The Painted Girls (31 page)
Authors: Cathy Marie Buchanan
Cathy Marie Buchanan is the author of The Day the Falls Stood Still, a New York Times bestseller, a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection and one of the Canada Reads Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade. She holds a BSc (Honours, Biochemistry) and an MBA from Western University. Born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, she now resides in Toronto. Visit her online at www.cathymariebuchanan.com or on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter @CathyMBuchanan
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T
he Painted Girls
is largely in keeping with the known facts of the van Goethem sisters’ early lives. In 1878 Marie and Charlotte were accepted into the dance school of the Paris Opéra, where their older sister, Antoinette, was employed as an extra. Their father, a tailor, was dead, and their mother was a laundress. They lived in the ninth arrondissement, settling in 1880 in the rue de Douai on the lower slopes of Montmartre, a few blocks from Degas’s rue Fontaine studio. That year Marie passed the examination admitting her to the corps de ballet and made her debut on the Opéra stage.
Between 1878 and 1881, Edgar Degas drew, painted, and sculpted Marie in numerous artworks, most famously in
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
, which appeared at the sixth exposition of independent artists in 1881 alongside Degas’s pastel of convicted criminals Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch,
Criminal Physiognomies.
Critics lauded
Little Dancer
as “the only truly modern attempt at sculpture,” and saw a street urchin, her face clearly “imprinted with the promise of every vice.”
A half dozen years ago I happened upon the BBC documentary
The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.
It questioned Degas’s intention in exhibiting
Little Dancer
alongside his portraits of convicted criminals. Was he hinting at the future criminality of the girl in the vitrine? I was inspired to investigate the notion that—not unlike Émile Zola, who was simultaneously putting forth arguments for a scientific literature, one that presented a deterministic view of human life—Degas bought into the idea that certain facial features hinted at a person’s innate criminality and sought to incorporate it into his artwork. How might such perceptions have affected the life of his teenage model?
At the same time, I delved into the stories of Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch. According to the historical record, Abadie was implicated in three murders. The woman Bazengeaud was murdered in Montreuil when her throat was slit by Abadie and Pierre Gille. Each was sentenced to death, sentences that were commuted to forced labor for life in New Caledonia after Abadie published “The Story of a Man Condemned to Death.” The widow Joubert, a news seller in the van Goethem’s neighborhood, was beaten to death, prompting further investigation of Abadie and Gille. Though neither was convicted, the proceedings went far enough to determine the pair had ample opportunity to carry out the murder between scenes when they were absent from the stage of the Ambigu Theater, where they were extras in an adaptation of Émile Zola’s
L’Assommoir.
A grocer’s boy was murdered in Saint-Mandé, and Knobloch confessed and named Abadie as accomplice. Both were convicted, though the evidence was scant and Knobloch repeatedly claimed in court to have made up his confession as a means of getting to New Caledonia. For the sake of this story, I collapsed the three murders into two and took liberties with dates. The newspaper articles, court transcripts, and critiques of
Little Dancer
throughout the story are faithful to the tone and, in many instances, the content of the original documents.
In the year that followed the exhibition, Antoinette served a three-month sentence for stealing seven hundred francs, and Marie was dismissed from the Opéra after a string of fines for being late or absent. Charlotte, however, prevailed, becoming a dancer of some distinction and teacher at the dance school during her fifty-three-year career with the Opéra.
There is no evidence the van Goethem sisters knew Abadie, Gille, and Knobloch. The intertwining of the sisters’ story with theirs, that fateful day when Antoinette met Abadie behind the Paris Opéra and later swallowed the mussels with parsley sauce he fed into her mouth, is nothing more than imagination and ink.
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
remained in Degas’s studio all his life. Despite his reluctance “to leave anything behind in bronze,” in the years following his death, his heirs arranged to cast the twenty-eight bronze repetitions that appear around the world. The original wax sculpture is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
More Advance Praise for
The Painted Girls
“Part mystery, part love story,
The Painted Girls
breathes heart and soul into a fascinating era of the City of Light. One can’t help but be drawn in by this compelling and lyrical tale of sister love and rivalry.”
—Heidi W. Durrow, author of
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
“
The Painted Girls
is historical fiction at its finest, awash in period details of the Paris of Degas and Zola while remaining, at its heart, the poignant story of sisters struggling to stay together even as they find themselves pulled toward different, and often misunderstood, dreams. Cathy Marie Buchanan also explores the uneasy relationship between artist and muse with both compassion and soul-searing honesty.”
—Melanie Benjamin, author of
Alice I Have Been
“
The Painted Girls
holds you enthralled as it spools out the vivid story of young sisters in late 19th-century Paris struggling to transcend their lives of poverty through the magic of dance. The author opens a rare window into the hard work, pain and determination behind the graceful art of ballet; even more, into the hard and sometimes cruel choices faced by young girls of that time. I guarantee you will never look at Edgar Degas’s immortal sculpture of the
Little Dancer
in quite the same way again.”
—Kate Alcott, author of
The Dressmaker
“From the first page, I was swept up in Cathy Marie Buchanan’s enchanting new novel. Set in Paris during the late 1800s, moving between Degas’s studio and Zola’s stage,
The Painted Girls
tells the heartbreaking story of two working-class sisters who must lean on each other to overcome their circumstances in a city on the cusp of a social and cultural revolution. Beautiful and haunting.”
—Amy Greene, author of
Bloodroot
“Sisters, dance, art, ambition and intrigue in late 1800s Paris.
The Painted Girls
offers the best of historical fiction: compelling characters brought backstage at l’Opéra and front and center in Degas’s studio. This one has ‘book club favorite’ written all over it.”
—Meg Waite Clayton, author of
The Wednesday Sisters
The Day the Falls Stood Still
The Painted Girls
Copyright © 2012 by Cathy Marie Buchanan.
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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-44341-236-0
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Text by Edgar Degas from
Huit Sonnets d’Edgar Degas
courtesy
Wittenborn Art Books, San Francisco, www.art-books.com.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Buchanan, Cathy Marie
The painted girls / Cathy Marie Buchanan.
ISBN 978-1-44341-234-6
I. Title.
PS8603.U28P34 2013 C813′.6 C2012-905905-6
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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