Free The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. by Carole DeSanti Page A

slipped my hand into his. We walked.
    The streets of Paris were wide gutters sluicing mud and refuse; urchins darted through the alleyways, and carriages spewed filth on anyone on foot. Icy puddles lay in awkward places, along with mountains of earth and rubble. One building had been a lodging for medical students, but had been sold to some partners who knew the street was to be demolished. They raised the rents, stuck up some plaster, and opened a pleasure garden. When it was time for the city to tear it down, the tax men would assess it (a tax man was one of the partners) and they all walked away rich. Pierre said that the middle classes had been bought off with a cascade in the Bois, a few francs in the bank, and some thick drapes to pull across the windows, and this was why he was meant to paint for the Salon judges and no one else.
    â€œI’m a hostage, one way or another,” he said. I squeezed his hand, felt the callus where he held his brush, on the second finger.
    â€œI don’t mind eating a potato for supper,” I said firmly.
    â€œHmmpf!” Chasseloup dropped my hand, headed into the tobacconist’s; came out tucking a fat packet into his coat. “We can drink our dinner tonight. Tomorrow I’ll go to the Mont de Piété, that great engine of Parisian commerce.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œThe poor man’s bank. The city pawnshop.”
    We shuffled up six flights in silence with no grocer’s bags to weigh us down. Pierre said that bread cost too much in this district; forget about
vin ordinaire.
He rattled the key; inside the little pie-shaped room we were like birds stranded in the treetops, the untaught ones who let straw fall from their beaks as they flutter about, and there was the rent envelope underneath the door. Chasseloup scuffed it aside; opened the door to the cupboard and weighed the potato on his palm. His eyes were huge and liquid, his hair looked soft, like the brush between a cow’s ears before you touched it and realized it was stiff. He weighed the potato and stared, then placed it on the narrow sideboard counter. Retrieved the remaining item in the larder, and broke the bottle’s seal.
    â€œI need some air. Need to breathe without Vollard bursting in, paint without photographer’s tripods and
cartes
de visite
on strings.” (There was talk among Chasseloup’s friends that painting would soon be obsolete; the business of art would all go to the photographers.) Chasseloup took down the sugar, poured the green; set out the water pitcher, his “lucky” spoon, a battered filigree.
    My back ached and I put my hand there, feeling the desperate undulation of these moods; the hunger of the man for what he wanted; his furious need varnished over by an adherence to a strict set of principles, a labyrinth for which there was no
Plan de Paris.
His was a ranging, ferocious appetite and at the same time, its despair. His claim upon me was dimly familiar. Different in its expression, perhaps, but with no less urgency, or more . . . Had it come round again, then, to this? The alarm at my center began to ring. I glanced at the green bottle, nearly full. It could be a long night.
    Chasseloup rolled a cigarette and folded his lean, tall self onto the floor. Hustled a trunk from under the divan, flipped its brass locks. The scent of camphor preceded a tossing up of trousers and coats, well-cut and of good material; vests, cravats, and gloves; starched and folded linens, a silk-faced overcoat, all very different from Chasseloup’s usual wardrobe.
    â€œI didn’t know you had these,” I murmured, looking over his shoulder.
    â€œLike them, do you?”
    â€œI don’t care.” It irritated me when Pierre pretended I had “aspirations,” especially when I didn’t utter a murmur about his strange economies: our suppers of absinthe and potatoes. I slipped on my cloak, made for the door. We had passed a