'Happiness is no laughing matter,' quoted Sarah.
They went downstairs and into the hot morning, the stinks and perfume of the south, the din of traffic, and Julie's music. They strolled, laughing from bravado, across the square, both high on these compounded stimulants, and watched Henry and Benjamin approach. Under the plane tree, Bill and Molly stood together.
Stephen stopped, unable to go on. He looked this morning like a miserable old man. Worse, there was something frivolous, or fatuous, about him. She could hardly believe this was the strong and impressive man she had seen in his own setting. And probably she had something silly and pathetic about her too.
She took his arm and moved him on.
'Even a god falling in love could not be wise,' said Stephen.
'Who? I pass. But, Who loves, raves.'
'Byron,' he said at once.
'Oh lyric love, half angel and half bird and all a wonder and a wild desire,' said Sarah, watching the two men come towards them, Henry visibly slowing his pace to the measured pace of Benjamin.
'Browning,' said Stephen.
'Browning it is.'
'And most of all would I flee from the cruel madness of love, the honey of poison flowers and all the measureless ills… but in my case that is far from true.'
'Who else but?' Now Bill and Molly were approaching. She began to laugh. 'He is coming, my own, my sweet,' she mocked herself, and looked at Stephen to go on.
He said, not laughing, 'Were it ever so airy a tread
'My heart would hear it and beat.
While Sarah and Stephen exchanged lines, Henry and Benjamin stood in front of them, listening.
Stephen: 'Were it earth in an earthly bed.
Sarah: 'My dust would hear it and beat.
Bill and Molly had arrived. Now the four stood confronting Stephen and Sarah. It was Bill whose face showed a rich and irreverent appreciation. 'Tennyson,' he breathed, like a boy in class.
'Tennyson it most certainly is,' said Stephen. 'Had I lain for a century dead… '
Bill cut in, looking straight at Sarah: 'Would start and tremble under my feet / And blossom in purple and red.'
'What glorious, marvellous nonsense,' said Sarah, laughing fit to be sick, while Bill gave her a charming and intimate smile, saying he knew why she laughed so excessively and he could not sympathize more.
Benjamin remarked judiciously, 'I suppose it is nonsense according to whether you are in love or not.'
'That, I would say, is an accurate summing up of the situation,' said Stephen. His look at Molly caused her to blush, then laugh, and turn away. He insisted, 'Time was away and somewhere else.'
'It's no go, my honey love, it's no go, my poppet,' said Sarah, too harshly.
Benjamin took Sarah's arm and said, 'Sarah, your accomplice Jean-Pierre has talked me into not going to the technical rehearsal this afternoon. He is very kindly driving me to visit the chateau of Julie's possible in-laws. But he threw her over, I hear? Not a very honourable young man.'
'The Rostand place,' said Sarah. 'It's charming. And that means you will be with us tomorrow.'
He hesitated. He had decided to leave but could not resist the moment, her mock-command of him, and, no doubt, the music, pleading love throughout the town. 'Yes, I'll stay for the dress rehearsal tomorrow. That's what you want, isn't it?'
'That is what I want,' said Sarah, laughing straight up at him, reckless with the excess of everything and knowing she was behaving like a girl. Inappropriately. Ridiculously. At this moment she did not care about Bill, who stood to one side, enjoying how she was being so ruthlessly charming to the banker.
Then Stephen and Sarah went slowly on, and the others stood listening as the two played their game.
'It's good to love in a moderate degree, but it is not good to love to distraction.'
'God knows. Who?'
'Plautus.'
'Plautus!'
'I had an excellent education, Sarah.'
'I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me,' said Sarah, sure that no one had said these words from such a desert of desolation.
'But they are singing to me, that's the point,' said Stephen.
They had reached the little street where the museum was. The houses were in all shades of a chalk cliff, grey, pale, bleached, their shutters, which had once been glossy dark brown, faded to a scabby and patchy beige, like stale milk chocolate. Their tiled roofs — the same pattern of tiles the Romans used, interlocking in stiff waves — were the colours of the soil of this region, rust and ox-blood and dull orange. Against this restrained background blazed the balconies, loaded with pots crammed full of pelargoniums and jasmine and oleanders, and under them, along one side of the street, was a line of pots of every size and shape, dressed with blossom. Rue Julie Vairon seemed decorated for a festival in honour of Julie.
The museum, only a year old, was a house where it was believed Julie had given lessons, though the house next to it was just as likely. Never mind. On either side of the entrance stood shiny lemon trees in newly painted green tubs. On the inside of the entrance door, a hand was reversing a notice to say open. Henry and the others had returned to the square because they had found the place closed. It was a large door, a mere slice of glass and steel in the yard-thick stone wall, and it led into the ground floor of the old house. A dozen or so glass cabinets accommodated carefully grouped objects. One held paint brushes and crayons, half-finished drawings, a metronome, sheet music. In another was a yellow silk scarf, and beside it shabby black cloth gloves. The gloves seemed that moment to have slid off Julie's small hands, and Sarah heard Stephen draw in his breath. His face had gone white. The gloves were alive; here was Julie, her poverty, her attempts to conform, her courage. Her journals lay behind glass, together with letters mostly to clients about copying music, or appointments for portraits. No letters to her mother had survived: was it possible that Madame Vairon had carried them with her, and they died too in the lava from Mount Pelee? None of Julie's letters to Paul or to Rémy, though it was unlikely these letters had been destroyed. Letters from Paul and from Rémy were collected into books and were there, in stacks, ready to be consulted by biographers. Paul's were long and desperate and incoherent with love, and Rémy's were long, thoughtful, and passionate. It seemed Philippe did not write her letters. But then, he saw her most days.
The walls were covered with her drawings and her pictures, many of herself and of her house. The self-portraits were by no means all flattering. In some she had caricatured herself as a respectable young lady, dressed to give lessons in houses like this one. A few showed her glossy black, in the clothes worn by her father's house servants, abundant colourful skirts, frilled blouses, bandannas. She had tried herself out as an Arab girl, the transparent veil over her lower face, with inviting eyes — the picture on the poster at Queen's Gift which had overthrown Stephen. Older, at the time of Rémy, her self-portraits show her as a woman capable of taking her place at that table, bare shoulders and bosom tamed by lace, passive folded hands — a biddable femininity. The drawing of the nude bacchante had a place on a side wall, not at once or even easily seen, as if the authorities had decided that it had to be somewhere, but let's not draw attention to it. But the Julie she and posterity had agreed she was she had drawn and painted endlessly, in water colours and in pastels, in charcoal and in penciclass="underline" the fiery prickly critical girl and the independent woman not only were on the walls but could be bought as postcards.
Her little girl was there too, a tiny creature with Julie's black eyes, but then, just as if she had not died, Julie had pictured her at various ages in childhood and even grown up, for there were double portraits of Julie as a young woman with her daughter, a charming girl — but they were like sisters; and of Julie, middle-aged, with a girl like her own young self.