Alone In Paris

Chapter One ~ 1892-2

She was wondering if she should have done more for this strange and unusual child.

Only she, with her vast experience of pupils, knew that while Una had acquired a great deal of academic knowledge, she was completely ignorant of the world outside and particularly of men.

How could she be anything else, considering that she had come to the Convent when she was only fifteen, having, the Mother Superior guessed, led a very sheltered life and had stayed within its precincts for three years?

But they were, the Mother Superior thought, three vital years in which a girl changed from childhood to stand on the very threshold of womanhood.

‘What will become of her?’ she asked herself and prayed that Una would find a man who would marry her and, if nothing else, take her away from Montmartre.

*

The train drew to a standstill at the platform and with a rush the blue-smocked porters came to the carriages, crying out,

“Porteur! Porteur!”

Looking through the window, Una saw a crowd of people on the platform and wondered how it would be possible to find her father.

Then as Mademoiselle agitatedly collected her charges, Una kissed her travelling companions goodbye and promised that she would not forget them.

“You must write and tell us what you are doing,” Marie-Celeste said, “and perhaps we can meet one day, if Papa lets us come to Paris. It would be fun to visit you in Montmartre, although Mama says it’s a place no nice girl would go.”

“Come along, Marie-Celeste,” Mademoiselle called, descending onto the platform.

Marie-Celeste made a grimace in her direction and kissed Una again.

“Take care of yourself,” she said. “I expect you will have a lovely time with all those artists painting pictures of you,” she added, as she jumped down onto the platform.

Left alone Una collected her handbag and her winter coat, which was too heavy to wear in the heat.

The crowds were moving towards the exit from the platform and Una went with them, looking round all the time for a sight of her father.

He was tall and distinguished and looked very English, despite the fact that he sometimes wore rather strange and unconventional clothes that marked him as an artist.

She had nearly reached the end of the platform when she saw her own round-topped leather box being pulled out of the guard’s van.

‘I had better collect it,’ she thought to herself and found a porter who was only too willing to carry it for her.

“Someone meeting you, m’mselle?”

He spoke in the slightly familiar manner that Una knew was not because he was being impertinent but merely because she looked so young that invariably strangers thought that she was still a child.

“I think my father will be at the barrier,” she replied.

The porter nodded and went ahead and she followed him.

There was, however, no sign of her father at the barrier and, after waiting for a few minutes, Una thought that perhaps he had forgotten the day she was due to arrive.

It was just the sort of thing he would have done in the past.

“Sometimes I think your father has a head like a sieve,” her mother had often said half-despairingly and half with amusement.

It was true. He would keep appointments on the wrong day and he would forget anything he had to collect or buy for them in Paris or else bring home entirely the wrong item because he had forgotten what was originally required.

“I am afraid my father has forgotten me,” she said to the porter.

“Don’t worry, m’mselle,” he replied. “I’ll get you a voiture, a nice cocher who’ll take you where you want to go.”

He spoke in such a protective and fatherly manner that Una smiled at him gratefully.

“That would be very kind of you,” she said and she knew that he did choose the cab driver with care.

She gave him what she thought to be the correct pourboire. He thanked her effusively and she thought he looked rather surprised when she gave him the address of her father’s studio in Montmartre.

Once the horse set off from the Station, Una could only think with delight that she was in Paris.

It seemed to her not three years but a lifetime since she had last been here and yet now it was so familiar that it was like coming home.

The high grey houses with their wooden shutters, the crowded boulevards, the people sitting outside the cafés at the small marble-topped tables, the pâtisserie shops and the stalls piled high with colourful fruit or great pallid pieces of tripe were just as she remembered them.

She thought as they drove along that she could smell the coffee, which never had the same fragrance in Italy.

Now the horse was climbing rather slowly up the hill and high above her, almost as if it blessed her from the sky, was the great white dome of Sacré-Coeur.

Una had learnt in her studies that it was after the defeat of France at Sedan that a Jesuit had suggested placing France under the protection of the Sacred Heart.

Then the chant had gone up from every Church,

“Save Rome and France in the name of the Sacred Heart!”

In fact, taking advantage of France’s enfeebled state, Victor Emmanuel had seized the opportunity of taking control of Rome and the Pope had declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican.

But the idea of the Church in Paris was an immediate success.

Millions of francs flowed in and it had been the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Guibert, who had decided that the Basilica should be erected in Montmartre.

“It is here,” the Prelate cried, “that the Sacred Heart should be enthroned to draw all to itself. On the summit of a hill a monument to our religious rebirth should be raised.”

The Church looked so beautiful now with the sun shining on the white stone that Una thought it was impossible that Montmartre could be as wicked as the girls at school had told her it was.

She was not a Catholic, for both her father and mother, being English, were Protestants.

But, living in the Convent where nearly all the other pupils were Catholic, Una had learnt how important their religion was to them and how deeply it coloured their lives.

She was sure that however sinful Montmartre had been in the past, the Church, which by now was nearly completed, would sweep away all that was wrong and diffuse an air of sanctity over the whole place.

The road that led to Montmartre was certainly as steep and as difficult as the ascent into Heaven itself.

The horse was going more and more slowly and now Una could see how different the people looked from those she had passed in the streets and boulevards below.

Men with velvet jackets and great flowing ties walked with women wearing what almost appeared to be fancy dress.

They looked strange and at the same time rather exciting and she tried to guess which were errand girls and boys, laundresses, shopkeepers and poor artisans.

There were some men who Una thought were obviously Apaches and she wondered if the stories she had heard of their fights with knives and pistols in dark alleys were really true.

There were artists sketching on the pavements and congregating in a square where the chestnut trees were in bloom.

The scene was so pretty and the whole place had such an air of gaiety about it that Una drew in her breath with excitement.

It was even more thrilling than she had imagined it would be and she hoped that her father would allow her to walk round and look at the people and perhaps he would know some of the artists.

She was so busy looking round her that she was surprised when the carriage drew to a standstill outside a tall building that was badly in need of a coat of paint.

It looked drab and had a slight air of desolation that made Una feel apprehensive.

“Here you are, m’mselle!” the cocher said, shouting at her over his shoulder.

“Thank you,” Una replied.

The man climbed down slowly because he was elderly and rather fat and opened the door of the carriage for her. Then he lifted her trunk down onto the pavement.

She paid him and then he asked,

“Shall I carry the trunk in for you, m’mselle?”

“That would be very kind,” she answered.

She went ahead through the open door of the house and saw a staircase in a narrow, unfurnished hall that looked both dusty and dirty.

“Which number are you going to, m’mselle?” the cocher enquired.

For the first time Una realised that her father did not own the whole house, as she had imagined, and it obviously contained several studios.

She was just about to reply that she had no idea, when she saw three names stuck to a board.

One of them she saw with relief was that of her father.

The cocher saw the board too.

“Well, at least you know who’s where,” he said.

“My father lives at number three,” Una answered.

“That’s up the stairs,” the cocher said in a voice of resignation.

Putting her trunk onto his shoulder, he climbed up the stairs ahead of her.

They were uncarpeted and creaked ominously under his weight.

On the first floor there was a door on which was inscribed roughly in black paint, JULIUS THOREAU.

Excitedly Una squeezed past the cocher on the small landing and knocked.

There was no answer and she opened the door tentatively.

She had expected the studio to look strange but certainly not anything like the large room before her, which was remarkable for its disorder.

There was a sofa, chairs and a table, all mixed up with several easels, a model’s throne, a high stepladder and propped everywhere were unfinished canvasses.

On the walls hung a number of unframed pictures and on the floor were books, boots, dumbbells, an incredible number of empty bottles and some women’s clothes, stockings, scarves, an embroidered Chinese shawl and an open sunshade.

Una looked about her in bewilderment.

The cocher put down her trunk.

“Looks as though a good tidying-up wouldn’t do any harm, m’mselle,” he said jovially.

Then, before Una could reply, he had left her, his heavy footsteps clumping down the stairs.

Una stared round her, wondering how anyone could live in such a mess.

Then she saw at the far end of the room a narrow wooden staircase and guessed that it must lead to a bedroom.

It passed through her mind that her father might be ill, which would account for his not coming to meet her.

Gingerly she picked her way across the room, dislodging a ball and seeing a piece of beautiful china, broken in two, lying beside an old boot without laces.

She climbed the staircase and found, as she had expected, a small bedroom, containing a large divan as a bed and a chest-of-drawers with one leg missing propped up on books.

There were several broken chairs and the walls were decorated with strange, brilliantly coloured murals of half-naked women.

Una looked at them and felt embarrassed.

As there was no one in the room, she felt almost as if she was spying on something secret and climbed down the stairs back to the studio.

There was a large window with a North light and in front of it stood an easel on which she could see a half-finished picture.

She manoeuvred her way across the room to look at it.

She recognised that it was her father’s work, but he had certainly changed his style a great deal since she had last seen one of his paintings.

He had always used colours in a different manner from other artists.

There had been something unusually beautiful in the manner in which he had brought light into his paintings, giving what he painted a brilliance that made it hold the attention, while the background faded into insignificance.

Una tried to understand what he wished to convey in his paintings, for he had told her that a real artist painted what he felt rather than what he saw with his eyes.

But she found the picture on the canvass entirely incomprehensible, just a mass of swirling colours mingling with one another and without even a recognisable pattern.