THE IDEALIST

 From the first day Edward knew they were drawing the wrong person. The whole class was turned towards the model who had been chosen for them, a woman with a very brown body who from the waist down seemed heavily rooted to the ground by a sort of sinking of her flesh, a strong implantation of her feet on the model stand, a heavy droop of her arms and shoulders. But the woman he was looking at and drawing surreptitiously was poised before him with such an air of having stopped only a minute here on her way to something else that he immediately began to think of ways of speaking to her for fear she might not be there the next day. Her face was tranquil, and her eyes virtuously concentrated on the model, and her fingers were correctly drawing wha she was looking at, but even then he felt such a restlessness in her, such a self-sufficiency, as if she carried her own world within her and did not need to cling to any group, or place.

“I hope you will come again tomorrow,” he said suddenly and awkwardly, having found nothing cleverer.

She looked at him sharply for a second and answered: “Why?”

He showed her his drawing of her. “It isn’t finished, you see.

“You picked the wrong model,” she said, smiling.

“No. I think the others did.”

“It is true she is hard to do; there is an awful lot to dispose of”.

Edward looked at her drawing, in which the model had been over-refined.

I see you are given to improvements and to anemia,” he said, and immediately feared he had lost her. He was elated to see her laugh.

“I’m so glad you are frank! Tomorrow you can help me be realistic. Au revoir.”

She arrived the next day at half past nine. She wore, Edward observed, a dark blue velvet suit which made her look like a page from medieval stories. Her hat looked jaunty and yet soft, and when it was hung up in the hallway among the other tailored beige, brown and neutral colored ones, it looked unmodern, and it made him feel that just as the class had picked the wrong model she had picked the wrong century. But since he lived in this century and was fully able to appreciate her there was nothing wasted.

She smiled at him, but she was thinking of something else. This was the mystery he was intent on clearing. Where did her thoughts go when they were not on her drawing. Not to other centuries; she was carrying a book of Cocteau about. But she had a fearful way of looking high over the heads of everybody, and through walls.

Edward could think of nothing better than to criticize the quality of her chalk and pencils so that he might suggest where she should buy them. With sweet docility she met him there after class. He enjoyed seeing her shop, talk, move, even argue. She was real. She could even count her money quickly.

When they came out it was raining. Edward shivered as realistically as he could and said in an accent of profound distress: “How good a cup of coffee would taste now. Have you ever been to the Viking?”

His model looked at her watch. “I have plenty of time.

This rather startled him, although he had keenly hoped for it. She knew the Viking, then; she was accustomed to drinking coffee, not alone, and she even knew how much time it all required. Edward had forgotten they were in Montparnasse, two yards from the Grande Chaumière.

She told him she knew he was the author of some very keen impressionistic sketches of night life, of marker women, rag packers, and policemen.

He told her all he fancied about her. And came back three times to his question, “So you have been here often?” with a sort of anxious curiosity.

“Yes, many times. Isn’t that natural?”

“No,” he said, rather gloomily.

“Bur why not? Why not? I’m alive, Edward Lunn, I’m modern. You have simply taken a painter’s liberty and dated me rather far back. An 1830 face you said. That’s possible. But not my mind.” She leaned over, laughing, and touched his hand as if to emphasize her humanness. He looked so startled she withdrew it instantly.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, “that you are an idealizer of women, and that you see an aureole of poetry around my head!”

“The modern flippancy does not suit you at all,” he said. “It’s a pose.

“I’m sorry,” said Chantal, “I teased you. You were dreaming. I did it to break the spell. I always do it to break the spell. I have become suspicious of dreaming. I did a lot of it myself once, and while I was doing it many agreeable things, real things, passed me by.”

“I hare real things,” said Edward, looking around rather bearishly at the rest of the people.

Chantal knew he had not understood.

 

They changed books and arguments while hunting the Luxembourg Gardens under one umbrella. They discussed psychology over the café rabies of the Bouie Mich. They shared the love of painting while working side by side at the Grande Chaumière. And while hunting down special books among the quays, they felt the excitement and the fever of mental communion.

Paris was newer to him than to Chantal who had been born in it. She had to wait around the corners, sometimes, with a little watchful smile, while he made his discoveries. They were very old discoveries. Chantal wanted sometimes to mock them. His surprise and his elation were so childlike. Then she realized he was discovering himself, and was silent, soft eyed, and patient. He had drawn things exactly as he had seen them and with such intuition that they suggested all the meaning there was in them to others. Bur what they suggested was beyond Edward’s own knowledge and understanding. His little women had heavy eyes, and faces one could imagine any moment altered by a violent enjoyment of the senses; his men wore sardonic smiles, and all his people in the street the skepticism and mellowness of an old race. Bur it was all accuracy of drawing, and he himself had no key to the meaning of his work.

She took him to the Salon des Humoristes and they laughed together. She put many French books in his way. She saw that he was stirred to a new conception of fearless living. His mind grew bright and flexible. He saw that from her hands came a warm knowledge, but he still thought her a legendary apparition.

 

One morning they were all working intently when Chantal noticed that the model’s body was trembling a little. After a minute she slipped down on the model stand, took her head in her hands and sobbed. Someone in the front row rushed up to her with her kimono and covered her. “Are you cold?” they asked her. She went on sobbing and mumbling. Chantal went up to her. The model was Russian and knew little French, but she finally explained that she had not eaten for three days. Chantal asked her to be patient for a few minutes, and ran out to the café, and came back with a boy carrying coffee, Porto and a basket of brioches. The boy stared at the model. Chantal sent him away, The whole class was chattering and commenting, but only three persons stood near the model. Edward looked upset. She was sitting as Chantal had left her, with her knees under her, her kimono open at the front which she did not bother to close.

In general they all showed a callous indifference to the model during working hours. She was like a piece of furniture. Few of the students talked with her. Knowing her body so intimately seemed to eliminate her value as an individual:

Bur here, crying, eating her brioche, and her face swollen, and her kimono hanging loose, she suddenly became someone to have a feeling about. Chantal pitied her. Edward did not talk, but looked troubled. One woman drew her kimono around her tightly, “You must not catch cold,” she said. Then she turned away. One placid elderly man asked if she wanted him to take up a collection for her.

Suddenly Chantal noticed a change on Edward’s face. His eyes were on the woman’s body, still heaving a little. It was not the same look he had while he was drawing.

Alter a while they all went back to work. Bur Chantal could not draw anymore. She had been shadowing the breasts, to bring our their swelling and the angle at which they fell, a little sideways, with their overripeness. Bur she could not see pure lines anymore. It seemed to her that the breasts were still heaving and trembling. Chantal could not understand why, when the model had taken her face with her wet hands to whisper in her ear, she had wanted to move away.

Edward stopped working too. “I’m through for this morning,” he said, without looking at her.

As several of them walked out together they left some money on the model stand, bur they did not look at the model.

 

Edward carne to Chantal’s studio late one evening. He appeared restless and tense, seemed unwilling to sit, as was his habit, next to the books. He looked out of the window, into darkness, and finally came to stand in front of Chantal and without looking at her, he burst out: “1 suppose you have guessed it, I am obsessed by that woman.”

“The model,” said Chantal quietly, as to herself. And she looked far beyond him. He, thinking she sought to meet his eyes, bowed his head. “Oh, but you can’t possibly understand what she means to me. She has taught me joys, joys such as I never suspected the existence of. No other moments in my life seem worth remembering, no, not even those when I did my best work, and God knows I thought I had reached then the heights of ecstasy. My feeling for you, that is entirely apart: it’s religious. Let me talk to you, Chantal. I need you.

“You can talk to me.

“Forgive me for talking about her, but here with you is the only peace and coolness I know. The other is like a fever, which wears me out, like bad fever, a horrible thirst. I need her so much, want her so much. I go to her. We spend the day together in her room, but when I go away I do not feel satisfied, and yet I have been fearfully happy.” He sat on the edge of a chair and breathed deeply.

“It’s queer, here I feel freer. It is the light atmosphere of your intelligence, of your calm will. The other woman dominates me and all my senses. I can’t think. I can’t work. I can only enjoy her; I am only aware of her. In a way that powerful forgetfulness is sweet, terribly sweet. I can’t give it up, I can’t give it up.“

“I know, I know.” Her voice was very gentle, and she almost crooned the words.

“You couldn’t know! You sense things, you understand, you never say the wrong word, you are healing, but you can’t know. It’s like an explosion of the whole world. Nothing else matters or means anything except that intoxication of the senses. And that woman, would you believe it, warned me against herself, the first day. She said: ‘Go away before I reach you joys that you will never get from the kind of women you admire. Go back to your dear wholesome comrades.’ She despised me as she said it. I stayed. It has been the devil trying not to be sentimental. She is so callous, and I did not want her to think me ridiculous. Do you know what I sent her yesterday instead of flowers? An electric radiator—she has been cold in her hotel room-—a radiator!”

He was laughing. He stood up and walked around the room. Suddenly he noticed that Chantal had not laughed.

“Why do you think I can’t understand? I have known all those feelings. My will has been dissolved. I have known that forgetfulness . . .”

“You Chantal, you! But your face, your extraordinarily pure face!”

“Never mind my face from now on,” she said crisply.

He sat down and looked crushed.

“Aren’t you glad,” she said very softly, “since it is because of that I can understand you today?”

“Glad? Glad? But how can I be glad when I have lost my ideal of you?”

“Well, I am glad of that,” said Chantal, looking very soft and human, leaning over a little, waiting.

Bur he did not understand.

 

Anaïs Nin