I Always Loved You by Robin Oliveira

Author:Robin Oliveira
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

July 12, 1878

My dearest Mary,

I believe I’ve been unkind. No, worse than that. I’ve been an imbecile. No doubt you’ve been thinking of me in those apt terms. When you did not answer my previous two letters, I knew that I had offended you in the most indecent way. Of course you were disappointed. It was blind of me not to understand this. You possess that American optimism that believes anything is accomplishable, while we poor French succumb too often to our laziness, though I do hope you realize what great hurdles would have been in our future had we dared to climb the battlements, considering Manet’s earlier, dreadful defeat. We have used up all our store of rebellion in opposing the Salon, and have none to spare, which undoubtedly makes us cowards, but I promise you that I will work hard for another independent show as soon as the exposition is over. I owe you that much after inviting you to exhibit with us and then marooning you in a welter of time. Can you forgive this irritable man? May I still call you friend, my dear, dear mademoiselle?

E. D.

“It is a very graceful note,” Lydia said. She was curled on the window seat before the open sash. Degas’s letter, read and reread, was now folded in the open pages of the book on her lap. The slight summer breeze was ruffling the maple trees that rose from the abyss of the Avenue Trudaine, its gas lamps spilling circles of evening light onto strolling passersby. Upon moving into the flat, Lydia had seized the window seat as her own and no one ever challenged her. “You must admit that, Mary.”

Mary looked up from the new writing table, delivered yesterday by a carter whom she’d had to bribe to deliver the desk before his profitable day of ferrying visitors to the Tourville gate of the fair. In the height of the summer, prices for hotel rooms and vegetables had doubled, fiacres had become even more scarce, sidewalks were unnavigable, and the unending trumpet and drum of daily life seethed at a volume not unlike, people said, the invading rockets and bombardments of the Prussians. Italians, Spaniards, Orientals, African princes, and bewildered Americans roamed Paris with an eye toward experience, stumbling exhausted from the surfeit of the exposition into the attractions of a city already exhausted by the visitors’ poor French and worse manners.

None of this had benefited any of the impressionists. Tonight, Mary was writing a letter. An art dealer in Philadelphia had been recommended to her, a Mr. Hermann Teubner. He was a restorer of old works, well known in the city, and open to receiving as many of her paintings as she wished to send him, under consignment for twenty percent commission, as befitting the recommendation of his dear friend, Lady Mitchell, to whom he was indebted for the connection, etc., etc. He directed Mary to send the unframed works as soon as possible, though he did

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