Moonlight Over Paris(21)
“We shall begin from the beginning. You may think you know how to paint, but you do not. You know nothing. And so you must unlearn all the rubbish you have been fed, like so much pap, by your other teachers. You must forget all so you may learn all.”
He surveyed the room, a dark-maned lion assessing a herd of terrified gazelle, but rather than hide behind her easel, as others were attempting to do, Helena straightened her back and didn’t look away when his gaze swept across her. She was made of sterner stuff, and she’d faced disapproving stares before. Compared to the first ball she’d attended after Edward had ended their engagement? This was nothing.
“Most of you are American or English, so I shall teach this course in English. If you have difficulty understanding, ask a neighbor, and don’t even think of bothering me. You shall now embark on a series of sketches. Before you is paper sufficient for the exercise, as well as a selection of charcoal.”
Ma?tre Czerny set a tall stool upon the center of the stage and then strode to the side of the room, to a set of shelves that was crowded with objects of every color, shape, size, and substance. He selected a bowl of apples and, returning to the stage, placed it on the stool.
“You may begin. You have ten minutes. Do not bother to prepare the paper; simply draw. Draw what you see before you.”
Never in all her life had Helena been as apprehensive of a task as she was now. Withdrawing a stick of charcoal at random from the cup on her easel, she sketched a light outline—but she had chosen a piece of soft charcoal by mistake, and it left a thick, almost jet-black line on the paper. She scrubbed at it with a lump of putty eraser, and succeeded only in smearing the paper. Praying Ma?tre Czerny wouldn’t notice, she flipped the paper over, found a thin stalk of vine charcoal, and began again. Outline. Shadows. Shadows softened.
She needed to remove some of what she had added, and so add highlights, but the light in the salon was coming from two sources, the bank of windows and the electric lights that dangled overhead, and was reflected in quite different ways by the apples, which she was certain were papier-maché or wax, and by the bowl, which was made of a dark, almost opaque glass. She needed to—
“Enough!” Ma?tre Czerny carried the bowl and apples back to the shelf and returned with an ornate and heavily tarnished silver candelabrum. “Take up a fresh sheet of paper. This time you have five minutes. Begin!”
Her hand flew over the paper, trying in vain to capture what her eye saw, but she got the proportions all wrong, and she hadn’t the time to erase what she’d done, and the finer details of the silver were vanishing into a misshapen blur that bore more resemblance to a dead tree than a piece of antique silver, and—
“Enough!” He removed the candelabrum and replaced it with a wreck of a violin, its strings broken and tangled. “Two minutes!”
The shape of the instrument was easy to capture, but she’d barely sketched its outline when the dreaded order came—“Enough! One minute!”—and the violin was replaced with an enormous conch shell, pale ivory with a delicate pink interior, its curving lines so—
“Enough! That is all for the moment.”
Helena set down her charcoal, her hands shaking so badly that she had to fold them into her lap. Her sketches were crude, unfocused, and amateurish, while Mr. Moreau’s—she couldn’t help but glance at them—were elegant and effortlessly graceful.
“Choose the best of your efforts, and set it on your easel,” their teacher commanded.
Ma?tre Czerny walked along the rows, muttering to himself in French and what Helena took to be Czech. Periodically he would groan loudly, or run a hand through his hair. Two or three times he examined a sketch for a few seconds longer, and then, before moving on, nodded curtly.
At last he was at their row. He paused by Mr. Moreau’s sketch, a marvel of simplicity that captured the conch shell in four or five sweeping lines, and nodded approvingly. For Helena’s sketch, he offered no response, instead moving past as if he hadn’t even seen it. A moment later, she knew she’d been lucky to escape so easily, for his groan of disdain upon seeing the American girl’s work was accompanied by yet more hair-pulling and grumbling.
When he had finished his inspection he returned to the front, scrubbed his hands over his face, and raised his eyes to the heavens. “Terrible. Simply terrible. Try again,” he commanded the entire class.
Ten minutes to sketch a vase filled with ostrich plumes, five minutes for a heap of red and gold brocade, two minutes for a forlorn and moth-eaten stuffed pheasant, and finally one minute for a green glass fisherman’s float.
“A few—a very few—of these sketches show promise,” he said upon his return to the front of the salon. “The rest belong in the bottom of a chicken coop. There is only one thing to be done: you will start at the very beginning.
“Cone. Cylinder. Sphere. Cube. Torus.”
Someone at the front must have grumbled, or made a face, because Ma?tre Czerny was across the room in a flash, looming over the poor fellow, all but shouting in his face. “Did I not say I care nothing for your opinions?”
He paced the width of the salon, back and forth, pulling his hair back from his brow so forcefully that Helena’s eyes fairly watered at the sight.
“You long to be successful, do you not? You long to be the young new painter everyone is talking about. But you do not wish to do the work. And you cannot become great without learning how to draw.