Lisette's List by Susan Vreeland Read Free Book Online

and it revealed him to me in a new way. I saw the humility in this man whom I would have loved to have had as a father.
    “So Camille says to me, he says, without bitterness, as though it were the lot of all painters, ‘I haven’t a sou, but you can choose a painting from this row for yourself.’
    “Just think of that, Lisette. He let me choose. He went backoutside, and I was left to look at the paintings. Sowers, plowmen, hay wagons, haystacks, barges on the Oise, the hillside of cultivated land behind the Hermitage, a town square on market day. It was agony to choose.”
    “I should think so,” I remarked. I tried to plant these subjects in my mind so that when we went back to Paris I might be able to pick out a Pissarro painting in a gallery, but I was afraid my memory wasn’t as good as Pascal’s.
    “Later Camille asked what I thought of them, and he chuckled like a bashful boy, this grown man with a long, untrimmed beard. He was starving for a mite of praise from somebody outside his group of painters. The dear unwanteds, he called them.
    “ ‘What about praise from an ochre miner?’ I asked him. ‘What’s that worth?’
    “ ‘From a pigment salesman with a good eye for color? Plenty,’ he said. I’ll never forget that. I only claimed an eye for the seventeen hues we made from ochre. I think I told him that his colors were in harmony, and that his little dabs that didn’t mean anything up close looked like the real thing from a distance. I felt like a fool talking like that. All I wanted to do was to look at more paintings. He stood like a carved hunk of wood, waiting for me to say more. I could feel him suffering there, waiting, so I said something like this: ‘You know, the painting you gave me, of the yellow-ochre path? It makes me notice the range of ochres in all paintings. They make me think I’m doing something good selling those pigments. And the world you paint is one I know. It’s not just beautiful. It’s true. To the countryside. The light.’ That seemed to please him. I wanted to please him, Lisette.”
    “I’m sure you did please him.”
    “I was overwhelmed by so many paintings and told him so.
    “He let out a kind of snort and said he had fifteen hundred once. When he went back to Louveciennes after the Prussian war, he discovered that Prussian soldiers had been living in his house. They used his frames as firewood and made pathways of his paintings sothey wouldn’t muddy their boots. Imagine that, Lisette. They kept their horses indoors in winter and slept upstairs. They used his studio to butcher sheep and his paintings as aprons. He had to dig out from the floor a thick layer of dung and dried blood that covered more paintings. Twenty years’ work, and he was able to save only forty canvases.” Burning with outrage, Pascal bellowed, “The barbarians!”
    I flinched and dropped a pea pod on the ground.
    “That painting of the girl and the goat?” I asked. “You said it was done in Louveciennes?”
    Pascal nodded.
    “Then it must have been one of the forty.”
    The stark realization of its narrow escape made it more valuable in my eyes, made me want to be in Paris all the more in order to search out all the other Pissarro paintings of Louveciennes.
    Pascal passed a moment in reflection before continuing.
    “Camille just stood there, this big man, watching me sputter, needing me to sputter, me, a laborer who knew nothing but what I loved. Do you understand, Lisette? He was heroic to keep on going. Unaccountably heroic. For years afterward, dozens of women wore the canvases of his looted paintings as aprons while doing their laundry along the Seine.”
    “What a pretty sight that must have been, all of them lined up along the bank, wearing his paintings.”
    “You don’t understand! It was a crime! They had stolen them! And they glared at him when he returned to Louveciennes because he had spent the Prussian war safely painting in England.”
    Maybe they had lost