Le Cynique D'Amour

Montmartre was touched with life again: the gypsies on the steps of Sacré Coeur grew bolder as the temperature raised, carriages heading into the heart of Paris were a prominent feature in the streets, and fresh gossip was on everyone’s lips. The dancers in the Moulin Rouge were even doing the Can-Can again as a regular number.

It was spring. Love - amour - was the most popular subject for the playwrights to immortalize on stage, and the musicians to visualize through song.

Love – real love, anyways – was not a popular subject in Robert Blythe’s mind, however. As Montmartre warmed up around him, the young Englishman’s heart remained cold.

Today, he did as he often did: people-watched from the outdoor tables of some café, picked something from the lot of them to examine, and consequently sought out to prove it wrong or false.

On the crisp April afternoon, his cynicism was directed – as was per usual – at love. He watched a young couple, around a decade younger than his eight-and-twenty years, sit down in front of him at this café, and hold hands across the table. They proceeded to tell each other, “Je t’aime” with sappy looks in their wide eyes.

Robert resisted the urge to spit out his tea, and instead brought out his notebook and a pencil.

He quickly sketched the scene before him, and then tore the picture out of the book and flipped it over, dropping it down on the table and staining it with orange pekoe. He didn’t care; he scribbled on the back of it in loose, scrawling handwriting, much too messy to be legible by anyone but himself.

By the end of it, he was satisfied in his judgement of their motives, and, glancing at them again, was satisfied that their love was a ruse. It had to be.

Soon after, he left enough francs on the table to cover his tea and the croissant he’d eaten earlier, then wiped his face with his napkin and set it down. He picked up the sketch and stuffed it in his pocket.

As he walked away, a young woman around his age was about to replace him in his seat. He didn’t see her.

She, however, saw him leave. She also saw a piece of paper stained with tea on the table, and picked it up. One side bore writing, and the other, a sketch of a beautiful couple so clearly in love she could cry. She smiled at the gem she had found, and looked up just in time to see Robert’s tall figure turn a corner, his steps brusque.

Directly in front of her was the couple he had drawn. She held up the sketch and compared: the facial expressions he had drawn were flawless matches.

She wished he would have looked this way as he left; she would have loved to meet the artist of such a piece. She hugged it to her chest, and decided to keep it.

When Robert returned to his hotel, he took the sketch out of his pocket and went to place it in the book with the others. His collection of cynicism. He looked down at what was in his hand so he could slip it into the book. It wasn’t a sketch; it was a napkin.

He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders; he had too many sketches and dissections of couples, anyway.

***

The next morning, it was raining. If rain did anything for Paris, especially for Montmartre, it effectively drowned the smell of piss to a sort of dull tang in the air that mixed with the scent of wet stone to create a unique, slightly more pleasant parfum.

Yesterday, the café Robert was at had seen almost no one sitting inside; instead the tables outside, where he had been sitting, had been packed. Today, in the dreary weather, the opposite was true.

In fact, the only person sitting outside was a woman, her parasol just barely keeping her dark mahogany hair out of the rain. The hem of her blue dress was stained with mud from the wet cobblestones.

As Robert walked up to the café, he wondered about this woman. Why was she sitting outside on such a terrible day? She was sitting in the same place he had sat yesterday.

On impulse, he decided to observe her. He took a seat a few feet behind her, hoping a waitress wouldn’t want to brave the rain to serve him just yet, and took out a sheet from his notebook. It soon became stained with rain water, and his dark hair, already wet and nearly black from the walk to the café, was dripping down into his eyes.

He pushed back his lank hair distractedly, trying to get a good view of the woman’s head without being seen. Her head kept whipping about, as if she were searching for something in the sparse, rain-drenched petit bunches of people.

Just as he was satisfied with her shape, she turned her head around and found him sitting there. “Bonjour,” she called, smiling and lifting her parasol so her eyes were visible. He couldn’t help but note they were blue.

He scowled instead of answering, and had just shoved the soaking wet paper into his breast pocket when she asked, “May I see?”

“’S just paper,” he muttered, embarrassed that she could be so cheery towards him. He left it in his pocket.

She laughed, a quiet, tinkling sound, and came to sit across from him. At the same table. Robert was taken aback, even though forward woman were commonplace here.

She wasn’t like a courtesan or a dancer, though. She looked as if she belonged in Parisian high society, not the colourful, free-flowing streets of Montmartre.

“If it’s only paper, then I suppose this is only paper also,” she smiled, holding up his sketch of the couple from yesterday.

He looked at her quizzically, confused as to her motive. “I drew that yesterday. I don’t need it.” He looked away from her, wishing he had a cigarette. He chanced a glance back over to her, and saw she was still smiling. “Well, you seem to like it; you keep it.”

“It is very beautiful, sir; you have captured their emotion perfectly.”

He was curious in spite of himself. “And what emotion did I capture, exactly?”

“I thought it was obvious: you’ve translated their love flawlessly to paper. Though I have to wonder, why dip it in tea?” She raised an eyebrow, but she was still smiling.

He wished she wouldn’t. “You call that love?” He snorted. “All the boy wants is sex; look, there” – he pointed to the young man in the sketch – “can’t you see it in the way he is leaning towards her? And his legs are apart, he’s trying to project something. I even wrote it on the back; take a look.” In the back of his mind, Robert wondered why he was even explaining this to her.

She frowned and flipped it over. “I cannot read this…your penmanship is horrible. Besides, it’s written in English.”

“Merde,” he muttered under his breath, “Well, you shall just have to take my word for it, then.” He brushed his hair up out of his eyes, wishing he had decided to wear a hat for once.

“I don’t take your word at all,” she began, taking another look at the boy, “He’s too innocent; you can see it in his eyes. There is nothing there but complete adoration for his chou chou, see?”

“Maybe I drew it wrong, then,” he snatched the sketch out of her hand and put it in the pocket with the sketch of her. Both were soaking wet, and at this rate, he was happy if they became ruined.

She was still smiling, the corners of her eyes crinkled. “I don’t think you did…you see, I saw that couple right after you left. You have drawn them spot on, and I see nothing in your sketch, and in reality, other than utter true love and devotion-,”

“It cannot exist!” He leaned forward earnestly and grabbed her hand roughly, flinging droplets of water at her silk petticoat with his sharp movement and temporarily staining the already soaked fabric.

She calmly drew her hand back from his grip and asked politely, “Do you have other sketches, sir?”

“Yes,” he replied through gritted teeth. He clenched his fists, and rainwater gushed out of the spaces between his fingers.

“Might I see them?”

“If you wish,” he narrowed his eyebrows, hoping that if he showed her enough of his notes, she would become dismayed.

In the next twenty minutes back at his hotel room, she tried her hardest to disprove everything he had proved by disproving what was written plainly on faces. Faces he had drawn, and then gone and twisted into something sinister on the backs of their sketches.

After looking through all of them an hour or so later, she was silent. She had been silent after the first twenty minutes, instead sitting quietly and listening to his cynicism.

He looked at her expectantly as he closed the book, wondering if he had won her over or not.

“I see,” she said, no longer smiling. He turned his back to refill his glass of scotch, quite pleased with himself.

When he turned around, she had vanished. He set his glass down on the table, which now had a lot of empty space. She had taken his book.

***

He set out the next afternoon, the sun slowly drying the ground and the stone of the buildings. As he passed by a corner of one, he could feel the heat radiating off of it.

He stared at it curiously, wondering how on earth the sun could do that, and saw one of his sketches staring down at him. Underneath it, someone had scribbled, “Mon coeur, il chante quand je regarde cette oeuvre !” Someone’s heart sang when they looked at his work.

He had never had such a comment before. He had never had any comments before the woman’s.

He kept his eyes on the buildings he passed, and sure enough, pieces of his work were scattered throughout the streets. Most of them carried comments on or near them, but the most popular ones by far were the ones of couples.

He walked closer to one of these, and read things like “such true, beautiful love,” and “what a talented artist, to capture real, raw emotion.”

He looked at the picture. It had been drawn outside of Sacré Coeur, and the couple was looking, not in wonder at the cathedral, but in wonder at themselves. He had attributed it to bewilderment or confusion.

Apparently, no one else had. “I don’t understand,” he muttered in English as he strode towards the café. 

He had been living in Montmartre for several months now, and had thought it to be a deceitful place full of liars and whores. But judging by these comments on his work, the people were wonderful, everything was beautiful, and nothing was a lie.

Someone smiled at him on his way to a table. Surprised, he quickly smiled back. Beyond waitresses, grocers, the hotel owner and the woman, it had been his first direct encounter with the public of Montmartre.

“Confus?” She was there again, and smiling again. Was he confused?

“Ouais,” he replied emphatically, sitting down across from her without thinking.

“Don’t be. The people love you here. Everything you do is beautiful and true. You just can’t see it, so I decided to show you.”

“Why?” He crossed his arms.

In response, she stood up and gracefully walked over beside him, where she knelt down and kissed him on the cheek. Her parasol was above their heads; it could block out the sun as well as it could the rain, but it couldn’t stop the light from flowing in.

Under the blue parasol, Robert blushed pink.