Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [107]
“I thought so!” he remarked to his wife as they continued along the boulevard. “Something told me to beware of that child. I was suspicious right from the start.”
113 Moulin Rouge
He had frequently reminded her that in Paris the one thing they were going to see if they saw nothing else was a cancan. He always laughed when he said this, while she, pretending to be somewhat scandalized, always protested but ended by saying that if he was determined to go she certainly intended to go along as a chaperone.
So to Pigalle they went for dinner and a revue, and afterward in the taxi while they were returning to the hotel he joked about the cancan girls. He announced that he was planning to send a dozen roses to the one who had caught his eye; she replied that if he dared he would never hear the last of it.
But in their room after she had fallen asleep he lay awake with a somber expression. He remembered how the girls danced on one leg in time to Offenbach’s music and how they waved their skirts. The cabaret was filled with tourists and the sexuality of the spectacle was false, contrived for effect in every detail, like the black elastic garters stretched across their full young thighs; yet he had been astounded. What he had expected to see he had seen, and therefore it was not exciting, it was more in the nature of a confirmation; but he had been unprepared for the lascivious screams of the girls—screaming while they waved their skirts, as if their bellies were afire. Again and again he could hear those obscene cries in the musky silence of the Parisian night.
He turned his head on the pillow to look at his wife; she lay motionless in a deep, exhausted sleep. He thought of her affectionate embrace, which was invariably the same, and he felt resentful, for something which rightfully belonged to every man had been denied him.
114 Les Sabots de Millet
Among the famous attractions in the environs of Paris which she was most anxious to visit were the Bois de Boulogne, the cathedral of Chartres, the palace of Louis XIV at Versailles, and the forest of Fontainebleau where the celebrated artists of the Barbizon school had worked. So he arranged for a limousine and a driver.
She enjoyed them all. Perhaps she enjoyed Versailles and Chartres more than any of the other sights because she so often mentioned the palace grounds and the tapestries, and the rich stained glass of the ancient cathedral. What he himself could not forget was the simple hut where Millet had lived. He could not understand why a man would endure such poverty unless it was inevitable, and in Millet’s case it was not inevitable: he had elected to live that way so that he could spend all of his time painting.
Mr. Bridge continued to think about this, and the more he pondered the indignity of living in a hut the more it annoyed and puzzled him, so that one afternoon as they were strolling on the Champs Elysées he suddenly remarked: “I do not insist a person has to live in a place like Versailles or anything of the sort. Far from it. But it beats me how that artist Millet could be indifferent to ordinary comforts. Lord, there wasn’t a toilet in that place, there wasn’t any heat, there wasn’t anything. If the fellow liked to paint pictures, all right, but if there was no public for his pictures why didn’t he get a job like everybody else? He could have done his art work over the weekend. If I’d been in his shoes that’s how I would have handled