The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (27 page)

I was all the more pleased not to be spending the winter in Paris, for the weather was growing cold and a city of such size and bustle did not, at the moment, for some reason, please me. I seemed to long for Italy, though I had never been there, and I think I was beginning to long for a place to settle—a new, humble, and economical life working as a person ought to. It was, strange to say, not enough to be going some place or stopping over some place, as at Paris. I wanted to
be
someplace, to feel set down somewhere again, and Florence then to my mind would be as good a place as any. Or so I hoped. “Some call Florence the ‘Boston of Italy,' for all its own peculiar provincialisms, I dare say,” Mr. Spooner explained. “But that does not begin to do the city justice.”

While we were in Paris, we had wandered into the artists' district one day to search out a friend of Mr. Spooner's—the artist Theophile Nantieul, who despite his modest success and middle age continued, I believe merely for frugality's sake, to live in these quarters teeming with students and young artists who were restless, ambitious, and unaccomplished. As we sat inside protected from the damp Parisian evening, we observed the denizens of the boulevard, these
rapins
and
grissettes,
who seemed determined to outdo one another by their whimsical coiffure and dress: Spanish cloaks, waistcoats à la Robespierre, Henry III bonnets, scarlet sashes, and pea-jackets; in short, arrayed in every fashion but the reigning one, every costume of a previous century, or so it seemed as we waited for M. Nantieul.

Later, while we were getting acquainted with this refreshingly plain-looking Frenchman with close-cropped hair, he asked me whether I found Paris congenial. He laughed when I answered that I had not yet found it so.

“Then perhaps, Madame Fullerton, there is hope for you!” He indicated the bright yet oddly cheerless scene about us with a sweep of his arm, and looked knowingly at me. “Ambition for celebrity destroys many in Paris. It happens only too often that, with the idea of taking a shortcut to a kind of fortune, they borrow wings by attaching themselves to a system, by changing a clique of admirers into a real ‘public.' So one turns Republican, another Saint-Simonian, or
juste milieu
, or whatever. But such mere opinions or systems don't give a man talent. Indeed artists ruin their talents by them, as witness so many about us.” His arm swept beyond us again. “An artist's views ought to be confined to belief in himself.”

He stopped, looked up at us, and arched an eyebrow without saying another word. Then, slowly and emphatically, he said: “One's sole means of achievement ought to be hard work.”

“Ah! Monsieur Nantieul,” I said, “but it's not merely hard work; it's love, also, don't you think?”

He and Mr. Spooner looked at me. “Oh, I see,” M. Nantieul said, shaking his index finger playfully. “You, Madame Fullerton, are an artist.”

“So you see, indeed,” Mr. Spooner said. He looked at me proudly, then at M. Nantieul.

Nantieul laughed. “There are always those for whom a sort of drawing-room celebrity is sufficient, is, indeed, the main thing.”

Mr. Spooner nodded his head in agreement.

“And those for whom shocking the burgher is the true achievement,” Nantieul offered further, “forgetting that what shocks the burgher today is certain to bore the rest of us tomorrow. But you see, these are merely childish things, perhaps what destiny prepares most mortals for in their youth. But such childishness, I tell you, is the ruin of many a talent.”

I saw that M. Nantieul had fathomed what I was already finding vaguely oppressive about Parisian Art Life, but which I had been not quite able to grasp or articulate. I dared not presume on our brief acquaintance by asking how, with his opinion of this inner city of poses and attitudes, he could immerse himself so completely in it (this realm of
Le Chapeau Pointu
, as he at one moment called it). I assumed only, as Mr. Spooner had suggested, he valued his frugality above all. And surely it was his low opinion of it all that inoculated him against such posturings, steeling him to carry on with his own independent work.

But our acquaintance with M. Nantieul was more remarkable for what I finally came to understand, inadvertently, about the gradual change in my relation to Mr. Spooner.

We had been invited to M. Nantieul's little studio, perhaps three blocks from where we sat, to examine his current work and to share a bottle of his “best Sherry.” After nearly an hour of conversation, I excused myself in order to make use of the public facility, and was just returning (had only stopped to adjust my dress once more) when I heard Mr. Spooner and his friend discussing, apparently, me. The door had been left slightly open, they had not heard me coming down the hall, and as one does without thinking in such circumstances, I listened.

“… an inspiring traveling companion,” M. Nantieul was saying. “If as you say she is an accomplished painter, well, I wish I were in your boots. You have the look of an Infatuated One, old boy!”

I heard the clink of bottle on glass.

“At my age? Come now, Theo,” Mr. Spooner said. “Oh, don't look so amused, Nantieul.” There was a pause and laughter. Then Mr. Spooner continued. “Well, I confess, sir, I am a
little
infatuated… . Who would not be? But it is harmless, I assure you.”

“A
little
? My dear man, you are saturated with this delightful being; you forget perhaps that I'm too old and experienced not to recognize the … shall we say … ‘manly illness'?”

“Ah, you overstate things, as always, my old friend. But I suppose I hardly know my own mind these days, living so close to her, in the strange isolation of travelers. But what can I do? I am long and lovingly married, appear respectable to a fault. Violate her trust, and that of my wife?”

“By throwing this ‘complication' carelessly into the companionship you have established?”

“That is obvious, is it not, my friend?”

“Well, of course these things are always … delicate, but life passes us by, you know, if we do not seize upon it and live honestly with those whom we love or desire. Of course, you know best the trust you and your fair friend have established, the boundaries of your relations, but I think you may do better to be honest with her. And I for one can not believe she suspects nothing.”

There was another brief pause in the conversation; then Mr. Spooner spoke. “For some time now I've been quite at a loss over the strength of my feelings. I don't sleep well. I suffer every day I spend so innocently beside her.”

“A difficult case, indeed, George. Well then, there is only one cure. Declare yourself! At a more convenient hour, to be sure, but out with it, man. You may be casting aside that brief happiness which is the only thing the Good Lord gives us poor creatures—excepting the rare passion for one's work—‘without a hitch,' as you Americans like to put it.”

“Then everything, everything would change between Mrs. Fullerton and me. And what of my family, sir, were I to subvert our relations for some such weakness and humbug as this … as you say … infatuation?”

“Nonsense. You are not so old as that. And need you trumpet a delicious and secretive little liaison to the wide world? You Americans do make such fools of yourselves over these things!”

“We can not help it, Theo. We have a thing called conscience, which you French know nothing about. At any rate, I am the fool who can't make up my mind to act upon my feelings, as you recommend.”

M. Nantieul was about to respond when I opened the door and said, “Gentlemen, would you offer me one more glass of that divine Sherry?”

They looked shame-faced and began to bump about like schoolboys in their efforts to fulfill my request. M. Nantieul, the more calm of the two, began anew our previous conversation on the state of painting and painters in France. I said that I had been attending whenever possible lectures at the Academy, to say nothing of our daily rounds in one gallery or another. I also related our experience of attempting to attend a lecture at the Sorbonne. Some old guardian of the inner temple saw me and approached us before the entrance with his ready speech. I was just about to speak when he said, “Monsieur may enter if he pleases, but madame must remain here,” meaning the courtyard. So we turned on our heels and left with the same supercilious air, we hoped, in which he had addressed us.

While we spoke, Mr. Spooner remained flushed for some time, and mostly silent. His embarrassment over discussing me with his old friend, and perhaps suspicions that I had overheard something of it, led to our leaving immediately. And although we were invited to return by our host, we never went back because of our need to move onward to our destination.

In the first days it was a long journey by coach-and-four led by a postilion with immense jack-boots and a ferocious whip driving his bell-bestrewn horses. These days seemed interminable: over a countryside of dull plains alternating with endless unpopulated avenues, except for beggars it seemed; and then the fantastic old towns with drawbridges and walls and towers and ramshackle inns; and then the passing caravans of long, narrow little wagons bearing the cheese from Switzerland, and the twice-daily Diligence bearing Young-France passengers with great beards and blue spectacles and large sticks; and then the Mail Coach as well. After the dusty roads, Chalons was a resting place with a good inn and pretty red and green steamboats on the river; and then on to Lyons by the river and on down the Rhone where, eventually, villages hang off the sides of mountains and castles perch on many a peak.

While we had remained in Paris, Mr. Spooner never said a word to me about his feelings. But let me tell you, reader, something of our new home that autumn. Mrs. Spooner saved all the letters they ever received from his pupils, and this letter I sent to her shortly after our arrival (which later came into my own hands) will best describe our new situation, for it seems to provide a sense of the immediacy of my first experience in Florence much better than casting back in memory to those years in Italy as I now write.