Paint the River 1.0

Original version of a dark story. A young savant deals with his smothering world during the Frnch Revolution.

 

          In the years before the French Revolution, the Ladies would sit in the parlors and embroider, and the little Grand Dukes would doodle on the floor. Philippe especially loved to paint. He’d smear the colors around the canvas, eventually affecting a sunset wash of greens and browns and grays. When he was bored, he’d paint the patterns of the wallpaper – the blue fleur de lis on warm beige. When content, he’d paint the flowers in the garden outside the large bay window. By age ten, he had started to capture the ladies at their needlework on his oilcloth surfaces. The other boys were more fun to watch certainly, throwing things and making faces. But the women sat so still that it was easier to capture their images.

            He thought the likenesses were marvelous. They reminded him of how he often saw things in his dreams, these paintings – the images of people and objects merely blurs of soundless color, splotches of bright light here and there. He showed one of these dream blurs to the Ladies once. His eldest cousin, Marguerite, had been embroidering a blood red satin with saffron lace and the way the light from the window had played on it fascinated his fingers with the brush, as did the rubies around her neck. When he presented the work to her, she sniffed as she peered down her nose at it, blinking several times. Then she went back to her work, smiling politely and saying, “It’s nice, Philippe. But I didn’t think there were any red flowers in that garden just now.” He was twelve then, and his ten-year-old brother Stephen, who showed great promise his father said, had already been sent to Paris to study with a master painter. Philippe hid the painting in his armoire and didn’t use the red paint for two weeks.

           

Three years passed. The boys now spent more time outside, riding and fencing, than they ever had doodling in the parlors. Philippe sometimes felt strange sitting alone, painting in the corner of the garden parlor, as the Ladies stitched away at the eternal embroidery. He painted the flowers, the wallpaper, which had been replaced because of mold, the sunsets over the garden hedge; but he didn’t paint the women anymore. He never painted people. They moved too much and were too complicated with all their intense features and continuous movements. A flower was much simpler, much happier. He’d refined his style over the years, adapting to the cold hard lines and shadows of reality, and now only occasionally painted the dream pictures, with their blurs of bright color and streaks of odd lighting.

His mother pestered him often. “Philippe, why don’t you go ride with the others? It’s a beautiful day.” She would leave her sewing to demurely walk to him and run her fingers through her youngest child’s fey hair.

“Yes, the light is perfect in the garden.” He would look up momentarily, considering the fall of a petal.

“Perhaps you could sit outside and paint then. You’re getting paler by the day.” She would consider his face from an angle, resting her hands lightly on his broadening shoulders.

“My complexion’s fine, mother. If I sat outside, the glare would change the painting and it’s perfect from here.” Another quick glance to the window and back to his small strokes on the canvas. There would be silence for a moment as she watched him work.

Then, “Why don’t you paint something besides flowers? Stephen just sent us the finest Crucifixion scene. Have you seen it?”

“Yes, mother.” A longer silence.

“Why are the flowers always red, dear?”

At this, he would stop and look his work over carefully. He would finally shrug and mix more black into the red pigment. She would sigh and retreat back to her needles and off-white lace.

It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy riding, he found it very soothing. But it was a beautiful day, and it would be a shame to waste the light. And Philippe’s mother had suggested riding with the other boys. He was not quite inclined to that. Despite the maturing of time, they were still rather brusque and silly, showing off and daring one another to jump the higher fences and all that. He preferred to let his mount have its head and simply enjoy the scenery and the feeling of man and beast moving together.

It was on one of these peaceful, solitary rides that he discovered the spot by the river.  An old willow overshadowed a steep embankment. It looked as though the river had taken a sword and sliced straight down through the tight-packed soil to form the space between water and land. The fringe-like grasses played in the wind, as if they were fairies dangling their legs over the edge of the precipice. The willow’s trunk was gnarled and thick, its drooping limbs protruding out over the water some distance. The day he found the spot, the sky was made of pale clouds blanketing the world in shades of grey. It had been almost dusk and he was about to turn back toward the estate, when the tree caught his eye across the distance of open field. He had not seen the river and only realized he’d heard it once he’d finally come upon it. The spot whispered his name, not the one his parents had given him – but his true name. His soul answered, “Yes. This is home.” And so it was. He was seventeen.

 

Stephen returned home a year later. Philippe didn’t really hear when his brother reported the growing unease in the city. The late afternoon sun was showing Philippe colors he had never seen in the wood of his father’s desk. Later, there would be another bright, yet fuzzy dream work hiding its vibrant reds in the dusty depths of the armoire. 

Stephen took to painting alongside him in the garden parlor. He’d do sultry portraitures of their finer cousins in what he said was the style of the Renaissance masters. Philippe always wanted to shiver in the presence of these works, with their cold, harsh lines. They seemed to demand recognition of some stark reality he’d never had the courage to approach.

That was when he started painting at the river. It was calmer there. There weren’t any bright flowers basking in the sun. But neither were there any prim Ladies or talented, well-educated brothers to distract him. It occurred to him one day, while watching the sun set on the west bank that the garden parlor had been a bad doodle of his spot there under the Old Willow. The Ladies quiet chatter was merely a pathetic echo of the river’s babbling, rushing chorus; and the shapes of the wallpaper merely attempted to be the patterns drawn by clouds and sky above the horizon. Even if there weren’t any flowers, the evening waters glowed red and the sun tried to reflect this in the sky, the Old Willow presiding over it all.

The paintings changed. He no longer tried to hide them, but left them strewn about his rooms against the walls, on chairs, and against table legs. The servants complained at first that they couldn’t clean; then they stopped coming. Philippe’s room became a sea of oranges and reds and twilight grays. The dream blurs were back, drifting their ambiguity around his rooms. They comforted him, reminded him of some unseen place from his future. The limbs of the willow would become arms, reaching or embracing. The fairy legs would dance along the floor across multiple canvases in varying styles, as if the winged creatures were metamorphosing or moving from one plane to another. The horizons not only explained the cycle of a day or a month or year, but of the mind. Philippe loved to stare at these when he was bored in his rooms. They would tell his mind stories of what it could be, or sometimes what it couldn’t. Sometimes a horse could even be made out against the infinite hills of grey or jade.

And always there was the river. In every painting, recognizable or not, was silent, flowing water. Movement caught in stillness, calling, daring one to follow its course. But it couldn’t be followed past the edge of the canvas. So Philippe would return to the river and sit under the Old Willow and paint.

 

Philippe was happy until the fires. He was twenty-two and his parents had given up on him. All the better, he could spend more time with his paints. Stephen was courting one of the cousins and painting portraits for money, though he didn’t need it. Their father had plenty and had recently gained favor at court. He was always away now, the care of the estate left to one of the older boys. Philippe neither knew nor cared who. He spent more time than ever at the river, sometimes riding out at dusk and returning at dawn, when his eyes could no longer stay open. He’d ride out again after a brief nap and some sustenance.

One day, he returned just after dark to a riot of light and color. Flames of bright scarlet and poppy red and whitest ivory licked the darkening indigo sky. They were reflected in the few light puffs of cloud that drifted serenely past the raging conflagration. He sat atop his fidgeting mount and watched the beauty burn itself out. Eventually the tiny people stopped running about, futilely trying to drown the beast. Everything grew still and the stars could be seen twinkling above the ruin of smoldering ash. Servants picked through the rubble, but nowhere in sight was a familiar head of a family member. All gone. He must assume that. The troubles Stephen had spoken of, which his father had written home about recently, they’d reached the estate. Similar things had been happening across France.

He didn’t mind so much the loss of his things, or even the lost paintings. The gardens were gone; and the sunny parlor. The Ladies would not be missed so much, but the wallpaper and the large bay window – they were gone. He hadn’t realized he missed them until then. He hadn’t visited them in months; had not spent time there in years. But they were just two places. And they weren’t Home. The river was Home.

Philippe turned his horse and rode back to the river. He set the beast free to wander where it willed and painted all through that day. That night he slept nestled among the roots of the Old Willow. The next day he painted over finished canvases, rinsing his brush in the river until the tubes began to run dry. He managed to squeeze enough out for a last work. The twilight was falling. He was enchanted by it as he had never been by any other. He quickly covered a canvas with its image. The silhouetted branches waited quietly against a light indigo sky, the grey river slowly rolling through the mid ground. The painting sat there, staring back at Philippe. It was waiting for something more.

It required a little more color, he thought.

 

A few days later a peasant girl chased a saddled horse across the fields. She stopped by a river to catch her breath. When she looked up, she spied a huge tree farther down the bank. She ran to it and came upon a painting. She’d never seen a painting before and stood staring at the strange bright orange and red image in the center of the canvas. She couldn’t quite make it out, but it seemed to be hanging from a black tree limb.

A soft creaking distracted her and she glanced up past the canvas. She gasped, eyes wide, and ran immediately back home to tell her mother. As she faded into the distance, a young man’s body continued to swing gently from a tree limb over the indifferent water. The rope creaked long after the embers of his soul burned out. 

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

Being a painter myself, I was drawn to this. Now, please know that my opinions are just that---opinions. If I say things that ring true, great. If not, ignore them.

In this paragraph "It wasn't that he didn't enjoy riding..." I think it might be better to say "horseback riding" or something to that effect. I didn't know what kind of "riding" you were talking about until later in the paragraph. In that same paragraph, the sentence "Despite the maturing of time..." was unclear to me at first reading.

"The fringe-like grasses..." This is a wonderful sentence---very appealing in its imagery. One thing, though---I question the use of "fringe-like" To me, it would sound better if you said "fringe grasses"

"Movement caught in stillness...." I think this and the sentence that follows could be made into one, ie "Movement caught in stillness, calling, daring one to follow its course, but ending abruptly at the canvas edge."

"Stephen was courting one of the cousins...." There are many instances throughout that could be tightened by the elimination of "was" and its various forms. For instance "Stephen courted one of the cousins and painted portraits for money, though he didn't need it."

"But nowhere in sight was a familiar head of a family member.." Please forgive me, but I'm confused. Are you talking about paintings of family members, or the actual people?

"To wander where it willed" would sound better "To wander where it would" methinks.

"rinsing his brush in the river..." Since you speak of canvases, I assumed he used oils, which are not water-soluable. Acrylics weren't invented yet. Did you say previously and I missed it?

I would like to see you better describe or develope Philippe's distress at the end. His suicide needs to stir the reader's emotions, but his doesn't do that for me very well.

Bard's Apprentice, you've crafted a wonderful story here, and one that I can relate to. For the most part, I feel your writing is outstanding. A little "tightening up," and more attention to communicating clearly, and it will be even better. Sam