The Ladies of the Secret Circus by Constance Sayers (the little red hen ebook TXT) 📕

looked down at her fingers. Was it blood? Lara sniffed at the garnet-red smudge on her finger and dropped the ticket back on the bed, horrified. The ticket was bleeding. “You bleed?”

None of the tickets to Le Cirque Secret remained. Except this one.

Althacazur had said he’d find her. And it appeared he had.

The Journal of Cecile Cabot—Book Two

May 25, 1925

Father did something entirely unusual a few days ago. In a big show in front of all of the performers, he announced that he has permitted Émile Giroux to capture the circus on canvas for three paintings of the artist’s choosing. Since it is impossible for us to be painted, I pressed Father as to how he was going to achieve this, but he said it was not my concern. This led to my questioning him why we couldn’t be painted like normal people in the first place. He said that my tongue could be cut out if I asked another question. We have enough mutes in the circus that I’ll take him at his word. Hours later, I overhead him telling Esmé that he would be enchanting the three paintings. Even though I have earned the respect of my fellow performers, he still treats Esmé like an equal and me, a child.

I don’t entirely trust this development with Émile. Rarely does Father do anything without wanting something in return. He says everything is point and counterpoint. Balance is required.

After being permitted to attend our practices, Émile chose me as his first subject.

For the first sitting, I posed in my aqua costume with the brown beading. I prefer the blush one, my signature costume, but Émile fancies the aqua one because he says it makes my eyes come alive. Sitting for him was a maddening chore, but the idea of him studying me so intently stirred something in me. Now I think that I finally understand Esmé’s love for painters. Feeling Émile’s eyes on me was such an intimate act. The honesty in his depiction of me; the way he’s chosen to both scrutinize and rearrange me in paint. Each night, as he unveiled the progress of his work, I found that we were both so vulnerable: him for the artistic risk that he had taken and me for opening myself to how he truly sees me. While I am not the great beauty my sister is, in the way Émile has pinpointed my most intense moment, the one before I’ve ascended the ladder where I’m anticipating the crowd and the performance ahead of me, he has captured not just my likeness, but my true essence.

While he worked, he often gazed at pieces of me—a hand, a foot—but I noticed everything about him: his white shirt with paint stains on the forearms, the ones that he rolls so I won’t see; the quiet way he can work for hours without talking; and his strong chin, which is the telltale indicator of frustration when he is unhappy with some detail. And those eyes—the sad, dirty-green eyes that gaze up at me, hungrily. Toward the end of my sitting our eyes lingered until the end, when we found ourselves sitting in silence simply taking each other in, watching each other breathe.

May 30, 1925

Tonight Émile asked me to accompany him to Le Select. Outside the café, it was a warm night, so there were hordes of people sitting on cane chairs. Inside, patrons were packed like in a crowded cafeteria. This is not the romantic notion of Montparnasse anymore. I heard the American and German accents and saw that what they said is true: There are more tourists than artists here now.

For dinner, we were meeting with Man Ray and his girlfriend, Kiki, but the photographer’s French was as terrible as my English, so we talked at each other, gesturing and requiring Émile to translate, until we both nearly fell over in our chairs with laughter at our wild arm movements. Man Ray had a hook to his nose and the most intense eyes I have ever seen on a man, yet I found him handsome. When you spoke, he focused intently on your voice—even if he could not understand a word of my French. It’s a heady, sensual thing, as though I am the only person in the restaurant. I think Émile’s gaze has opened something up in my soul, like the breeze that flows from the window after a stuffy summer night. While Man has made a living as a portrait photographer, he longs to be a painter. There was something about Émile’s work that inspired him. At first, I was intimidated by both Man and Kiki, but to my surprise, they’d had a ticket to Le Cirque Secret recently and were in awe of me?

While they don’t know it and would completely disagree about it for hours, Émile and his friends were not unlike circus performers—each night they displayed their works and read their poems to the growing crowd of admirers outside places like Le Dôme Café or Café de la Rotonde, never seeing that they, too, were contained under their own big top. They are too close to observe that there is change coming to Montparnasse, subtle for now, but I fear it will soon loom large. The artists and intellects have become the attractions. The tourists go back to their Right Bank hotel, then back home to America, Germany, or England to regale their friends with their proximity to the writer Hemingway or the photographer Man Ray like they bought tickets to see them. As an outsider to this world, I’ve observed that the sea of expats with extra pocket money don’t care about Dada versus cubism nor understand the art of the unconscious mind as dear Salvador Dalí does. Émile’s friends, so wrapped up in their own conversations, haven’t seen the shift that has occurred around them, but I fear this special place is coming to an