The Swan Thieves

Being in love with someone unattainable is like a painting I saw once. I saw this painting before I got into my habit--now of many years -- of writing down basic information about any picture that strikes me in a museum or gallery, in a book or somebody's home. In my home studio, in addition to all my postcards of paintings, I keep a box of index cards, and on each of them is my own handwriting: the title of the painting, the artist's name, the date, the place I encountered it, a synopsis of any little story about the painting that I've discovered on the plaque or in the book, sometimes even a rough sketch of the work--the church steeple is to the left, the road in the foreground.

When I'm frustrated and coming up short on my own canvas, I flip through my cards and find an idea; I add the church steeple, drape the model in red, or break the waves into five sharp separate peaks. Once in a while I find myself flipping through my card file, in actuality or just mentally, searching for that important painting for which I have no card. I saw it when I was in my twenties (I can't even remember what year), probably in a museum, because after college I went to every museum I could, everywhere I went.

This particular work was Impressionist; I'm certain only of that. It showed a man sitting on a bench in a garden, that wild, luxuriant garden the French Impressionists favored and even planted when they needed one, an all-out rebellion against the formality of French gardens and French painting. The tall man was sitting there on the bench, in a kind of bower of green and lavender, dressed like a gentleman--I guess he was a gentleman--in formal coat and vest, gray trousers, pale hat. He looked content, complacent but also slightly alert, as if listening for something. If you backed away from the painting, you saw his expression more sharply. (This is another reason I think I saw the painting in life, not in a book; I remember backing away from it.)

Near him in a garden chair--on another bench? perched on a swing? -- sat a lady whose costume matched his in elegance, black stripes on a white ground, a little hat tipped forward on her high hair, a striped parasol next to her. If you stepped back farther, you could see another female figure walking among flowering shrubs in the background, the soft colors of her dress almost merging with the garden. Her hair was light, not dark like theirs, and she didn't wear a hat, which I guess made her young or somehow lacking in respectability. The whole had a gold frame, glorious, ornate, rather grimy.

I don't remember connecting this painting with myself at the time I saw it; it simply stayed in me like a dream, and I've gone back to it again and again in my mind. In fact, for years I've checked in surveys of Impressionism without finding it. To begin with, I don't have any proof that it was French, only that it looked like French Impressionism. The gentleman and his two women could have been in a late-nineteenth-century garden in San Francisco, or Connecticut, or Sussex, or even Tuscany. Occasionally I find I've thumbed that image in my mind so many times that I think I've invented it, or that I dreamed it at some point and remembered it the next morning.

And yet those people in the garden are vivid to me. I would never want to unbalance their composition by taking the fine, formal, striped woman from the left side of the painting, but there is tension in the image: Why doesn't the younger woman in the thickets of blossom seem to have a place? Is she the man's daughter? No, something tells you--me--no. She is forever wandering off the canvas toward the right, reluctant to leave. Why doesn't the elegantly dressed gentleman start up and catch her sleeve, detain her for a few minutes, tell her before she wanders away that he loves her, too, that he has always loved her?

Then I picture just those two figures moving, while the sun shines permanently down on the tumbling, rough-stroked flowers and bushes, and the well-dressed lady stays imperturbably in her chair, holding her parasol, certain of her place at the man's side. The gentleman does rise; he leaves the bower with a fierce step, as if on impulse, and takes the girl in the soft dress by her sleeve, her arm. She is firm, too, in her way. There are only flowers between them, brushing her skirt and streaking his tailored trousers with pollen. His hand is olive-skinned, a little thick, a little gnarled, even, at the joints. He stops her with his grip. They have never spoken like this before--no, they aren't speaking now. They are instantly in each other's arms, their faces warm together in the heavy sun. I don't think they are even kissing in the first moment; she is sobbing with relief because his bearded cheek feels the way she imagined it would against her forehead, and maybe he is sobbing, too?

1879

My beloved,

Forgive my weakness in not writing to you, and in staying away in such an unseemly manner. At first it was, yes, a normal absence -- as I told you, I went to the south for a week or so and rested a little after a minor indisposition. That was also an excuse, however; I removed myself there not only to recover from my cold, and with the idea of painting a landscape I had not seen in years, but also to recover from a more profound ailment, about which I hinted to you some time ago. I made no progress, as you can see from the salutation of this letter. You were constantly with me, my muse, and I thought of you with startling vividness, not only your beauty and kind company but also your laugh, your smallest gesture, every word you have spoken to me since I first came to care for you more than I should, the affection I feel in your presence and out of it.

So I returned to Paris no less ailing than when I went away, and on my arrival I resolved to try even here to throw myself into work and leave you in peace. I will not hide from you the pleasure your note brought me -- the thought that perhaps in some little way you had wished me not to leave you alone -- that you had missed me, too. No, no -- there is no offense taken, except what I have perhaps in my own foolishness given you. I can only resolve to live in proximity to you with all the composure I can summon.

How foolish for an old man to be so stirred, you will think, even if you are too kind to tell me so. You will of course be right. But in that case you will also underestimate your own power, my dearest, the power of your presence, your receptivity to life and the way that moves me. I shall leave you in peace as much as possible, yet not separate myself completely any longer, since you do not seem to wish it any more than I. For which all those imperious, crumbling gods I saw in Italy be praised.

This is only a part of my story, however. Here I must draw a deep breath and put down for a moment or two the task of writing you, to reach for the extra strength I shall need. I felt all the time I was away that I could not, even if you should wish it, return to you either in person or on paper without fulfilling the hardest promise I have made you.

As you will recall, I said I would one day tell you about my wife. I have hourly regretted that declaration. I am selfish enough to feel that you cannot know me without knowing about her, and even that I might--as you surmised--gain some small relief by doing so. And I would not intentionally break any promise to you as long as I live. If I could give you all of my past, and abscond with all of your future, I would do that, as you must guess; and it is perennial grief to me that I cannot. You see how abundant is my selfishness-- to think as I do that you might be happy with me when you already have every reason to be happy.

At the same time, I have felt deeply my mistake in making this promise, because my wife's story is not one I would willingly put into your mind, with its lovely innocence, its hopes for the world. (This will, I know, annoy you, and you will see the sad truth in my assessment only too late.) In any case, I beseech you to save the following pages for an hour when you feel able to hear something terrible, yet all too real--and I ask you to realize that I shall regret every word. When you have read this, you will know a little more than my brother does, and a great deal more than my nephew. And more, certainly, than all the rest of the world. You will know, also, that this is a political matter, and as a consequence some of my safety will rest in your hands. And why should I do such a thing -- tell you something that can only dismay you? Well, that is the nature of love: it is brutal in its demands. The day you recognize its brutal natureJoryourse1J, you will look back and know me even better, and forgive me. Probably I will be long gone, but wherever I am I will bless you for your understanding.

I met my wife rather late in life; I was already forty-three and she was forty. Her name, as you may know from my brother, was Helene. She was a woman of good family, from Rouen. She had never married, not because of any ineligibility on her part but because of her care of her widowed mother, who died only two years before we met. After her mother's death, she came to live with her older sister's family in Paris, and she made herself as indispensable to them as she had been to her mother. She was a person of dignity and sweetness, serious but not humorless, and from our first meeting I was attracted by her bearing and by her consideration of others. She was interested in painting, although she had had little in the way of education in art and was more inclined to books; she read German and some Latin as well, her father having believed in learning for his daughters. And she was devout in a sense that put my own lighthearted doubts to shame. I admired her steadfastness in everything she did.

Her brother-in-law, an old friend, was my advocate in the courtship (although he knew too much about me, perhaps, for the good of my reputation), and he settled a generous dowry on her. We were married in the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, with a few friends and relations in attendance, and went on to a house in Saint-Germain. We lived quietly. I pursued my painting and exhibitions, and she kept an excellent household in which my friends felt welcome. I came to love her very much, with a love that had perhaps more esteem than passion in it. We were too old to expect children, but we were content with each other, and I felt in her influence a deepening of my own nature and a taming of some of what she doubtless considered my wayward earlier life. Thanks to her steady belief in me, my absorption in painting also deepened and my skill increased.

We might have lived happily forever in this way if our emperor had not considered it his right to plunge France into that most hopeless of wars, invading Prussia--you were, my dear, a girl, but news of the Battle of Sedan must be shocking in your memory, too. Then came the terrible retribution of their armies--and the siege that ravaged our poor city. Now I must tell you, and frankly, that I was among those whom all of this angered beyond endurance. True, I was not part of the barbaric rabble but was one of those moderates who believed that Paris and France had suffered more than enough at the hands of unthinking, luxurious despotism and who rose against it.

You know that I spent many of these last years in Italy, but what I have not told you is that I was an exile, removing myself from what would undoubtedly have been peril, until I could be certain of resuming a quiet life in my native city-- removing myself in grief and cynicism as well. I was in fact a friend of the Commune, and in my heart I have no shame about that, although I grieve for my comrades who were not forgiven by the state for their convictions. Why, indeed, should any citizen of Paris have endured without revolutionary response--or the strongest complaint, at least--what we had not sanctioned in the first place? I have never abandoned that belief, but the price I paid for it was so dear that I might not have committed myself to action had I known what that cost would be.

The Commune established itself on March 26, and there was little real trouble for my unit until the beginning of April, when fighting began in the streets where we were stationed. You would have been living in the suburbs already, and safe, as I know from questions I have put to Yves since my return; he tells me that he did not know your family until later, but that you went through the calamity unscathed, apart from deprivations none could escape. Perhaps you will tell me you heard shooting in distant streets, perhaps not even that. Where there was gunfire, I involved myself with taking messages from one brigade to another, making sketches of the historic scene wherever I could do so without risking lives other than my own.

Helene did not share my sympathies. Her faith allied her strongly with the rights of the recently fallen regime, but she was tender toward all I believed; she asked me not to share with her anything that might compromise me, were either of us to be caught. In honor of this wish, I did not tell her where the brigade with which I was most deeply involved was bivouacked, and I will not tell you now. It was an old street, and a narrow one; we blockaded it during the night of May 25, knowing that this rampart would be of great importance in the defense of the area if, as we expected, the false government sent in militia to try to break us the next day.

I promised Helene that I would not be late, but during the night the need arose to relay a round of messages to our comrades in Montmartre, and I volunteered to take those messages, as I was not yet suspected by the police. I traveled without detection, in fact, to that area, and would have returned in the same manner had I not been caught and detained. It was my first encounter with the militia. My questioning was prolonged and threatened several times to become violent, and I was not released until noon the next day. I thought for many hours that I might well be executed on the spot. Again, I will not tell you the details of my interrogation, as I don't wish you to be privy to them, even eight years afterward. It was a terrifying experience.

But I will and must tell you what is infinitely worse: Helene, missing me during the night and taking alarm, began to search for me at first light, asking among our neighbors until her apprehension finally persuaded one of them to take her to our barricade. I was still imprisoned. She arrived before the barricade to inquire after me at the very moment troops from the center appeared. They opened fire on everyone present, Communards and bystanders alike. The government, of course, has denied all such incidents. She fell, shot through the forehead. One of my companions recognized her, pulled her from the skirmish, and protected her body behind the rubble.

When I arrived, having run first to our home and found it empty, she was already growing cold. She lay in my arms with the gush of blood from her wound drying on her hair and clothing. Her face showed only surprise, although her eyes had closed by themselves. I shook her, called to her, tried to rouse her. My only, and pitful, consolation lay in her having died instantly--that and the belief that if she had known what was about to happen, it would have been in her nature to commend herself in that moment to her God.

I buried her, more hastily than I wanted to, in the cemetery of Montparnasse. Within days my grief was increased by the swift defeat of our cause and the execution of thousands of comrades, and especially our organizers. During this final extinction, I slipped out of France with the help of a friend who lived near one of the city gates. I traveled alone toward Menton and the border, feeling that I could do nothing more for a country that had refused its only hope of justice, and unwilling to live in fear of future arrest.

My brother remained faithful to me throughout this ordeal, tending Helene's memory and grave in silence and writing to me from time to time during my absence to advise me whether or not I might return. I was a small player in that drama and not, in the end, of interest to a government with much rebuilding to accomplish. I returned, indeed, not out of any desire to contribute to France's well-being but out of gratitude to my brother and the wish to be of service to him in his afflictions. I discovered, not from him but from Yves, that he was losing his sight. Whatever assistance I could give him, and the dogged habit of pursuing my painting, were the only pleasures left to me until I met you. I was a wretch without wife, children, or country. I lived without the dream of society's improvement that must be the motivation of every thinking man, and my nights were a horror because of the death that had filled my arms with useless, cruel sacrifice.

The radiance of your presence, your natural gifts, the delicacy of your affection and friendship, have meant more to me than I can say. Now I think I will need less than ever to explain that to you. I will not demean you by insisting on secrecy--most of my happiness already rests in your hands. And, lest I find myself unable or unwilling to fulfill my promise and send you these truths about myself, I will close quickly by signing myself, heart and soul,

Your

O.V.