The Canvas of the World

by Antonin Varenne

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Arriving at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Aileen Bowman is an unusual woman. A journalist in her mid-thirties, unmarried, independent, she has been sent to cover the event for the New York Tribune, but the arrival of this woman who is unafraid to speak her mind, liberated from constraints of her gender and class, soon creates a stir in the city of lights.

In the course of a story that immerses us in the heart of the city under construction, from the emerging metropolis to neighborhood brothels frequented by artists and bohemians, the singular personality of Aileen merges with this city that suddenly finds itself at the heart of the world.

Release date: October 28, 2021

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 420

Sample

New York Tribune, March 1900

By our special correspondent, Aileen Bowman

 

THE WIND OF CHANGE

 

We set sail on a French liner, along with a thousand other passengers bound for Paris, the city soon to be illuminated by millions of lights.

By a curious coincidence, the Touraine is the last vessel belonging to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique still to be rigged. While steam engines roar invisibly below, the ship’s sails cast their round shadows onto the metal deck. As we make our way towards the biggest world’s fair ever imagined – the Paris Exposition – those canvas sails remain as a sort of tribute to tradition, to a glorious maritime past. The white cotton of our South, the wealth of empires, with the black plume from the chimneys drifting up above it. The sound of the wind is drowned out by the whistling of the boiler. In tandem, these two very different powers propel the Touraine onward, the ship’s prow cutting relentlessly through the waves of the Atlantic.

I had an old uncle – a rough pioneer from a vanished epoch – who would tell me stories about the heroic conquest of the American continent. All his tales would end in the same way: my uncle would smile and recite the words that – to me, as a child – had the ring of a magic incantation: “There’s only one direction in America: west.” And yet, for the next six months, the planet’s compasses will have only one pole, a shining and ephemeral north: Paris.

For us citizens of the young American nation, this crossing to Europe is a journey back to our origins. Such ideas – or perhaps the ship’s sails – give rise to a surprising feeling as we voyage towards that gigantic exhibition of new technologies: nostalgia. A strange emotion, an attachment to something forever beyond our reach. The past. If memory were an apple, nostalgia would be the worm inside, devouring its own home.

The evidence is there: by celebrating a new century, we will lock behind us the door to the century in which we were born. We feel threatened by the idea that progress, in its constant rush forward, will sweep away our memories. Among the passengers of the Touraine, however, not everyone is burdened by such doubts.

There are entrepreneurs here, determined to take their place at the Paris Exposition. I listened to the opinions of a weaving-loom manufacturer, a Californian sawmill owner, and a Pennsylvania representative of the great Standard Oil Company. Despite their disparate backgrounds and interests, these men all had two things in common: the same smile when I asked them what they thought of the liner’s sails, and a refusal to be overawed by the achievements of European engineers. They all mentioned the brilliant inventor Thomas Edison, the unchallenged star of this Exposition, who alone has registered as many patents as ten German, French and British companies put together. “Yes,” they told me, “we’re going to Paris to make discoveries and seal deals. But anyone who thinks we’ll just be admiring visitors is kidding themselves. The western part of the world is American now. We are trading partners with Europe in our own right. I mean, our country is as big as their whole continent!”

Some travellers are irritated by France’s paternalistic attitudes, but the French also have a nickname for us that should make us proud: they call us the “sister republic” of the United States of America, a budding Republic of Enlightenment. But doesn’t such a heritage imply a certain degree of moral and political responsibility? The United States is vast enough that we could rely solely on its domestic market, but what meaning would the principles of openness and tolerance enshrined in our Constitution have if we didn’t apply them? “We will satisfy those demands, we will meet this challenge,” the Californian businessman declares.

And the proof, both symbolic and material, is this: our involvement in this unique event, the Paris Exposition, and the million-dollar budget approved by Congress, four times more than was invested in the previous Exposition of 1889 (memorable for the construction of the fabulous Eiffel Tower). Other than our French hosts, the United States will have more artworks and artists than any other country. Not to mention the wives of these distinguished entrepreneurs, arrayed in the most beautiful dresses from New York, Boston, and Chicago, determined to prove that Paris does not have a monopoly on high fashion and good taste.

Historic rivalries prevented some countries from taking part in the 1889 celebration of the centenary of the French Revolution, but this year’s Paris Exposition will bring together all the nations of the world, a symbol of a new era of collaboration. That is the central message from all the conversations I had aboard the Touraine, a French liner that is, in spirit, international.

Aboard a ship still lit by quaint, old-fashioned oil lamps, the enthusiastic, determined representatives of the new America are en route to connect with the electrified world.

1

At the businessmen’s table, Aileen was treated like a whore at a family dinner, tolerated only because she was a journalist. The first dinner, in the main dining room of the luxurious Touraine, had been enough to convince her that she was aboard a floating circus, transporting only animals and clowns, with the troupe’s real artists presumably on a different ship.

In her presence, husbands did not let their wives speak, probably out of fear that they would stupidly, inadvertently express the curiosity they felt for this scandalous woman: the woman in trousers, the New York Tribune socialist, the notorious redhead Aileen Bowman.

When the conversation turned to Thomas Edison, she mentioned the current war between Tesla’s alternating current and Edison’s direct current, and how Edison – to prove the dangers of his rival’s invention – had eagerly promoted Brown and Southwick’s electric chair. Aileen asked whether anyone at the table had attended one of Edison’s demonstrations, which had taken place at fairgrounds all over the United States and involved the electrocution of dogs and orang-utans using alternating current. Then she described the execution of William Kemmler at Auburn Prison – the first use of the electric chair on a human being, and the subject of one of her first published articles. The smoke pouring from the condemned man’s blackened orifices, the muscles convulsing, the tendons snapping, the smell of burned flesh. Aileen declared that she was also going to Paris to hear Edison’s phonograph. America had to export its greatest inventions.

Afterwards she started drinking, ignoring their hostile arguments, and distracted herself by mentally undressing the women at the table. She imagined their breasts, in all shapes and sizes and ages, swaying from side to side above the flower-patterned porcelain plates in time with the pitching of the ship. The young wife of the Standard Oil man glanced contemptuously at the two undone buttons on the journalist’s blouse, perhaps wondering what the bust of a 35-year-old spinster who’d never breastfed a baby would look like. Aileen sat up tall when their eyes met. The young woman had been the only moment of love in that entire evening.

The greatest scandal of all was her loneliness.

 

When they arrived in Le Havre, Aileen waited on deck, leaning on the rail and observing the other passengers as they rushed towards the station to catch their trains to Paris.

It had a bigger effect on her than she’d imagined. Was she the only one feeling the nostalgia that she’d described in the article she would telegraph to New York as soon as she reached land?

Forty years earlier, her parents had made this journey in the opposite direction, with no idea that they would meet each other over there. They’d never talked about this continent as a place they wanted to see again. Aileen was following the tracks they’d attempted to cover.

They had died that winter, both of them within the space of a few months, as if the new century had forbidden them entry. Arthur had gone first, an old and weakened man, followed by Alexandra, who couldn’t go on without him. Aileen had thought her mother would become a serene widow, grateful for the past but continuing alone. She’d imagined her inexhaustible energy carrying her into the coming years, imagined her managing the ranch and fighting her political battles. But she had died very soon after Arthur. Their love had proved fatal.

One year earlier, Aunt Maria and Uncle Pete had also departed this world, frozen together in Oregon by the great blizzard.

The Fitzpatrick Ranch, which her parents had founded, had from its beginnings been a refuge for immigrants, deserters and fugitives, a tribe brought together by chance and adoptions. Her tribe, swept away in a single year. In the West, which ground down bones and teeth, winter made quick work of tired old pioneers.

All these deaths and memories were carried in the knapsack on her shoulder and the little travelling bag at her feet on the deck of the Touraine, and they suddenly felt too heavy.

Her father’s past was a mystery kept intact by his long, silent life. Like the ranch employees and the people of Carson City, all she knew of his military career were a few snippets of information, and the fact that he’d been a sergeant in the East India Company. His body and face had been covered with terrifying scars. He’d had fingers missing. But his silence was the symptom of his real pain. He’d been a policeman in London, after leaving the Company, then he’d boarded a ship to America. Aileen imagined her father, before he met Alexandra, as a ghost wandering the globe.

Alexandra and Arthur had built their ranch by the edge of Lake Tahoe. An estate torn from the grip of the wild Sierra Nevada, taken from old Indian lands. The ranch was all that remained of Alexandra’s idealistic dreams, a golden prison for her husband’s nightmares of war.

During the winter of 1865, at the end of the fiercest, deadliest and most absurd civil war ever fought, two brothers – having deserted the Northern army – had crossed the mountains and hidden at the ranch, curled up in the warmth of manure inside a barn: Oliver and Pete Ferguson. The first in a long list of marginals, poor criminals and rebels to spend a few days, weeks or months at the Fitzpatrick Ranch. Oliver and Pete stayed longer than most. Alexandra, the utopian, and Arthur Bowman, the insomniac veteran, had protected and adopted them once the war was over. Aileen had been only one year old at the time.

Pete Ferguson became her favourite uncle and she became the princess of that kingdom. Uncle Pete hated everybody except for his younger brother and this adopted niece. He burned and broke everything he touched. He made too many enemies in the county, then fled the ranch. Three years later, after a long journey, he returned; Aileen was ten. That part of his life, like Arthur Bowman’s past, became one of the mysteries at the heart of that community of misfits.

Pete had been in a state of exhaustion when he returned, crippled in one leg, his body covered not with scars but tattoos. But Uncle Pete had not come back alone. He was leaning on the shoulder of a young Indian woman who spoke an unknown language, Guatemalan Spanish and a smattering of English. Maria – her Aunt Maria – wanted nothing to do with that white family. And so the two of them, too marginal even for the ranch, had found refuge with some other homeless Americans, in the last resort possible for a deserter and an exile: an Indian reserve. Warm Springs, Oregon, where they had frozen to death.

Uncle Oliver had remained at the ranch with his wife Lylia and their three children – those cousins whom Aileen barely knew. They had been the branch of the family that had taken root, notable people whose fortune – as dictated by the American Dream – had made their humble origins unimportant. When Aileen saw them for the last time, at Alexandra’s funeral, they had looked at her from a distance, she and they isolated by their thoughts and the clouds of steam that escaped their mouths. It was Oliver’s family now who ran the ranch.

The Ferguson brothers had given birth to two distinct dynasties of Americans: the majority strain of solid entrepreneurs and defenders of property law, and the minority strain of confined nomads.

After her mother’s funeral, Aileen – now an orphan – had returned to New York with a settlement that made her a rich woman and the horrible feeling that the ranch, the lake, the horses and even Alexandra and Arthur were now nothing more than a child’s dream.

Perhaps nostalgia, at first so painful, would end up becoming a remedy, once the past had been recycled into oblivion.

 

Le Havre was bathed in sunlight. Crowds swarmed along the wharf and cranes leaned over the moored ships. The houses on the seafront, tall and narrow and squeezed close together, looked like cabaret dancers, elbows joined in a chaste but joyful line dance. Aileen imagined the houses’ legs high-kicking to show a flash of thigh, suspenders and knickers to the calm, imperturbable sea. The weather had been perfect during the crossing and she regretted not landing in France with her hair dishevelled and the liner in a state of disarray after facing the wrath of the Atlantic.

The Standard Oil man’s wife went down the gangway. Aileen waved and the young woman became entangled in the folds of her long dress.

She decided that Paris could wait another day. She would spend the night here, eat in the city’s best restaurant and sleep in a room with a view of the port.

 

The tide was high. That evening, the swell increased and the waves crashed onto the jetty. The wind blew salty spray against the houses’ windows, bringing a scent of seaweed and splashed granite. Aileen ate seafood with her hands. Her greasy fingers left smears on her wine glass. The Exposition would open its doors in less than a week; all the restaurants and hotels within 120 miles of Paris were fully booked. But for a woman travelling alone, they found a room and a table. She changed her dollars to francs.

She listened curiously to the customers and the waiters and was surprised when she understood them. She was anxious to know if she could answer them correctly. She had only ever spoken French with her mother, who was born in a village in Alsace. Since Alexandra’s death, Aileen had forced herself to think in French, out of fear that she would forget what her mother had taught her. Growing up in a country where they were the only two people who could understand each other, Aileen had imagined herself the last guardian of a secret language. But, here, everybody spoke it.

The existence of this mysterious land had confirmed what little Aileen always supposed: that she was a princess from another world, and her mother a sorceress who had chosen Arthur Bowman, the strongest of men, to be her husband on this earth.

And this evening, she was finally here. In the place she’d come from.

This was why she’d persuaded her employer to send her to Europe. And Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Tribune, was not the kind of man who was easily influenced. He campaigned for an opinionated press, but was not at all keen on dialectics unless he got the last word.

“Royal Cortissoz will already be there. There’s no point having two of you.”

“There’s no comparison! Royal is a stubborn man who can only speak New York English. Who will cover what’s happening in Paris when he leaves France after the inauguration?”

“Two weeks is enough to get what we need. Nobody cares about the rest of the Exposition.”

“I’ll stay there six months and write in-depth articles.”

“Six months? Are you crazy? That would be a gigantic waste of time and money.”

“I’ll stay until 1901. The start of the new century.”

“Out of the question. This Exposition is just a trumped-up tourist attraction. The French think it’s way more important than it actually is.”

“They’re expecting millions of visitors. Princes from Asia, kings from Africa, politicians from all over Europe, the world’s greatest intellectuals will all be there. If you don’t have anyone there who can speak French, how will you find out anything that’s happening? Are you planning to reprint Mr Bennett’s articles from the New York Herald?”

Whitelaw Reid frowned. Not only was the Herald his newspaper’s toughest competitor, but Bennett was his enemy. Aileen drove home her advantage:

“I’m sure Mr Bennett has hired an army of reporters who speak French and English. Did you know he even has an office on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, just like he did in ’89?”

“Are you threatening to go and work for that purveyor of cheap thrills and bad news, Miss Bowman?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. Quite the contrary: I’m promising to be a thorn in his side. I can write articles in English for New York and French versions that can be shared out among the Parisian newspapers. That way, the Tribune will have a presence on both sides of the Atlantic.”

She’d had him at the first mention of James Gordon Bennett, but Whitelaw Reid continued to argue just to save face.

“I am not going to pay you to take a six-month vacation in that crazy city.”

“I’ll pay half of my rent and expenses myself.”

“Putting one over on Bennett is one thing, but I don’t want any of your incendiary, provocative articles. It has to be reasonable or I’m not publishing it.”

“But if I find French newspapers interested in what you’ve rejected, I have carte blanche, right?”

“Not under your own byline. As long as you’re in France, your name belongs to my newspaper.”

“You’re right – I’ll choose a male pseudonym so I can write about women’s rights.”

“Oh, don’t start!”

“Until 1901?”

“Wire me a weekly column, plus news articles if anything important happens.”

“I won’t write about fashion.”

“Agreed. You’d scare the poor designers. As long as Royal Cortissoz is in Paris, you’ll be his assistant for arts and culture.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Get out of my office.”

 

He watched her smile as she stuffed herself with oysters, which were already milky even though it was only early April. She congratulated herself on arriving in Paris a day late and provoking the wrath of Royal Cortissoz, who was never more ridiculous than when he lost his temper. Strong emotions revealed his inaptitude for passion, against which – as a champion of the most conservative American art (which imitated the most conservative European art) – he considered himself one of the last bulwarks.

Aileen spread a thick layer of butter on her bread and poured herself more wine.

Later, standing by her bedroom window and searching for stars in the cloudy sky above the Channel, Aileen cried as she thought about all the opportunities she had missed to visit her aged parents. She would have liked to write them a letter now, to tell them about the taste of the seafood and the port of Le Havre, from where, she’d been told, for a few days every year, when the air was pure and the sun at a certain angle, it was possible to make out the dark line of the English coastline – her father’s land. She went to bed late, worried that this stay in France would end up nothing more than a long, guilty period of mourning. “Tiredness does strange things to your mind – go to sleep,” her father used to say, even though his own nights were scarred by bad dreams.

Would this mourning be like a drogue, holding her back, just as the ship’s old-fashioned sails slowed down the Touraine? It would be a sad way to celebrate a new century in Paris, but perhaps not an unreasonable one given that she planned to question the engineers here on the place that would be reserved, in their glorious future, for women like her and for people of mixed blood like her cousin Joseph.

The Fitzpatrick Ranch had three heirs: Aileen Bowman, Oliver Ferguson and – following the deaths of Uncle Pete and Aunt Maria – their son Joseph.

Of all the ranch’s offspring, Joseph, the bastard son of an Indian woman and a deserter, was the most tragic and the most dangerous in that lineage of dangerous men. He was also the one that Aileen understood best.

After the burial, instead of going straight back to New York, Aileen had visited the reserve at Warm Springs. At the Indian Affairs Office, she questioned a government employee. The man hummed and hawed, so Aileen held a ten-dollar bill under his nose to convince him to look up Joseph Ferguson in his register.

“He was hired.”

“Hired?”

“For a show.”

“What show?”

“Pawnee Bill’s Show.”

“And where would I find that?”

The answer to that question cost her another ten dollars.

“It’ll cost you a lot more than that if you want to see the show! Because Pawnee Bill has hired a whole load of redskins to replace old Buffalo Bill in Paris!”

“Paris, France?”

“I think so, yeah!”

“For the Exposition?”

“The what now?”

She took a train back to the east and spent the journey writing a list of reasons for travelling to France, in order of importance, and sketching out some arguments likely to convince the owner of the New York Tribune to send her there.

2

As they draw closer, each Exposition appears like a mountaintop from which we can look back over the distance already covered. The visitor emerges feeling reassured, encouraged and optimistic about the future. That joyful optimism – the prerogative, in the previous century, of a few noble minds – is now spreading much more widely; in this fertile cult, the Expositions appear as majestic but useful ceremonies, necessary for the existence of a hard-working nation driven by. . .