The Etruscan Babe-a-licious

About twenty-five years ago, while wasting time at the booksellers’ stalls by the Seine, I came across a thin volume, published in the 1840s, which was entitled Ces femmes qui ont dit non à Napoléon. The title is hard to translate: the ces… qui [those… who] construction in nuance-rich French automatically implies something unusual (a faithful rendering would be: Those Brave/Headstrong/Plucky Ladies Who Turned Down Napoleon). But the subject is universally understandable: young women who, despite the bragging rights earned by sleeping with the powerful, refused to disrobe and deliver – in this case for the randy Corscian bunny of the Revolution. I don’t know if it was a true history, or just a squib dashed off by a disgruntled royalist, but I spent a dreamy quarter-hour perusing the brief biographies of a few long-forgotten beauties.

The book was selling for 120 francs. At the time that was a monstrous sum for me – the equivalent of 30 meal tickets to the all-the-slop-you-can-eat feasts at the university canteen. So I passed on it.

I have always regretted not buying that book. In my unpublished novel, The Notary’s Necktie, I re-imagined it, composing fanciful chapters of “The Ladies Who Said No to Napoleon” to spur the plot. But the sting remains… I wish I had it in my library.

What put me in mind of it was an art opening held last month in Newport, Rhode Island. An artist, and an acquaintance, Esther Solondz, had found a motherlode of unidentified portraiture photography from the Thirties and Forties, sketched the likenesses, then covered the images with a rust finish. The result was an arresting, orangey, mildly unsettling portrait gallery.

One of the portraits was of a young woman, a beautiful young woman, slightly Semitic and ever so tragic. She looked to be a figure from Antiquity. I told Esther’s art dealer that she was Helen of Troy. I told the curator she was Queen Dido of Carthage. I told myself she was The Etruscan Babe-a-licious.

I returned the next week and took pictures of her. Then I kept staring at her on my iPhone.

I decided I had to have her. She was looking right through me.

Yet I couldn’t really afford her. It was the Napoleon's Ladies Syndrome all over again. An Argentine friend, in whom I confided, admonished me that life was too short, and that if you really love something, you should grab it. And it was a mystery: how could I, too broke to be an art collector and too diffident to actually look at and like something unmediated by scholarly monograph and unsanctioned by official approval, become so deeply infatuated with an image? Was I losing it? Showing my inner Pygmalion? And if I hung her on the wall, would I miss the regret of not having her?

Let me explain that last question: My favorite moment in Citizen Kane has a certain Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster’s right-hand man, reminiscing in old age about the Great Man and then breaking off, distractedly, to say: “One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it, there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on – and she was carrying a white parasol – and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since I haven’t thought of that girl.”

I first saw the movie as a teen, but what struck me even then was how Bernstein took such evident relish in his loss. It was as if the memory, and the habitual revival of the memory, mattered most. If he had accosted the girl, married her perhaps, he would have been robbed of that delicious moment of melancholy, to be summoned and enjoyed at will. I didn’t know it then, but such sentiment is a mainstay of Arab culture.

So it was fitting that my inevitable Bernstein moment (every man has one, I think) should involve an Arab, or perhaps a Tunisian Jew. It happened about the time I said no to Napoleon’s nay-saying women.

I had been with friends out to the Bois de Vincennes to watch a play at a converted ammunition factory. The troupe, given to very athletic, samurai-like productions of Shakespeare, was all the rage in Paris then. As we boarded the metro for the long ride back into the center of town, my friends sat across from me, and on the other side of the aisle, facing me, a young woman took a seat, unaccompanied. I had noticed her during intermission at the play: she had sipped a glass of wine, alone. We had exchanged a look. Now here she was: a kind of ringlet thing going on with her long hair, smooth olive skin, a long and beautiful nose, dark eyes. Lovely, in short. Semitic.

I kept stealing glances over at her during the ride into town, feeling not desire but a certain sort of elation in the presence of beauty. Had she glanced back? I couldn’t tell. And, in any event, my two friends prattled on and on, a nauseatingly happy French couple. Half-a-dozen stops came and went; I was summoning up the courage to go over to her. But when the train pulled into the Bastille station, she got up, opened the door, and alighted.

Now here’s the thing. Once the doors had closed and the train was set to get underway, she turned around on the platform and looked back. She looked directly at me. Through me. Then the train pulled away and she was gone.

I think I’m going to make an offer for that portrait.