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

that my grandmother—the woman who helped raise me—was not Cecile, but Sylvie. I think the answer is the third journal.” She handed the second journal to him. While it might have been faster for him to read the third, she kept it, preferring to be its first reader. After all, this was her family, her legacy. She needed to be the one to read Cecile’s words. While Barrow was fixed on Giroux, she was getting drawn into Cecile’s world. “Any word about the painting?”

“I’m seeing Micheau right after this,” said Barrow about Alain Micheau, the Giroux specialist who’d driven up from Nice. Earlier, Barrow indicated that two scholars needed to agree that it was a Giroux before raising the discovery to the larger art community. “Last night, Alain was at the institute until I had to force him to leave. The paints used on Sylvie on the Steed match an order Giroux placed with Lefebvre-Foinet on Rue Vavin in Montparnasse right before his death. They would have custom-blended the pinks and aquas for him. Giroux got his canvases there as well. He’d ordered three smaller ones for The Ladies of the Secret Circus a month before his death. The size on the first painting is a match. The journals also provide a wonderful first-person account of the creation of these works.” Barrow looked at the notes and the second book in disbelief. He reached out and touched Lara’s hand. “I want to thank you for this gift.”

She smiled. “It’s quite a story, isn’t it?”

“The paintings need to be together,” said Barrow. “I can’t believe Fragonard has held on to it all these years. They were an urban legend in Paris. Fragonard would have known that, especially being in the circus community. It was selfish… irresponsible.”

“So how did the first painting measure up?” asked Gaston, changing the subject. “I’m sure it was different in your mind.”

Barrow did not shift his gaze, and it seemed as though he didn’t hear the question at first. “Sylvie on the Steed was smaller than I’d thought it would be, a bit like the Mona Lisa—it lives large in your mind but is rather small on the wall. It was also moodier than his earlier work, the colors more vivid, and he used a technique that made them look like they’re dripping, yet it was not an impressionistic work. So I guess I would say I was underwhelmed by the painting’s size but overwhelmed by how it spoke to me. After seeing one of the series, I believe they are the crown jewels of Giroux’s works.”

“Why Giroux?” asked Lara.

“What is this? The question-Teddy petite dejeuner?” Barrow laughed and tore off a piece of country bread and studied it intently. “I was ten years old when my mother took me to the Louvre for the first time. She was often on location for photo shoots, and by this time she and my father had divorced, so I was raised by the nanny. Time with my mother… well… it was precious to me, and anything associated with it was heightened, special. At the Louvre, I spied this hulking canvas in front of me with these green skin tones and this yellow-orange haze. It was his painting of the Devil, but the Devil as Giroux saw him was not the standard depiction with horns and pitchforks and hooves. Instead it was the most magnificent woman in red, blood dripping from her fingertips and from her chin, but she was stunning and ravenous. It was a violent painting, yet sexual. The Spanish painters did works like this, but not the French. Giroux used some kind of melting technique with it that became his signature; the work just looked like it was dripping. He returned to this technique for your painting. I had never seen anything like it. That I was so attracted to this dark work seemed to unnerve my mother, who steered me away from it. And so I forgot about it until years later, when I was in Milan and it happened to be on loan there. To see it again, I felt a destiny with both the painting and the man. It had stirred feelings in me and made me want to know more about art—about him. Of course, I was to learn that the painting was not of the Devil.”

“The Vampire,” said Lara.

“Indeed.” He smiled. “The most beautiful painting I had ever seen.”

On cue, Gaston started. “You have to understand, Lara, that artists in 1925 had largely rejected painterly, beautiful art. Art was political—they believed that the colonial, bourgeois tastes had led to the events surrounding the Great War, so the entire premise of art was being challenged. Paris at the time was surrounded by Dadaists, surrealists, and futurists all trying to set the course for what art would be next,” said Gaston. “And yet here is Giroux sitting in the cafés beside them still painting largely beautiful paintings.”

“And getting away with it,” Barrow chimed in, not wanting Gaston to have too much expertise. “Had he lived, he would have been as famous as Salvador Dalí or Picasso. I’m sure of it.”

“And he wasn’t using everyday materials like pens and doors to create art, like Man Ray,” added Gaston, his espresso cup hitting his saucer loudly.

“No,” agreed Barrow, “the bastard just created beautiful paintings that were rather out of fashion at the time. He did challenge ideals of art—but even those are quite exquisite. He once remarked that being in the war, he’d seen many forms of hell in his life, and the one thing it had taught him was to value beauty.

“After I’d learned what happened to him—that his death was shrouded in some mystery—that added another layer for me,” said Barrow. “No one had ever really solved what had killed him or where these paintings had gone. There were various theories, but no one had taken the time to study it. That, and my mother took me to all of the circuses when she