival fine, but the coarse sand on the narrow, connected islands made the front wheel wobble.

  All types of canots—rowing yoles, sailboats, and racing sculls—tied to posts along the riverbank produced inverted images quivering in the lazy current, deliciously paintable. But not today. They were empty of life. On Sundays, though, every laundress with her chapped red arms, every shopgirl, mail clerk, butcher, and banker, Parisians of all classes took their leisure either on the Seine or in it or along its grassy slopes. La Grenouillère, The Frog Pond, one of the many rustic guinguettes along the river that provided food, music, and dancing, had a lonely air about it now compared to Sundays. Then, pleasure-loving Parisians threw off their city restraints and filled the floating café, shouted from rented rowboats, splashed each other in the shallow eddies, picnicked along the bank, drank and danced on the anchored barge—the way he and Claude Monet had painted it a decade ago. They had slapped each other on the back the day they’d discovered that juxtaposed patches of contrasting color could show the movement of sunlit water. What he would give for another day like that one, for
that thrill of breaking new ground. Repeating safe, easy methods portrait after portrait, as he’d been doing lately, was suffocating him.

  In the distance, a catboat sailing toward him looked like the Iris, one of Gustave’s boats. He rode toward it. Yes, it was! He stood up to his full height on the foot platforms, twisted to hail him with his left arm, and lost his balance. The front wheel jerked sideways, and the cycle tipped and crashed onto its side. His right hip and shoulder struck sand and gravel, his hand and elbow in the cast taking the fall, his face taking the bounce. The broken smokestack landed on his left leg. His right leg was trapped under one rear wheel, while the other rear wheel spun with a tick, tick, tick. Boiling water splashed and oil leaked onto his pant leg. He struggled to disentangle himself before getting burned. Jesus Christ! He would destroy himself if he didn’t start painting soon.

  He spit out sand and lay trembling in a cloud of steam, trying to figure out what had happened and watching the glints of light riding the water. How different the colors from this low angle, the contrast between tips of ripples and valleys between them more pronounced now—a deeper forest green for the furrows, with shifting patches of yellow-green and ocher on the humps, and the silver highlights more transparent than he’d ever seen them. My God! To show that to the world!

  A throbbing moved up through his legs, hip, shoulder. His right cheek and hand stung. Sand had scoured his palm and left it bloody. He staggered to his feet. Bazille’s dear old color box had suffered too—the corner splintered, one hinge sprung, the other twisted. Tubes and brushes lay scattered in the tall grasses, the canvas face down in a muddy patch. The Iris, with Gustave oblivious at the helm, was only a triangle of white sail downriver.

  Using his left arm and all his weight, he tried to pull the cycle upright, but it refused to budge. The monster weighed more than he did. The front wheel was bent. He could never steer it now. He turned off the oil burner and opened the steam release valve. The hissing quieted to a gurgle. Below the trademark, Peugeot, he saw the model name, La vie moderne. Modern life. He chortled. That was the subject matter of the new painting movement, as precarious as the steam-cycle.

  He crouched at the river’s edge and cupped some water in his left hand to rinse his mouth. A pain shot up his thigh. He splashed his right hand to loosen the grit embedded in his palm. The cool water stung. He crawled through the weeds to gather his brushes and tubes, but couldn’t find yellow ocher. If he were well off, or at least stable, he could do without it because he could make it from other colors, but those tubes were almost squeezed flat already. A muttering duck glided between reeds toward a tube of paint. He quacked at it in a tone that said, Leave it alone. The duck paddled away. The scent of wild roses assailed him. Any other time, the sight of them would have excited him, their petal faces pale pink and cream like women’s cheeks. Like Jeanne’s.

  At least he’d found his beloved bicycle cap. Now all he needed was to find his way. In painting, in love, in life.

  He carried brushes in his right hand and the color box of his dead friend in his left, the lid dangling. He set off limping the ten-minute walk along the wooded strip to the Île de Chatou. Just north of the railroad bridge, he would come to Maison Fournaise, the boaters’ guinguette—the riverside restaurant, hotel, and boat rental frequented by painters and writers where he had thought to try out an idea on the little canvas.

  Up ahead, Alphonse Fournaise, the barrel-chested son of the owner, hoisted a narrow-prowed one-man canot off carpenter’s sawhorses and over his head as if it were a giant baguette. He ambled to the bank, lowered the boat, and slid it into the water.

  “Auguste Renoir, you old fool,” Alphonse called. “You’ve either been in a boxing ring or you fell off your cycle again.”

  “The latter, of course. I left it in the path just this side of La Grenouillère. The front wheel is bent. There’s a muddy canvas there too.”

  “I’ll go get them. Are you all right?”

  “I’ll find out tomorrow when I try to get out of bed.”

  Alphonse tied the boat to the dock. “Alphonsine!” he called to his sister who was swimming nearby, and waved her in.

  Auguste watched her strong arms propel her through the water. When she climbed up the bank, her swimming costume of striped blouse and knee-length bloomers clung to her curves. Water slid down her shapely legs.

  “Mon Dieu, Auguste! What happened?” Alphonsine dried off with a towel as he explained. He set down his color box on the table under the trellised arbor and lowered himself gingerly onto the wooden chair.

  “I’ll get something to wash you.”

  He felt blood trickle down his cheek. In a moment she reappeared with two basins—soapy water and clear—and two cloths. Spears of light shone through the vine above her and danced in patches on her small mounded breasts. Her nipples poked out like beads under the thin wet fabric.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “I mean look up.”

  Dutifully, he raised his face to hers. Her skin shone rosy from the sun. Exactly what he loved to paint. Like Jeanne’s cheeks, which gave back the light. Jeanne Samary, the darling of the Comédie-Française. She made everyone in Paris laugh. Him too, at one time. He should have brought her here to the country away from heady adulation. Out here, he could have shown her a beauty not man-made, the joys of being an adorer, not merely the adored. Lying on the grass, he could have shown her how light on water breaks up in patches of color. She might have understood his painting of her, how skin really does take on the colors of the surroundings, and it might have all turned out differently.

  Like Alphonsine’s pink forehead washed with pale green by the vine.

  She pressed the warm wet cloth against his face. “You have sand embedded in your cheek. Does it hurt?”

  “Only when I look away from you.”

  Strange pleasure, to allow himself to be so vulnerable. He hoped this would take a long time. A pretty little scowl formed as she pressed the cloth gently against his face to loosen the grit. He tried to relax in order to control the tic in his cheek.

  Alphonsine rinsed the cloth and dabbed, snickering softly.

  “What’s so amusing about a man writhing in pain and about to die?”

  “You have a peaky face.”

  “You have a peachy one.”

  “Your cheeks go in like saucers, and your nose—”

  “What about my nose?”

  “It’s peaky, that’s all. Your face looks weathered.”

  “Like old wood cracked by the sun? It’s an occupational hazard. I paint en plein air.”

  He supposed he did look like an old fence post to her, with his lined forehead and concave cheeks, deeper when he hadn’t eaten well. At least his hair was still brown, though his widow’s peak was becoming more pronounced. Two bare troughs on either side of it were carving their way to the top of his head, the reason for his bicycle cap. His eyelids drooped slightly over hazel eyes. Jeanne had called his narrow, pointed nose aquiline, and had thought him handsome, his pronounced cheekbones especially, and so had Margot.

  “You’re not listening. I said, your eyes are always watching,” Alphonsine said.

  “Sorry. And my face is always twitching. I care more about my eyes.”

  “Your face is kind of solemn. Are you sad?”

  He was, of course, whenever he thought of Jeanne or Margot. “Not that I know of.”

  “Sit still. Every time you say something, you jerk.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m strung together that way. With piano wire.”

  Sharp grains scraped across his raw flesh. She began to pick them out with a tweezer. Her face came closer and she worked in one spot, digging with the metal points. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Her lips turned in on themselves and her blue eyes shot through with gold filmed over with wetness. She stopped, her hand resting on his chin, her eyes fixed on his cheek.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  S
he resumed picking. “They’re like metal bits in a soldier’s wound.”

  The tightness in her voice reminded him that she was a war widow. Ten years alone, but still looking young. In her early thirties, he guessed.

  Her mother, Louise Fournaise, came outside drying her hands on her apron. “Pierre-Auguste, you had no business riding that contraption with a broken arm.”

  “Yes I did! It was pure business. It’s time I find out what kind of painter I am.”

  “Couldn’t that wait until you walked here like any sensible man?”

  He pointed upward with his index finger. “The light, madame.”

  “Where have you been?” Louise asked.

  “My mother’s house in Louveciennes.” He lifted his cast. “I’ve been staying there.”

  “And she let you ride that torture machine? You’re thinner than ever. Wasted, in fact. She doesn’t feed you?”

  Wincing, he tried his most winning smile. “Not like you do, madame.”

  “So stay to lunch, you rascal.” Louise marched back to her kitchen.

  Alphonsine squinted as she worked on his face. “You were coming here?”

  “Looking for something new to paint.”

  “Do you remember painting me and your two friends under this arbor?”

  “Of course. I remember all the paintings I’ve done of you. Each one gave me great pleasure. I make it a rule never to paint except out of pleasure.”