The Swan Thieves

Chapter 86 1879

In the parlor that evening, she sits close to him instead of across the room. Her hands cannot concentrate on the embroidery; she leaves it unattended in her lap and watches him. Olivier is reading, his neatly brushed head bent over his book. The ottoman he has chosen is too short for his long legs. He has changed into dinner clothes, but she still sees his threadbare suit covered with the coarse smock. He glances up and offers with a smile to read aloud. She accepts. It is Le Rouge et le Noir; she has already read it twice, once to herself and once to Papa, and has been moved, and often annoyed, by the hapless Julien. Now, she is not able to listen.
Instead she watches his lips, feeling her own dullness, her sad inability to follow the words. After a few minutes he puts the volume down. "You are not paying any attention at all, my dear."
"No, I'm afraid not."
"I'm sure the fault is not with Stendhal, so that leaves me. Have I done anything wrong? Well, I have, I know."
"What nonsense." It is as close to an outburst as she would know how to make in this polite room, with the other guests nearby. "Stop it."
He looks narrowly at her. "I shall stop, then."
"Please excuse me." She lowers her voice, picks at the lace on the front of her skirt. "It's just that you have no idea what effect you do have on me."
"The effect of annoying you, perhaps?" But the confidence in his smile compels her. He knows perfectly well he has caught her attention. "Here, let me read you something else." He fishes among the cast-off volumes on their landlady's shelves. "Something elevating, Les mythes grecs."
She settles herself more deeply, making each stitch count, but his first choice is mischievous. " 'Leda and the Swan. Leda was a maiden of rare beauty, and she drew from afar the admiration of mighty Zeus. He swept down upon her in the form of a swan...."'
Olivier looks up at her over the book. "Poor Zeus. He couldn't help himself."
"Poor Leda," she corrects him demurely; peace has been restored. She cuts the thread with her stork scissors. "It was not her fault."
"Do you suppose Zeus enjoyed being a swan, apart from his courtship of Leda?" Olivier has propped the book open over his knee. "Never mind--he probably enjoyed anything he undertook, except perhaps disciplining the other gods when that was necessary."
"Oh, I don't know," she proposes, for the pleasure of discussion; why is it always such a pleasure, with him? "Maybe he wished he could visit lovely Leda in the form of a human being, or even that he could simply be a human being for a few hours, to have an ordinary life."
"No, no." Olivier takes up the book, puts it down once again. "I'm afraid I must disagree--think of the joy of his being a swan, soaring over the landscape, discovering her."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"It would make a marvelous painting, wouldn't it? Just the sort of thing the Salon jury would welcome." He is silent for a moment. "The subject has been handled before, of course. But what if it were done in a fresh way, in a new style--an old subject, but painted for our era, more naturally?"
"Indeed--why don't you try?" She puts down the scissors and looks at him. His enthusiasm, his presence, floods her with love; it pools inside her throat, behind her eyes, spills over her as she adjusts her embroidery across her lap.
"No," he says. "It could be done only by a bolder painter than I, someone with a great feel for swans but also with a fearless brush. You, for example."
She seizes her work again, her needle, the silk. "Nonsense. How could I paint such a thing?"
"With my help," he says.
"Oh no." She almost calls him "dearest," bites back the words. "I've never done such a canvas, so complicated, and it would require a model for Leda, of course, and a setting."
"You could paint most of it out of doors." His eyes are fixed on her. "Why not in your garden? That would make it new and fresh. You could draw a swan from the Bois de Boulogne--you already have, and so well. And you could use your maid as a model, the way you did before."
"It's such a--I don't know. It's a strong subject for me--for a woman. How could Madame Riviere ever submit it?"
"That would be her struggle, not yours." He is in earnest, but he smiles, faintly, his eyes brighter than before. "Would you be afraid, if I were there to help? Could you not take a risk? Be courageous? Aren't there things greater than public censure, things that ought to be attempted and cherished?"
The moment has come; his challenge, her panic, her longing, all rise up in her rib cage. "If you were there to help me?"
"Yes. Would you be afraid?"
She makes herself look at him. She is drowning. He will guess that she wants him, she does want him, even if she tries to avoid uttering the words. "No," she says slowly. "If you were there to help, I would not. I don't think I could be really afraid of anything. If you were there with me."
He holds her gaze, and she loves the fact that he does not smile; there is no triumph, nothing she can attribute to vanity. If anything, he seems on the verge of tears. "Then I would help you," he says, so softly that she can hardly hear it.
She says nothing, at the edge of tears herself.
He regards her for a long minute, then picks up the book. "Do you want to hear the story of Leda?"