The Restoration Artist by Lewis Desoto

Author:Lewis Desoto [Desoto, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary, Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Fiction, General, Literary
ISBN: 9780002005838
Google: iRO1aBF2ZTMC
Amazon: B00BEFXELW
Goodreads: 17368177
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT MORNING I HAD BOOKED MY PASSAGE on a real ship, the SS Volendam, bound for Le Havre, with a connecting train to Paris.

CHAPTER 19

I ENTERED THE CHAPEL CRADLING AN OVERFLOWING bouquet of wildflowers in my arms and let them slide onto the table, where they spilled out in a spray of yellow and orange. In the little vestry where Père Caron kept the objects necessary for Mass, and where I stored my painting equipment during services, I found a wide-mouthed pewter vase on a shelf. I filled it halfway from one of the water bottles I kept behind the door.

With my pocketknife I snipped the ends of the stalks from the flowers before arranging the bouquet. I placed the vase in the sunlight flooding in through the window. The bright yellow of the petals, glowing so intensely in the floating array of flowers, made me feel almost dizzy, intoxicated, as if the colour were some honeyed wine that I had been drinking. The flowers were marguerites jaunes. Brown-eyed Susans. Claudine had taught me the name during our first summer in Montmartin when I used to bring her bouquets of wildflowers after my painting excursions.

In most ways, she had been a practical and down-to-earth person, but she also had a romantic side to her. Once, I had been sitting in the garden of her mother’s house, sketching a blue flower that grew near the wall. “Aquilegia vulgaris,” Claudine had said, coming up behind me. “Commonly known as the columbine. From the Latin for ‘dove.’ See here, this little spur at the top is a bit like a dove’s neck.” She touched the blossom delicately with the tip of her pink fingernail. “And the petals fold out like wings. When Mary, mother of Jesus, was pregnant, she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who somehow knew that the child was going to be the promised Messiah. Elizabeth is the one who says, ‘Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.’ I love the sound of that phrase. So beautiful. When these parts here, the spurs or dove’s neck, wilt and fall to the ground, they resemble shoes. So in medieval times the story grew that wherever Mary’s foot touched the ground during that visit, columbines sprang up.”

Then Claudine reached forward and plucked the flower from its stem, and with the side of her thumbnail sliced the blossom open. “Pistil, stigma, stamen, style, ovary,” she said, reciting the names of the parts. “It’s kind of a secret, isn’t it, these hidden chambers inside a flower? When I see the harmony and the logic inside a flower I think of our own hearts and maybe that the reason they beat is not just an accident of nature.”

I remembered touching her upper lip, where a little dusting of yellow pollen had somehow lodged. “Powdered sunlight,” she said as I rubbed it between my fingertips.

Would I ever paint a bouquet with the same sense of joy that I once

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