Free The Restoration Artist by Lewis DeSoto Page A

chestnuts of Jardin du Ranelagh the drizzle became rain, heavy drops rattling the leaves above me, penetrating my thin jacket and shirt as I ran the last block to the museum entrance.
    When I located the little Corot painting, two young women were standing directly in front of it, engaged in conversation and evidently not in any hurry to move on. Despite the wetshoes pinching my feet and a trickle of rainwater sliding down the back of my neck, I was conscious of the beauty of one of the women. When she turned to her friend, I glimpsed large grey eyes and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her wheat-coloured hair was pulled back from her oval face into a ponytail. She looked very French—the expressive pouts of her mouth, the way her hands moved in the air as she talked.
    At last they became aware of my presence, and moved off. At the doorway the woman with the ponytail looked back at me, with a frank, assessing interest and a hint of flirtation in her eyes. A mischievous smile flitted across her lips.
    I had looked at the painting for a long time, lost in that particular mood that Corot’s pictures always evoked, as if I had found a long-lost place. But you could not live inside a painting, no matter how much more preferable than real life it seemed. And art was not life. I’d learned that much in Paris.
    I went down to the cafeteria and sat near the window, waiting for the rain to stop, already feeling a nostalgia for Paris, as if it were in the past already.
    When I had finished my coffee and was about to leave, I noticed at a table nearby the woman who had been in the Corot room. She was sitting with her chin on her hand, gazing out through the rain-streaked window to the soft blur of the street outside. I reached into my pocket for my sketchbook and pencil and began to draw rapidly. The profile and the ponytail were easy, but I struggled to get the mouth right, that expressive pout of the lips.
    The next time I glanced up, she had turned in her seat and was looking directly at me. Our eyes met briefly before I looked down, embarrassed to be caught staring. Abruptly, sherose and walked straight over to my table. I quickly covered the sketch with my hand.
    “Since you have been sketching me for the last twenty minutes,” she said, “I think it is only fair that I at least get to see the drawing.”
    Caught unawares, I could do nothing but remove my hand from the page. She leaned over and studied the drawing, her ponytail brushing across my cheek.
    “Not bad,” she said, tracing a fingernail over the drawing. “But you flatter me. It’s a little idealized. You idealize women, perhaps?” She said it as a challenge, with an amused smile.
    I found myself tongue-tied and could only shrug. She closed the sketchbook and slid it back across the table and turned as if to leave. Somehow I managed to gather my wits about me and I asked her to sit down. She did.
    Her name was Claudine Jourdan. I ended up not leaving Paris. I married her instead.
    N OW, REMEMBERING THAT DAY also brought back a reminder of everything that I had lost. The hollowness was still inside my heart. I turned away, leaving the dog and the sea and the moon to themselves.
    LeBec was unchanged since my visit the other day, a couple of boats in the tiny harbour, a handful of cottages in a row opposite, the same heaps of netting and lobster pots on the quay, but instead of being deserted this time, there were two men in denim overalls bent over an engine on blocks, a little cloud of smoke drifting above their heads from the cigarettes both of them had clamped in the corners of their mouths.They looked up at my approach and I waved as I walked down the quay.
    “Bonjour, I’m looking for the cottage called La Minerve.”
    “You must be the painter,” the older one said—they appeared to be brothers.
    “Yes. Leo Millar.” I extended a hand to each and they introduced themselves as Benjamin and Simon Grente.
    “Père Caron told us