I Need to Visit Le Chesnay

There are a number of things going on here. First of all, unfortunately, I'm fighting off being sick. I'm not sure yet, where I'm coming down in the battle, but I've done everything that has ever worked before to hold off a flu:  Oscillococcinum, Airborn, Echinacea, lots of vitamin C.... all that stuff, plus gargling with vinegar (which Toni suggested—boy, is that stimulating!) And I've been snorting an essential oil that another friend swears by, called Thieves—a blend of a number of oils including cloves and eucalyptus. I've also thrown the kitchen sink at it.

So far, I'm barely holding my own. Coughing, congestion, all that. This morning it seems to be moving up instead of down. Last night it was definitely in my chest. So I've got my fingers crossed here. I really don't want to get sick and I've hovering right on the edge.

The upshot is we didn't do much yesterday. We went out in the late afternoon and walked a bit around the neighborhood, ending in my favorite little café where we sat and talked and then stayed for dinner. That's about all there is to say about voyaging dans la streets of Paris. Not much.

What I did do while I laid around feeling like my throat was a battleground between good and evil, was read. I'm back on the Gericault circuit, which was activated by our walk in Montmartre and my reflections about his relationship to it. What I've begun to piece together is both curious and interesting to me. It's connected to Stendhal as well. One of the fascinating aspects of The Red and The Black (Stendhal's novel, written in 1830), is that it tells the story of an illicit affair between a younger man and an older married woman; Gericault's story. It becomes even more interesting because in Stendhal's story the husband is the Royalist mayor of a small town. Gericualt's uncle, the husband in his affair, was the Royalist mayor of a small town.

There are a number of things that make me wonder if Stendhal didn't know Gericault's story and was borrowing from it as he wrote. One piece of evidence for this beyond the text is that Stendhal posed for a portrait with painter, Dedreux-Dorcy, who was a close friend and intimate of Gericault's. In other words, there is reason to believe that Stendhal might have known the story first hand. And I've found at least one online writer who tells me that "Gericault is the model for the Romantic man Stendhal proposes."

Stendhal was an art critic. He published a work on Renaissance painting called, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, which apparently influenced Delacroix. Stendhal believed that art appreciation was "not a matter for the mind so much as a matter of the heart." He wrote reviews of the Parisian Salons. He was living in Paris during the early 1820s before Gericault's death. He self-identified with the artists' community though he does not seem to have ever attempted to paint. It's quite possible he met Gericualt. I need to read more to find out.

The horsewoman is by Gericault. It's assumed to be Alexandrine. She was from a titled family, but had no money. She married Jean-Baptiste Caruel, a wealthy banker who made his money off of tobacco during The Revolution and Napoleon's Empire. He wanted titled respectability, and indeed, he achieved his goal, becoming a baron. In 1819, just a year after Alexandrine's illegitimate child was born, he added Alexandrine's family name to his own and became Jean-Baptiste Caruel Saint-Martin. He was not the brother of Gericault's father, but of Gericault's dead mother.

Stendhal's portrait of the small-town mayor, M. de Rênal, fits with my notion and colors my thoughts about M. Caruel Saint-Martin who was 27 years Alexandrine's senior. M. Caruel Saint-Martin was the mayor of Le Chesnay, today a suburb of Versailles. In their day it was a separate village that had been originally created for the nobles at Louis XIV's court. One of the sidenotes that all this explains is how it was that Gericault spent time in the stables at Versailles studying and sketching the horses. It's likely that his uncle, the mayor, got him the necessary permission, and was certainly a justification for long stays at Le Chesnay.

So all sorts of things about Gericault's life are becoming clear. The biggest question I have at the moment is how his story fits into what I've been writing. And actually, it's not his story that I'm after, it's Alexandrine's. She had no personal wealth. Her husband was able to quite literally lock her away after discovering her affair. He kept her more or less a prisoner at Le Chesnay, and it's quite likely that after his death in 1847, her eldest son—who became the next mayor of Le Chesnay—followed suit. I believe she is a character in my novel. At this point I'm simply waiting, thinking, and reading with the hopes of understanding how and where and why she fits.

I'm toying with the idea of Alexandrine appearing at Chartres. Chartres is not that far from Versailles. It's in the opposite direction of Paris. It's a place of pilgrimage. If Alexandrine, who lived her life "in pious retreat, like a nun," might have ventured out (been allowed to venture out) it more likely she'd be in Chartres than Paris. So I'm thinking maybe she's at the inn, having come to Chartres and that Georges Sand strikes up a conversation with her. That's what I'm exploring at the moment. I'm also thinking that horses have to be part of it... not sure how, yet, but... maybe that will become clearer after I go Le Chesnay, which I am now planning to do. The picture is of an estate in Le Chesnay—possibly like the one the mayor owned and lived in.