A Death and a Marriage by Susanne Dunlap

Author:Susanne Dunlap
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Susanne Dunlap

CHAPTER 4

Elisabeth stood on the street and stared up at the limestone building that would be her home on the Rue Saint Honoré. Her mother hadn’t come to fetch her from Rosalie’s, only sent word that they were back and she should meet them there. At least, she thought, it was across the street from the Palais Royale with its magnificent art collection and beautiful garden. She could always escape there if she needed to.

She took a deep breath and rang the bell for the porter, who let her in once she explained who she was. He waved her up to the first floor. So, she thought, we’ve moved up in the world. Her mother answered her knock, and they embraced, more warmly than Elisabeth expected. “Where will I have my studio?” Elisabeth asked, taking in the signs of fatigue around her mother’s eyes.

“That is yet to be decided. For the moment, we will sleep in here.” She beckoned Elisabeth to follow her.

We? she thought. They passed through the sitting room and a dining room, by the large bedrooms toward the front of the apartment, and entered a small chamber at the back of the apartment, with one window high up in the wall and furnished only with a narrow divan bed and a cot. “This is a maid’s room!” Elisabeth said before she could stop herself.

Her mother drew herself up and faced her. “Jacques transacts his business at all hours and does not want to disturb us.” She smiled and turned to start unpacking the single trunk that sat on the floor, taking up much of the extra space in the small, dark room.

I will never be able to paint in here, if this is all he’s allotted us, Elisabeth thought.

But meager sleeping accommodations was not the worst of the changes Elisabeth and her mother had to expect. The jeweler objected to their former friends, claiming that their relative poverty did not serve his business, and that they smelled, in any case, of turpentine.

Yet it wasn’t until Elisabeth overheard them both one night after they had gone out to the theater and she had retired early that she began to understand the extent of the alterations in their life.

“You looked at him! I saw you! No sense denying it.” Le Sèvre’s high, reedy voice pierced through Elisabeth’s shallow sleep. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, then listened hard.

“Mon cher, Antoine Poinsinet is a dear friend who used to honor us by coming to dinner. Isn’t it good for your business to be associated with a successful playwright?” A barely perceptible tremble in her mother’s voice alerted Elisabeth to danger.

A moment later, she heard the sharp smack of flesh on flesh. Had he slapped her? How dare he! Elizabeth thought, her feet already out from under the covers and planted on the floor. She wanted to run to her mother, and was about to until she heard her speak again.

“How dare you!” The hoarse whisper bore no trace of

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