I am pleased to host Drēma Drudge as part of her Book Tour.
Victorine
By Drēma Drudge
In 1863, Civil War is raging in the United States. Victorine
Meurent is posing nude, in Paris, for paintings that will be heralded as the
beginning of modern art:
Manet's Olympia and Picnic on the Grass.
However, Victorine's persistent desire is not to be a model
but to be a painter herself. In order to live authentically, she finds the
strength to flout the expectations of her parents, bourgeois society, and the
dominant male artists (whom she knows personally) while never losing her
capacity for affection, kindness, and loyalty. Possessing both the incisive
mind of a critic and the intuitive and unconventional impulses of an artist,
Victorine and her survival instincts are tested in 1870, when the Prussian army
lays siege to Paris and rat becomes a culinary delicacy.
Drema Drudge's powerful first novel Victorine not only gives
this determined and gifted artist back to us but also recreates an era of
important transition into the modern world.
(Victorine is currently up for pre-order on Amazon US only)
Victorine’s Song
After our morning session (Manet thoughtfully brings me a
brioche and un café in an enameled mug), he leaves me to sort out my affairs,
but not before foisting some francs in a monogrammed handkerchief upon me.
“An advance,” he says. I take the coins gratefully, offer
him back his handkerchief, wishing he had advice to dispense as easily: I have
no idea what to do now. The “friends” I had while with Alphonse quickly fell
away as Willie and I wrapped our lives as one, two bodies in a bath towel. To
return to my former friends would be to return to their hopeless way of life. I
will not. To go back to Madeline is quite as impossible.
The room lights up with the sun as if the answer leaks in
with it, but it doesn’t, not even as I acknowledge that the rosy bits of sky
look like Willie’s cheeks. I reject the sky’s proposal: One does not welcome a
tornado into one’s room. True, I have survived Willie, but just. My hungers do
not scare me, but even I can recognize an unwinnable bout.
I pace the studio, but the room is too quiet, and the sun
insists I listen to things I will not. I pick up my worn canvas bag, the one I
used to carry my schoolbooks in, now filled with my portable life. Hesitating
briefly, I pull the door shut, lock it behind me.
Paris will tell me what to do next, I think, as I promptly
stumble over a loose brick. At the time, it doesn’t occur to me to be grateful.
“Haussmann,” I mutter as I grab my ankle.
I’ve watched the architect ruin our city, block after block,
a hungry monster with the sightline of a sugar-crazed toddler, squashing
decades, centuries, of our history, obliterating my people, the poor, as if
they were a nest of rats. Poorer Parisians have run from him from quarter to
quarter, but no sooner are we safe in one house than Haussmann finds it, has
his people give us notice one day, and tears it down the next. We can only
watch, hope to rescue a brick from the house where our grandfather was born. I
despise him.
There is, however, something euphoric about the planned
natural disaster; I love the confused buildings that seemed so stable and
secure now shaken. Watching them collapse thrills me. The rubble is a symphony
of colors and textures. We see the inside turned out. We see things we are not
meant to see. I notice that most people avert their gaze when they pass a
worksite. Not me.
His new lines are straight and wide, and though I hate the
uniformity of his design and his disregard for history, I do admire his
ambition.
The wide boulevards are to aid, it is rumored, in the moving
through of troops in case of another uprising. True, but there is such space
now that has so often been denied us. I hate the daily cost as I watch the poor
get poorer, as they pile into a house twenty thick, disease following them. At
least outdoors we have all of the space God created; they cannot take that from
us, and Haussmann creates even more as he purges the city of centuries’ worth
of buildings.
While some have praised his sanitary building of public
urinals in the streets, others have been scandalized that men would touch
themselves in this manner publicly. Once when I had to go very badly, I lifted
my skirts and managed to utilize one as well. Though there were men on either
side of me, the cries of protest I heard behind me weren’t aimed at them, even
though my wide skirts more than covered me.
My stumble provides me with an answer: A nearby sign in a
window announces a room for rent. I bend over and kiss the brick before limping
over to the soiled tavern.
I have to pay extra rent because the proprietress assumes I
am a prostitute. I don’t bother to correct her because I don’t care what she
thinks of me, and the “extra” isn’t enough to matter. For the first time I am
to live alone, and though it is cold (I have bought no coal yet and it is not
equipped for gas) and though it is dirty (I will clean it), it is a space that
belongs entirely to me.
I strum the lovely, dove gray rails of my bed in my newly
rented room. A few good wallops smooth the worst of the lumps in the horsehair
mattress. I must carry my water up at night and my slops down in the morning,
but I don’t care. It will give me an excuse to buy flowers from the little
stand nearby. Flowers trump even night soil, and they certainly help mask the
odor.
The first night I create shadow puppets on the walls to ease
my loneliness and the slight ache in my ankle, in my heart. I wake to see a
melted candle stub—I kept it burning not out of fright but because I adore the
way the flame lights the walls.
My clothes hang from stray nails. That is all there is to my
room besides the two windows and the cold tiled floor. I need nothing else
besides enough dishes for one, possibly two if I invite anyone else over. I
don’t know that I will. This brand of loneliness instructs, and I mean to
surrender to it until I’ve learned all that I can.
I grab a chair and yank the paint skin from the ceiling in
pieces, showering myself with plaster but revealing splotches of pink overhead.
I laugh as I walk past the cracked mirror and see my whitened face. I stop and
really look, see things now the other artists haven’t, like the humor at the
corners of my eyes, the content set of my lips.
I’d rather model forever than paint flowers on a cup that
someone is going to drink from without seeing. Tiny sips of beauty ruin the
deeper thirst for art. Pretty cups and cheerful hats are made to mollify women.
Why can’t I paint myself? Create myself? I count the francs
left. I may not be able to go to art school, but I can buy some art supplies. I
pocket the money. There is next week’s rent to consider. Mine, not my parents’
rent, because they have decided that my money is not worthy of saving them. I
must find a way to get them to accept. They cannot afford their pride, but I
don’t think they know that yet and they may not before it’s too late.
And without a teacher, someone respected by The Academy, no
one would take me seriously as an artist anyway. “So what?” begins gently
stirring in me, and I crave absinthe. Instead, I carry up some water for a
wash. It may have taken God a week to create the earth, but I have gone from
homeless to having my own place in one day, which seems an impossible task.
Being a woman and so young, I’d say I’m giving Him a run for His money; I think
I can do without a drink for one day. Without meaning to, I cross myself.
Drēma Drudge
Drēma Drudge suffers from Stendhal’s Syndrome, the condition
in which one becomes overwhelmed in the presence of great art. She attended
Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program where she learned to
transform that intensity into fiction.
Drēma has been writing in one capacity or another since she
was nine, starting with terrible poems and graduating to melodramatic stories
in junior high that her classmates passed around literature class.
She and her husband, musician and writer Barry Drudge, live
in Indiana where they record their biweekly podcast, Writing All the Things,
when not traveling. Her first novel, Victorine, was literally written in five
countries while she and her husband wandered the globe. The pair has two grown
children.
In addition to writing fiction, Drema has served as a
writing coach, freelance writer, and educator. She’s represented by literary
agent Lisa Gallagher of Defiore and Company.
Connect with Drema: Website • Twitter • Instagram • The
Painted Word Salon.
Website: https://dremadrudge.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dremadrudge
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dremadrudge/
The Painted Word Salon (Facebook):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/485639358698462/members/
