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Eugène—he ignoring her confusion, she pretending not to be confused—made up their
gentile
life together, one of agreement, placidity, and resignation. Some days she thought she was winning. Hours could go by and she wouldn’t think of Édouard, but then some shameful vestige of the old passion would revive—prompted by what, she never knew; rapacious justice, perhaps—and the desire would spirit her into the past, into the months before she married Eugène, when a different future had still been possible.
    She did not know what had possessed her to come to the Salon unescorted. Now she would have to walk home alone, a breach of propriety that would have made her mother faint, were she still alive. But Berthe had traveled a long road, one her observant mother had discerned and that had led to the maternal machinations that had ended in Berthe’s respectable, if less than satisfying marriage.
    Berthe gathered her things and began her circumspect stroll up the Champs-Élysées, her shoes pinching her tired feet, the sunshine falling on the parasol she unfurled to avoid unwanted male attention. When she reached her apartment, housed in a grand new building on the Avenue d’Eylau, where she and Eugène had moved after her mother had died, Berthe pulled off her gloves and unpinned her hat and thought, I have found a good man who will forgive me anything, even the gossip of others. Even the truth. What, then, was love? The incessant whisper of passion, or the tedious murmur of caring? The ragged tear at your heart, or the gentle caress that rendered you safe? Perhaps there was no one thing that was love. She would like to know, though, if there were, to quash uncertainty, to understand which way her life had turned out. What was true? If she had risked everything and run away with Édouard, would she be happy now? Or, in choosing Eugène had she gained a happiness she did not yet appreciate?
    Her mother’s lifelong complaint:
You don’t know how to be happy, darling.
    But, Mother
, she always asked,
what is happiness?

Chapter Four
    My dear Mademoiselle Cassatt,
    I have heard through the inevitable gossip that the Salon jury turned down your paintings this year. I propose something, or rather someone, to cheer you. May we call at your studio this afternoon, perhaps at three, which is early, but I hope after you have finished your work for the day? You will be pleased, I believe, though if you are not, forgive this admirer for hoping to lift your spirits by making a small offering to assuage your sadness. My wife says that I am being forward, but I am an old man now and believe I am permitted to take such liberties if it means the happiness of someone I hold dear. Don’t forget that I promised your mother when we were all in Belgium that I would look after you.
    Forgive my reticence about my gift, but I do love a surprise.
    Respond by return post as to your acquiescence regarding my unforgivable cheek. It is well meant, my dear.
    Amitiés
    M. Tourny

Chapter Five
    W hen the door opened to Mademoiselle Cassatt’s studio and it was she who greeted him—the woman from the Salon, the one he had made a fool of himself over—Degas summoned his Parisian soul, relying on the French masculine misapprehension that women were, above all, expendable.
    â€œDear God,” he whispered to himself, enough to make Tourny glance at him and murmur, “Not today, Degas.”
    Tourny
had warned him of his affection for this
américaine
, this foreigner whose accent he described as abominable, but whose artistry made up for the inexcusable deficit. It was Degas’s duty as a friend, Tourny had said, to squelch his tendency toward mockery and find it in himself to be, for once, charming. Degas thought this preemptive remonstrance supremely unfair, given that he had agreed to come—was, in fact, eager to meet the woman who’d painted that stunning portrait he’d