Free Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland Page A

had only one alternative. Quickly, though without one shoe, I swept through the petite salle to the grand salon and marshaled the Baroness of Orange to witness his disarray. Like it or not, Agatha van Solms was going to countenance the in fidelity of her lover.
    It was, in all respects, an eventful night. I wouldn't give a thousand placid summer days in exchange for it. When I settled under the bed clothes toward dawn, Gerard was still raging.
    "How dare you compromise my position here! You realize, don't you, that it will be all over The Hague tomorrow?"
    Those were, I believe, the last words I heard that night as I turned on my side, raised the bed clothes over my ear, and remembered with a chuckle how, on my way back through the petite salle with Agatha in tow like a Dutch barge, I had collided with Monsieur le C— slinking his way out. I fell asleep thinking: What a shame we didn't have hyacinths.
    Bitterness was out of the question. That I did not charge him with his various infidelities; that I did not attack that matron of the Mauritshuis who, God give her mercy, first introduced me to the pleasures of Dutch musical salons; that I was, in fact, indifferent to my husband's indiscretions testi fied, to me foremost, that our love was of a tepid paleness. The Hague was, every Dutchman de clared pridefully, the very capital of reason above passion. Therefore, what I had been taught to fear, now I embraced. Betrayal—his or mine, it didn't matter—freed me. Best to leave quickly than be come a byword of reproach mentioned behind linen fans out of range of daughters' ears. A season of contrition among the plumbago at my aunt's summer house in Provence, and then I would be back in Paris, at Charlotte's, where there would be theater and opera to keep me from thinking. Ah, that sublime, escaping sigh one sighs when one un laces one's corset, that exquisite freedom could be mine with only a coach ride back to Paris.
    But how to pay for it? Impossible to wait for my father to send me money. That would take a fort night. And there would be questions. It would be indecent to stay here a night longer than necessary. I had to think. This time, I really truly had to think. What could I do? What did I have?
    With a stab of pain, it came to me—the paint ing.
    Trying not to look, I wrapped it in muslin the next morning and called for the carriage. The pa pers, which Gerard kept in his strongbox, I would have to do without. I started at van Hoep's, but encountered only niggling there. Standing up as if to go, the muslin in my hand, I couldn't keep my eyes from the girl in the painting. What I saw be fore as vacancy on her face seemed now an irre trievable innocence and deep calm that caused me a pang. It wasn't just a feature of her youth, but of something finer—an artless nature. I could see it in her eyes. This girl, when she became a woman, would risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with her beloved.
    "This is more than a pretty curio, my good man," I said. "You are looking into the guileless soul of maidenhood."
    There was, I realized then, something indecent about behaving as we had in front of her. The shock to her sensibilities would leave indelible marks.
    "Are you sure it's a Vermeer?" the dealer asked.
    "Positive. There are papers, but at the moment they are inaccessible to me."
    "And the papers indicate—?"
    "That it was painted by Jan van der Meer of Delft, and auctioned in Amsterdam about a hun dred years ago. I can't remember when or where." I flipped my handkerchief to indicate that such de tails were of no consequence.
    "There's no signature. If there was any chance those papers said a van Mieris, I'd give you two hundred guilders, but for only a Vermeer, phugh."
    I wrapped the painting again and left without a word more, took it to a second dealer and said it was a van Mieris.
    "Are you sure it's not a Vermeer?"
    "I'm certain."
    Again he asked for documents, but without pa pers