A few hours later I’m underground in the Paris métro, following dense crowds through tunnels of glazed white tile. Even after studying the system map for several minutes, I get on the wrong train at Opéra and don’t realize my mistake for a few stops. I switch trains at Bonne Nouvelle and take a seat, trying to steady my hand as I write in my notebook, the train bumping on into the night.
QUESTIONS
1. Who is M. Broginart?
2. What was in the larger picture and what happened to it?
My hostel lies on a quiet street in the Fifteenth Arrondissement. The lobby is also the bar and it seems like half the guests are drinking here tonight. I check in with the bartender. He hands me the key to my bunkroom and a slick visitors’ map of the city printed by Galeries Lafayette.
I sit on my bunk and unfold the map, my eyes following the sweep of the Seine around the city, the two islands in the center, the Left Bank where the boulevard Saint-Germain meets the boulevard Saint-Michel. All my life I’ve wanted to come to Paris. I think of the years of French classes, the suitcase full of yellowed Gallimard paperbacks in my father’s garage. I fold up the map and go to the hostel’s computer beside the bar.
For the next two hours I look up libraries and archives. By the end of the night I have seven places marked in ink on my map. The bartender winks at the girls sitting beside me.
— Look at this guy. Just got into town, he’s already mapped out which bars he’s hitting. Where are you going first?
— The Bibliothèque Nationale.
I start early the next morning, but Broginart is not an easy man to trace. There’s nothing on him at the Bibliothèque Nationale: not in the catalogs or the digital library, nor in any of the dozens of books I call up on prominent Parisian collectors. At the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève I spend hours under its soaring cast-iron columns, paging through gallery catalogs, reading the letters of painters and sculptors from the 1910s and 1920s. Broginart’s name appears nowhere. I move on to the specialist libraries, the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Pompidou Center, the Médiathèque of the École des Beaux-Arts. After four days of research I know the names of the famous Paris galleries, the collectors who bought their paintings, the major salons and exhibitions. I know nothing about Broginart.
The nights go better than the days. At six o’clock each evening I leave the libraries and buy a bottle of wine or beer from the nearest grocery, walking the streets until I don’t worry anymore, until I can’t think about anything but the city itself.
Because I love everything in Paris. The enamel green color of the water fountains. The brown fold-up seats on the subway cars that the accordion players sit on, old men in fraying pin-striped suits who play to no one but me, the melody coming in and out as the train crosses the Seine at Austerlitz. The cups of café allongé I drink on the café terrace each morning, one euro and twenty cents.
My third night I’m in the Jardin du Luxembourg at dusk and a short man approaches me with a friendly smile. He tells me his name is Mohammed and he’s a native of Casablanca. He wears a dirty sweater, blue jeans and white basketball shoes with no laces. We talk in French and English. Mohammed knows the best places to sleep on the riverbank and where to get the best couscous in Paris for three euros a plate, but only on Sundays.
— You will be the only British there, Mohammed says. But if you come with me, it’s no problem.
— I’m American.
Mohammed nods sagely. — Et qu’est-ce que tu fais à Paris?
— Je cherche un tableau de l’artiste Eleanor Grafton. Let me know if you see it—
— You can go to Le Louvre, Mohammed says. There are thousands of paintings there. Tonight is Wednesday, it’s open late. And it’s always warm and dry inside.
I walk through the backstreets of Odéon to the Louvre. Everywhere in the museum I imagine Eleanor’s painting, even though I don’t know what it looks like. In the rows of gilded frames in the Denon wing, it’s always at the end of the hallway, the last picture in the gallery. Because I see Imogen everywhere here. In the cold stare of the Grande Odalisque, or underground in the shadowed brickwork of the Medieval Louvre; in the gallery for the blind beneath the stairs where you’re allowed to feel the statues, to recognize faces by the contours of their features, the hard lines of the nose and chin. Even the dark-haired girl standing before me in line at the museum café. She might look just like her, but I’d never know it.
The next day I follow a different track. At daybreak I ride the métro to visit 28 rue Pigalle, the address of the dealer Moisse where Broginart bought Eleanor’s paints. The building now houses a small grocery store. I cross the boulevard de Clichy and wander around Montmartre, but all the artists have been gone for decades, replaced by hordes of summer tourists. I take the métro back to the Left Bank. At the Magasin Sennelier on the Quai Voltaire the clerk has never heard of Moisse, but he directs me to another shop on the rue Soufflot where the old man behind the counter squints at the receipt and frowns.
— Moisse. Very famous couleurs. They’ve been gone a long time.
— Were they good paints?
The man shrugs. — I never saw them. But they were supposed to be very good. Moisse started at the Maison Édouard, and they mixed the best colors in Paris. Manet used them, Caillebotte, everyone—
— Would they be worth buying from overseas?
— Comment?
— Were they good enough to order from another country?
— Of course. Once a painter has his colors, he doesn’t want to use different ones.
I thank the man, walking out the door. The bell chimes behind me. Suddenly I turn around and walk back in.
— Have you heard of a collector named Broginart?
— Qui?
— Broginart.
The man shakes his head.
— Non.
I start west along the quai toward the Bibliothèque Nationale. It’s a long walk but I need time to think. There must be a thread I still haven’t followed, a piece of evidence that could unravel everything if I tugged hard enough. But which piece of evidence?
When I get to the library my research flits from topic to topic. I read about pigments and linseed oil, the grinding of colors and manufacture of tube paint in France; I flip through the catalog from the 1920 Salon des Indépendants. But I feel like I’m circling my goal instead of getting closer. So I study the catalogs of Paris museums and galleries, searching for collections of early twentieth-century paintings. Some of the smaller museums may not have listed their collections online. I call up a stack of catalogs and flip through the indices one by one. Then I see the name. GRAFTON, Eleanor… 39
I turn to page 39. The entry is brief.
GRAFTON, Eleanor
The Unvanquished (Étude de femme nue), vers 1917. Huile sur toile. 733 x 1000. Don de Henri Broginart
The front page of the catalog says Musée Konarski: Catalogue sommaire des collections. I skim the introduction. The museum is housed in the former home of Ludwik Konarski, a poet from Warsaw who migrated to Paris in 1909. Konarski befriended many painters at La Ruche, an artists’ residence in the Passage de Dantzig where Konarski bought the paintings that would be the cornerstone of his collection.