Free Mistral's Daughter by Judith Krantz Page B

that prevented him
from wanting to talk about it.
    After that first night in
April it was the one perfect spring of Maggy's life.   It was the spring by which all other springs
would be judged and found wanting, and while Maggy lived it she alsowatched
herself living it.   She knew, in the part
of her brain that felt no emotion, that only recorded and filed memory, that
this was her age of gold.   She knew, with
the knowledge born in all women, thatnothing as glorious ever lasted
forever, and yet, as day followed day, she never looked ahead, never considered
the future, never asked herself what would happen tomorrow. Each day was
enough, round and full and as complete as an apple of the sun.
    For Mistral, too, it was a
time of surpassing joy, but before he was a man he was a painter, and his
happiness sprang more from the work he was doing than from Maggy herself.
    It never occurred to Julien
Mistral, following the night of the Surrealist ball, that Maggy had a life that
could prevent her from posing solely for him seven days a week.   He took all her time as his right, expecting
her to hold her pose for abnormally long periods since he was tireless and
never stopped until she was in such muscle pain that she had to beg for a
rest.   He assumed, with a selfishness so
total that it was regal, that she was entirely content to leave her own life
behind, to abandon her room and share his studio, to forsake her circle of
friends, to go without normal diversions, to give up any vestige of personal
freedom. When he dropped his brushes it was onlynatural that she be
there waiting to relieve the nervous tension of creation by opening her body to
his hungry, violent lovemaking.
    Maggy questioned none of his
careless convictions. She offered herselfto him on every level with
simple generosity, as if she were a held filled with tall, blowing flowers,
that grew only to be gathered at his pleasure.
    Hour after hour, she gladly
endured the concentration of his gaze,knowing that he wasn't thinking
of her or even seeing her as Muggy. Her love asked nothing for itself but the
satisfac-tion of watching him work. He was a man consumed, a man filled with so
high a passion for creation that she thought of it as holy. The two months
during which Mistral painted the seven pictures of Maggy, the series that later
came to be called simply La Rouquinne , "The Redhead," were
months that soon would become isolated from all that Maggy or Mistral knew of
ordinary life.   They would become as
legendary, to each of them, as if they had once been joined together in some
heroic adventure never before attempted by man.   The series became a milestone in the history of art, but neither of
them was ever to discuss it.
    By the end of May of 1926,
Mistral felt sure enough of his new powers to attack other subjects.   When he had finished the seventh portrait of
Maggy he abandoned his concentration on the nude as suddenly as he had
begun.   Now he turned to still life.   His neglected garden, heavy with June
flowers; each corner of his junk-filled studio, bright with tatters as a flea
market; a vase of purple and white asters; a melon split in half-all these objects
presented themselves to his freshly inspired vision as if he had never seen
them before.   They lived, as surely as
Maggy lived.   Light fell on them and they
breathed it in.   The world was new.
    Mistral never painted except
from life, and, as his mind danced he changed forever the way people would
focus their eyes.   With the rhythm of a
bandit, with the bravura of a pirate, he let loose that sense of play he had
not been in touch with since childhood. He plundered the secret clearings of
his spirit, opening them to sun and air and wind, using his brushes as if they
were a trumpet on which he could blow his way to the gates of heaven.
     
    Maggy's disappearance with
Mistral from the life of the quartier had provoked a storm of gossip
and, when Mistral released her from posing for him, her