The Cleopatra and Male Perspectives — Villette

Lucy's stay at La Terrasse runs a fortnight past the vacation. Graham says she is not strong enough to go back to that den of a pensionnat, and Mrs Bretton drives to the Rue Fossette and gets Madame Beck's consent. The attention Lucy could have done without follows. Madame Beck arrives in a fiacre, ready to see how the doctor lives. She praises everything, calls the blue salon magnificent, congratulates Lucy on such worthy friends, and when Graham comes in she runs at him with a rush of compliments about his château, his mother, and his looks. She leaves as a catherine-wheel of affability. Lucy follows her to the carriage. In the moment after the door shuts, the sparkle is gone. Madame sits sterner than a judge. Lucy goes back and teases Graham about this devotion. He laughs, repeats the fine speeches, and is the best company in the world when he can forget Ginevra. Lucy thinks of how she used to walk the convalescent Georgette under a grape wall, and of tempers whose mere climate restores a weakened person. Graham is that climate, until the name Fanshawe changes the air.

He takes her into Villette while his mother rests. Lucy likes pictures, and she likes them best when she is left alone. In company she goes blind and numb. Graham is a guide after her own heart: early, before the crowds, willing to hear her say that an original picture is as scarce as an original book. Fat, complacent painted women do not strike her as the goddesses they take themselves for. She lingers over small Flemish still lifes. Then she finds herself nearly alone before one enormous canvas, hung in the best light, with a cordon in front and a cushioned bench set ready, as if the picture knew it was queen of the collection. The woman is larger than life, a huge, dark, indolent figure. The title is Cleopatra. Lucy sits because the bench is there, studies her, soon tires, and turns to smaller pictures of wild flowers, fruit, and mossy nests.

A voice orders her, with no ceremony, to get up and come away. Monsieur Paul is back from Rome. Travel has not made him more tolerant of insubordination. He is scandalised that a young woman, a girl in his accounting, should sit coolly before that picture. Lucy says she found it herself, that it is ugly, and that she still cannot see why she must not look. He will not discuss it. He places her in a corner before four paintings of a woman's life, a young girl, a bride, a mother, a widow, each as stiff in her virtue as the Cleopatra is loose in her luxury. Lucy cannot keep her eyes on them. She turns by degrees and surveys the gallery. The crowd includes women Monsieur Paul later calls ladies, who may look at what no unmarried girl should glance at. He himself looks at the Cleopatra for a long while, quite at ease. He asks if she has been ill. She says she is well now. The talk runs to the cretin she tended in the vacation, and to his temper when a dull pupil exasperates him. He mocks the smallness of her powers: one idiot, and she fell ill, and now she has the face to gaze at pictures of Cleopatra. She does not get angry. She asks what he thinks, since he has looked too. He says the picture is worth nothing, a superb woman with an empress's figure and not much else. She answers that she can still see the painting from the corner, and that the four stages of a woman's life are not enough to hold her. While he talks, a little count in the crowd simpers at the Cleopatra and whispers a friend, all tact and titter. Lucy forgets Monsieur Paul for a minute. A group comes between them, or he leaves.

Graham is looking for her and has not yet searched the corner where the professor put her. She watches him a moment more. He looks at the painting without the count's simper. They take a turn round the gallery. She likes to hear what he says of pictures. As they leave, she tells him how Monsieur Paul sent her to the right-about, and asks what he thinks of the Cleopatra. He dismisses it. His mother, he says, is a better-looking woman. He has heard French fops call the painted figure the type of the voluptuous, and that type is little to his liking. He tells Lucy to compare the painted woman with Ginevra.