He returned to the apartment late in the afternoon. The second day of jury duty was over, and all prospective jurors had been asked to return the next day. Melancholy smiled inwardly at the thought of being able to see Juror Two again. As he took off his striped tie and changed his shirt, Melancholy wondered if she was single.
He unfastened his cloth cuff links and placed them in a white bowl on his nightstand. The late afternoon sun was streaming through the curtains which partially covered his bedroom window, and Melancholy noticed the way the slanted light hit his twin bed. It brought to mind a painting by Hopper.
Kitty Newton died on November 9th, 1882. She was twenty-eight years old. Tissot left London and returned to Paris five days later. He called on Edmond de Goncourt who wrote of their meeting in his diary:
“Visite, ce matin, de Tissot (arrivé dans la nuit d’Angleterre) qui me dit, dans la conversation, être très affecté de la mort la Mauperin anglaise.”
While in Paris, he made a brief attempt at reviving his old style and even did a series of Parisian women, but the strain was too much. He became interested in spirituality and communicating with the dead. During one séance, he thought he spoke to Kitty, and his painting of that experience is one of his most famous. It is not surprising, then, that Tissot finally had to give himself up to religion to find peace. He left Paris and traveled to Palestine and thereafter produced only religious paintings. One critic called the move a “disaster for his art.”
A visitor to Tissot’s house in the winter of 1882 reported the house had been abandoned in great haste. “His paints, brushes and several untouched canvases were still in the studio.” But there was one exception. While most of Tissot’s furniture was left untouched in the house, the visitor noticed a curious absence in the bedroom—only the frame of the bed remained. The visitor later discovered that the gardener had pulled the mattress from the bed and dragged it into the garden, where he had it burned in the open air, like a witch at the stake.
“I’ll make a cake for you,” said Kitty. “You shouldn’t be alone on your birthday. We’ll celebrate together.”
Every birthday, the same story. Why couldn’t he forget?
She picked him up from work, and they drove together through the dark wood to his house in Westport.
“Why won’t you stop, Melancholy? Please. You have to stop.”
Her voice assailed him, mercilessly.
“Happily or not, I’m married. Don’t you understand, Melancholy? Married.”
Unsheathe your dagger definitions.
“All women marry down. That’s one of your famous sayings, isn’t it? Here’s another, for your collection: a woman always feels like she could have done better.”
Melancholy could feel the approach of another attack.
“You had your chance, Melancholy.”
“Kitty…”
“Many chances.”
But he couldn’t-
“Don’t you want to get married?” Kitty was confused. In those years before his escape to New York, Melancholy had been working at a bank in Connecticut and living in Westport, and his only connection to the world outside the money pit was Kitty. He had taken her to countless restaurants and hotel bars in New York. Their weekend trips to the city were so enjoyable for both of them that they tried to take as many trips as Melancholy could afford—which was a high number, thanks to the roaring stock market.
The maitre d’hotel at the Pierre even started to recognize them, they were such frequent and unusual guests. (Unusual because both of them were so young.) All the men, once they saw Melancholy’s date, would always treat him like a god.
“No.”
“I don’t understand. Don’t you love me? Why are you doing this?” Kitty, normally so in control, was on the verge of tears. “Melancholy, why are you doing this?” she asked again.
“Because I don’t trust you.”
The painting was in the retrospective. The one where Kitty sits on a couch, orange nasturtiums against a low-cut dress. She was about twenty-seven when she sat for the portrait. Tissot had painted her wearing makeup, and the critics at the time, when the painting was shown for the first time, assailed the use of cosmetics. What respectable woman wears eyeliner and rouge, they scoffed? One of them even asked, Where is the grace, the character, the excellence of the work with which modern life is to be redeemed if it is to pass into Art?
Melancholy raged inwardly at the memory. Meaningless drivel. Critics! Only academics, and his jaws clenched at the word, could compare in their stupidity and uselessness. He remembered how the curator of the retrospective had explained the use of cosmetics by referencing Baudelaire’s opinion that makeup “adds to the face of a beautiful woman the mysterious passion of the priestess.”
How could they be so stupid, he wondered. Didn’t they know? Kitty was dying of tuberculosis! Her lover wanted do one more painting, to remember her, and she wanted to look good. So before she sat for her final portrait, Kitty blued her eyelids, put rouge on her cheeks, and drew a bright red candy stripe across her lips, defiant and beautiful in the face of her imminent death.
