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difficult than anyone realizes to
hold a pose.   You'll want to cry with
pain but you must never let your client know it.   When the half-hour is up, then, and only
then, may you move.   And ten minutes
later, back to work.   So.   Shall we make Alice Prin regret the day she
insulted you?   Shall we attack?"
    "Oh, yes ... yes, please! "   Maggy sent her glass of tea
crashing to the floor with her instantaneous gesture of impatient
acceptance.   Suddenly the old dream lay
within her grasp again all the more precious for the fiasco of the morning,
suddenly she felt that she had only to reach out to hold Paris between her
arms.   What did it matter, after all, if
Renoir was dead?
     
    4
     
     
    Listen to me, Maggy
Lunel," Paula said severely. "Does an egg wear a skirt?"
    "Not the eggs I
know," Maggy answered, rolling her eyes disrespectfully.   In less than a week's acquaintance she had
learned to love Paula — and those she loved, she teased.
    "Don't make the mistake
of not taking me seriously, my girl!   You
must imagine, with all the power you possess, that your body is a basket of
eggs, eggs of different colors and sizes, your breasts the eggs of an
ostrich, your pubic hair the spotted egg of a gull, your nipples the eggs of an
undernourished sparrow.   A naked egg is
the most natural thing in the world.   It
is so basic, so complete that not even Brillat-Savarin ever suggested that an
eggshell should be decorated."
    "What about Russian
Easter eggs?" Maggy protested, but sooner than she would have believed
possible, she learned how to feel genuinely unconcerned as she exposed her body
to the eyes of the painters who first gave her work as Paula's protégée, only
to quickly find themselves in hot competition with each other for her
time.   If she felt a blush about to
betray her, Maggy learned to shield her face with her hair for the few seconds
it took to recover the egg image, but within weeks she moved easily from pose
to pose, her body just an object.
    Pascin painted her with roses
in her lap, an icon of sensual authority;   Chagall painted her as a bride flying in wonder through a purple
sky;   Picasso painted her over and over
again in his monumental, neoclassic style and she became the preferred
odalisque of Matisse.   "You,
popotte," she said to him, "are my favorite client.   Not for your beautiful eyes, but for your
oriental carpet.   Here, at least, I can
sit down — it's like a week's vacation."
    The day after she met Paula,
Maggy moved out of her hotel into one room with a fireplace and a sink and a
bidet, high up in the building next to La Pomme d'Or, Paula's restaurant.   It cost her eighty-five francs a month,
furnished only with a big, gilt-trimmed bed.   Maggy bought herself fresh new bedding.   Paula gave her an overstuffed chair, she picked up a battered table and
an old armoire in a junk shop and once they were installed she had no more
space for anything but a mirror above the sink.   When Maggy looked out of her window at the mansards and chimney pots of
the gray-white roofs of Montparnasse, outlined against the ever-changing skies
of Paris, she wished for no other view on earth.
    The building in which she
lived boasted that rarest of creatures, a good-natured, happy concierge.   Madame Poulard sat in her dark loge working
all day at her Singer sewing machine, toes up, heels down, toes up, heels down, petite couturière to the immediate neighborhood. Childless, she adopted
all the girls for whom she sewed, pouring over Le Journal des Modes with
Maggy as they looked for designs to copy, since the two ready-made skirts and
two blouses Maggy had brought from Tours were totally inadequate for her new
life.
    By October of 1925 Maggy had
established herself as Kiki's only rival and equal and even if Kiki was still "de" Montparnasse, Paula gloated over the fact that Maggy needed no such
qualification after her own name.
    It was just as Maggy, unique
Maggy, the one and only Maggy, who