Mistral's Daughter (10 page)

Madame
Mistral had attended to her son's needs while he was a baby but as soon as
Julien could be sent to the École Maternelle she left him to fend largely for
himself with a clear conscience.
 
The boy
was healthy and well formed, there was a servant to keep him fed and clean and
to take him to school.

From
a point in the past that went as far back as he could remember, Julien had
always known that most of what he could learn at school was not worth the trouble.
 
He lived for other information, the lessons
he taught himself.
 
Like all children he
was a natural artist, with a basic set of symbols at his command to represent
people, houses, trees, the sun.

By
the time he was six, before most children become enamored of realism in their
drawings, Julien had started to use his eyes to put the elements he drew into a
coherent whole, a compo-sition.
 
Soon he
lived for the sheets of paper he carried about in his schoolbag, the precious
pencils he kept so sharp, the colored crayons on which he spent all his pocket
money.
 
As drawing became the focus of
his being he grew less verbal, less aware of the passage of time as he bent
himself to the ultimate questions:
 
the shape of things,
the relation of one
shape to another and the relation of all the shapes to the whole.
 
Grammar, spelling, mathematics and even
reading itself had nothing to do with the crucial problems of pattern and
structure with which his mind was concerned.

When
his teachers protested to his mother she agreed that Julien's inattention was
deplorable. But even the formidable French educational system can't force a
child to do well when he doesn't care
about the opinion of others, when
punishment is merely a minor annoyance and when his mother forgets his crimes
as soon as she escapes from the principal's office.

Uncaring,
soon given up as a dolt by his teachers, he held down the place at the bottom
of every class until he was old enough to leave school.
 
Years earlier his schoolmates had given up
trying to communicate with the absent boy whose remoteness was so complete
that it had long ago ceased to be a challenge for them.
 
If he had been shy, he might have been
victimized, but his undisguised lack of
interest in his schoolmates
protected him from them quite as well as his unusual height and strength.

At
seventeen when his schoolmates were volunteering to fight the Kaiser, Mistral
entered a private art school in Paris where he worked brilliantly within the
academic tradition until he passed the exam for the École des Beaux-Arts.
 
After a few years at the Sorbonne he began to
find himself at odds with any traditional approach to art.
 
First only to himself, then openly, he said
that art cannot be taught.
 
"Technique, yes; color, yes; anatomy, yes...
 
as for the rest, no." He abandoned the
Beaux-Arts when he was barely twenty-one and his father, from Algeria,
unprotestingly sent him enough to live on until he died a year later.
 
When Mistral was twenty-three his mother,
too, died, and except for a legacy to her best
friend, she had left the
little she possessed to her son and only child.

Now
Julien Mistral was almost twenty-six and still unknown in the art world except
for the reputation he had earned among some of his contemporaries. To him all
gallery owners and dealers came under the category of the enemy.
 
When Mistral heard that Marcel Duchamp had
called art dealers "lice on the backs of the artists" he roared that
Duchamp hadn't gone far enough.

"What
about Cheron, who paid Zadkine ten francs for sixty drawings?
 
He's the same shit who threw Foujita seven
francs fifty centimes for a watercolor!
 
Merely
a louse?
  
He should be hung, taken
down while still breathing and disemboweled.
 
Twenty francs to Modigliani for a portrait
—
it's
unspeakable."

Yet his inheritance was
almost gone and Kate Browning, the prim, rich American who had invited him to
the Surrealist ball, hadn't returned to buy another painting.
 
Should he perhaps, Mistral wondered, have
written her an apology for his disappearance?
 
He considered the thought briefly and then dismissed it to return to his
easel.

Katherine Maxwell Browning of
New York City had a small talent.
 
A
very, very small talent, and what was infinitely
worse, she
almost
knew it. Her intelligence was keen, her eye for the beautiful acute; she had
been born with the painful capacity to appreciate the best, to aspire toward
it, but without the ability to produce it.
 
She referred to herself as a sculptress, her family of rich stockbrokers
thought of her with admiration and puzzlement as a true artist since none of
them had any intimate knowledge of art nor cared to have.
 
Even her professors at Sarah Lawrence had
been encouraging.
She had always been able to trap and stamp upon the
truth about her own talent before it rose to her consciousness.

Kate Browning had come to
Paris in early 1925 to study with Brancusi, but he would have none of her.
 
However, the professor in charge of the
atelier at the Beaux-Arts, where Kate next presented, herself, was lenient
enough to allow her to join, even after she had shown him the required photos
of her best college work.
 
He expected
that once she had bought the obligatory round of drinks for the other students,
she would attend a few classes and then quietly drop out as so many Americans
did in those days.

His attitude was dictated not
by any un-French, untraditional
 
desire
to be nice to foreigners but by a very French appreciation of her immaculate
prettiness
—
a look as quietly emphatic as the power of will which had
driven this essentially ungifted woman to position herself in the heart of the
artistic life of the world.

She was twenty-two, and she
had the rare kind of perfect oval skull that permitted her to part her short
ash-blond hair in the middle with impunity.
 
Her high forehead loomed over eyebrows plucked into a thin line and the
prominent
bones of the clearly marked sockets around her gray eyes gave
her face a distinction
that might otherwise have escaped it because of
the relentless regularity of her features.
 
Kate's nose was slim, her lips were thin, her chin was sharp, yet it was
these very hard edges that, in the ensemble of her wonderfully shaped skull,
made her a striking woman.

In the early spring of 1926,
Kate Browning, who spoke French with a tutored fluency that made up in
vocabulary what she lacked in gesture, was taken to visit Mistral in his studio
by one of her fellow
students at the Beaux-Arts.

With the first savage pounce
that his canvases made on her trained yet unrigid eye she was consumed by a
rage to possess this man's work.
 
She
knew.
 
She looked at his work, she let herself
plunge into the great river of color and she knew for once and for all.
 
There was never any doubt in her mind, then
or ever, that Julien Mistral was the greatest painter of his day, nor that
others would eventually agree with her.

Yet Kate was clever enough
and disciplined enough to resist the voracious impulse she felt to buy as much
of Mistral's work as possible.
 
At their
first meeting she had quietly listened to him fulminating against private
collectors.

"I've known
some
who buy everything a poor wretch of an artist will give them, they take
everything, at bargain prices, and wait until the market catches up with their
tastes.
 
Then, hup! Huge profits!
 
They're even worse than dealers
—
at
least with a dealer you know
it when you're being robbed."

Julien Mistral would have
shouted with outrage if anyone
had suggested that even as he spoke Kate
was seeing herself as his future patroness, the custodian of his talent, the
protector of his career.
 
Yet, from that
day on, she found herself waking in the middle of the night thinking of him,
planning
how she could make him as famous as she knew he deserved to be.

Her acquisitive nature was
covered only lightly by a smooth fabric of civilized rules.
 
She was cunning, deeply cunning
,
and
as tenacious as she was cunning
.
 
There were primitive forces alive under the
spareness of the personality she presented to the world and she directed the
flow of this power to biding her time.
 
Carefully she chose one of Mistral's works and then, a month later,
bought another.
 
She held herself in
check for she had understood from the beginning that in spite of his financial
need
—
of which the perceptive antenna
of the rich had
immediately informed her
—
Mistral was intensely suspicious of anyone
who seemed to want to own a piece of him.
 
And what was his work but himself, flung
raw onto canvas?

She had contrived to invite
Mistral to the Surrealist ball in the must casual manner
and when he
decamped with Maggy she merely murmured "Patience" to herself,
refusing to take his act as an insult.
 
Was Kate Browning's decision born of the fact that her devotion to
Mistral's work enabled her to put aside her own utterly minor abilities without
having to make any excuse, even to herself?
 
Was it born of this perfect opportunity to lay down with honor her own,
fruitless struggle to create?
 
Or was it
the prize of Mistral
himself that she sought, rather than his work? Was
not this rough, lawless, remote man the most essential part of her
interest?
 
This redheaded man whose tall
body moved with such an outdoorsman's grace, whose face was so unforgettable in
its beauty, its strength?

She never asked herself these
questions in the middle of the night, nor would the answers have mattered.
 
Everything had come together for her in one
instant of awareness and in her spare, predatory and absolutely determined way,
Kate Browning dedicated herself for life.

As Maggy stood in the kitchen
of Mistral's studio, humming to
 
herself
and peeling potatoes on a Saturday afternoon in early July, she heard a knock
on the front door.
 
She glanced into the
studio where Julien was working. When the knock was repeated he didn’t hear it.
 
Maggy opened the door with a feeling of mild
curiosity.
 
Outside stood a young, finely
boned, obviously self-possessed woman who looked much too elegant for the
neighborhood.
 
She was dressed in an
immaculate, white, crepe-de-chine dress intricately fagoted and scalloped with
a deep white cloche of the finest straw covering her head.
 
The man with her, Maggy thought, had the look
of a farmer dressed for a visit to the big city, as if he'd just had a good
scrub and struggled into his only proper suit.

"Is Monsieur Mistral at
home?" the woman asked.

"Yes, but he's working."
 
Maggy wouldn't dare disturb him at the whim
of a casual caller.

"But I am expected,
Mademoiselle," Kate said with a polite smile.

"He didn't tell
me..." Maggy broke off as Kate brushed quickly by her.
 
Open-mouthed, she watched the pair advance into
the studio.
 
Mistral put down his
brushes with ill grace, but he walked forward and shook Kate's hand, frowning
as he loomed over her.

"So! You did forget,
Julien.
 
Never mind
—
I told
Adrien that I didn't think you'd be expecting us.
 
Adrien, this is Julien Mistral.
 
Julien, this is the friend I told you about
in my note, Adrien Avigdor."
 
As the
two men shook hands Kate laughed a social laugh, a drawing-room laugh, a laugh
that could cover any situation with its characteristic note of total confidence
and perfect assurance that anything the owner of that laugh did or said was
correct.
 

Maggy hastily took off her
apron and dried her hands on it.
 
She war
barefoot, as usual, and wearing a sleeveless, flowered, cotton smock she wore
only in the kitchen.
 
She pulled back,
her shoulders and marched into the studio with her limber, long tread.
 
Thank God I'm tall, she thought as she shook
hands with Kate Browning and Avigdor, both of whom were shorter than she.
 
Why, she wondered, hadn't Julien warned her
that he expected visitors?
 
That was what
must have been in the little blue telegraph message he'd received earlier that
day and tossed away with a grunt of annoyance.

"A glass of red?"
she heard Mistral offer. "Sit down somewhere," he said gesturing vaguely.
"Maggy, bring the wine."