‘Well, if my memory serves me correctly, I drew blue wrens, and gray sparrows... but never a dove.”
“There is always a first time, my darling.”
“Indeed,” he answered. “Why don’t you go stand by the mantel.” He gestured in the direction of the white alabaster fireplace.
“It would be my pleasure...” She was happy to oblige him.
He took the pencil and began to sketch her head, the length of her neck. But soon he stopped.
“Please forgive me.” His voice broke into a cough. “I’m getting a bit tired.” He laid down the pad on the sofa. She had only been posing for a few minutes.
When she walked over to sit beside him, she lifted the pad to see what he had drawn.
He had rendered her in profile; the face was half done. He had drawn a few wisps of hair around the curl of her ear.
But still she could see he had talent.
“I should be getting home. Émilienne will be expecting me.”
She nodded, her heart stung at the mention of his wife’s name. She placed the pad down on the sofa and walked him to the door. She cupped his cheeks in her hands just as she had greeted him hours before. This time planting a kiss on his dry lips.
He kissed her back. Then, as was the familiar ritual between them, he reached inside his breast pocket and handed her the pocket watch to set with the exact time they were separating.
“Until next time,” he whispered, placing it back in his jacket and kissing her on the cheek.
“I will wait until the hands move again,” she whispered in his ear.
After she saw him to the door, Marthe went over to the sofa to retrieve the unfinished drawing, tearing it off the pad. She went to her desk and placed it amongst the first love letters Charles had written to her. She knew he would never complete it. But she was happy to have herself captured even incompletely by his hand.
17.
Marthe
Paris 1898
Charles canceled his visit the following week. And then the week after. A letter arrived, which read that as much as he longed to see her, he was having trouble getting out of bed. Émilienne had insisted he convalesce at their estate in the country, where she thought the air was better for him.
The following week, Marthe awakened to an ominous sign. As she walked down the hallway, passing the pedestal table where she always kept Fauchon, she discovered the little bird lying at the bottom of his gilded wire cage, his legs pointing upward. When she peered closer, she noticed his eyes were like two hard, black stones.
Giselle tried to soothe Marthe, wrapping the dead bird in some waste silk, telling her that the bird had lived far longer than most, and promising her mistress that she’d make sure he was properly buried in the park.
“He was one of Charles’s first gifts to me,” Marthe lamented as shewatched her maid tuck the bird in its makeshift shroud into a biscuit tin. “He bought him to keep me company, to provide me with birdsong.”
But what disturbed her more than Fauchon’s unfortunate passing was the feeling that it foreshadowed something terrible to come. She tried to push it out of her mind, but a dark cloud engulfed her. She feared Charles’s death would be next.
***
With Charles away from Paris and little else to distract her, Marthe looked forward to her visits to Boldini’s studio more than ever. Charles’s illness had reduced him to such a frail state that she yearned to be in the company of someone who had as much energy as she did. She soon learned that he not only shared her love of Asian porcelains, but also of Venice.
Early on in her sittings, he had asked her about her name. “De Florian?” He raised one of his eyebrows as he appraised her for one of the early sketches. “Is it French?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she answered coquettishly.
“What would you say, then?”
“Venetian.”
“You mean like the café in San Marco?”
