“Oh no, ma chère,” Lucien said. “Manet didn’t go to Madrid to see Goya’s Maja until after he painted Olympia. He didn’t know what she looked like.” Lucien had grown up on lectures on the famous paintings from Père Lessard; their stories were the fairy tales of his childhood.
“Not him, silly. The model knew.”
“You can use Goya’s Maja pose. That’s what Manet started with.” Olympia—Édouard Manet, 1863
What a completely disturbing thought. Olympia did look remarkably like Goya’s Nude Maja, regarding the viewer, daring him, and Manet clearly admired Goya, using Goya’s Maja on the Balcony as inspiration for his own painting of the Morisot family, The Balcony, and Goya’s war paintings from Napoleon’s invasion of Spain for his Execution of Maximilian, but those works were later, after Manet had gone to Spain and seen the Goyas. It couldn’t have been the model, Victorine. She was, well, she was like many models of the time, an uneducated, undowered girl who lived in the demimonde, the half world between prostitution and destitution. The model was like the brush, the paint, the linseed oil, the canvas. She was an instrument of the artist, not a contributor to the art.
“You know a lot about painting for a girl who works in a hat shop,” Lucien said.
“So, now you’ll paint me with only one brush?”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“You know a lot about painting for a baker,” she said, the sparkle of a dare in her eyes.
Bitch. “Hold that pose. No, bring your right arm down to your side.”
“Do it for me,” she pouted. “I don’t know how.”
“Just move, Juliette. Now, don’t move.”
And he began to sketch her image nearly life-size on the canvas. First roughing out her figure, then going back, filling in contours. He lost himself in the drawing, seeing only form, line, light, and shadow, and time slipped into those dimensions until she moved.
“What? No!” Lucien dropped his crayon on the seat of one of the chairs he was using for an easel.
She stood up, stretched, yawned, fluffed her breasts up a bit, which transported Lucien out of the land of line and shape, back to a small, sunlit room with a beautiful, naked girl whom he desperately wanted to make love to, and perhaps marry, but definitely and immediately bonk.
“I’m hungry and you’re not even painting.”
She started to gather her clothes from a chair by the door.
“I have to have the whole motif sketched out, Juliette. I’m not going to paint you in the storeroom of a bakery. The setting needs to be more grand.”
She stepped into her pantaloons and his heart sank.
“Does the Maja have a grand setting? Does Olympia have a grand setting, Lucien? Hmmm?”
And the chemise went over her head and her shoulders and the world became a dark and sad place for Lucien Lessard.
“Are you angry? Why are you angry?”
“I’m not angry. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m lonely.”
“Lonely? I’m right here.”
“Are you?”
“I am.”
He stepped up to her, took her in his arms, and kissed her. And off came the chemise, off came the pantaloons, then his shirt, then the rest, and they were on each other, on the fainting lounge, completely lost in one another. There may have been pounding on the door at one point, but they didn’t hear it and didn’t care. Where they were, no one else mattered. When, at last, she looked down from the lounge, at him, lying on his back on the floor, the light from the skylight had gone orange, and the sweat sheen on their bodies looked like slick fire.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Maybe I’ll be able to start painting tomorrow.”
“First thing in the morning then?”
“No, ten, maybe eleven. I have to make the bread.”