The Painted Girls

by Cathy MarieBuchanan

This fiction story tells the story of three daughters and two young men during the 1870's in Paris.  The girls and their mother are constantly hounded by their landlord for the rent payment.  The mother, a washerwoman, deals with her life by swilling absinthe.  The oldest daughter Antoinette takes ballet lessons at The Opera and hopes for a job in the chorus but she is rejected for the role, she isn't good enough.  She then grooms her sisters as dancers.  She is very loving and attentive to her sisters but her attention is being torn from them by a young man who promises he wants to marry her and save money for a home.  He has sex with her but never seems to save money, rather throws it around.  She is shocked one day when a friend of his hits her and he does not defend her, where do his, and her. loyalties lie?

Meanwhile the middle sister Marie does succeed in making it into the dancers and she is noticed by Degas who hires her to be his model.  She is embarrassed about posing in the nude but feels desparate for the extra money.  She runs hersel ragged to make money, working at a bakery in the early morning, taking dancing lessons later in the day and then modelling for Degas.  One of Degas acquaintances also takes an interest in her and invites her to model for him.  She goes to him but he uses her nudity for sexual gratification not for art.

Then, Antoinette's boyfriend is accused of a vicious murder along with another young man and is sentenced to the guillotine.  This is later converted to transport to New Caledonia.  Antoinette decides that she will go with him and starts to save money, but she finds she isn't saving enough so she decides to become a prostitute in a brothel to make more money.  She is convinced that her boyfriend is innocent despite protestations fom her sister and her best friend (also a prosititute).  She ends up going to prison herself for stealing money from one of her clients.

Then her boyfriend is accused of another murder.  Antoinette tells her sister Marie that he is innocent, that she marked on a calendar the days she was with him and that she was with him on the day of the murder.  She asks her sister to take the caldendar to the boyfriend's lawyer, but the sister burns the cslendar.  Then she feels guilty and depressed when the men are convicted and she falls into a depression and gets fired from her job.

While all this is happening Marie had been performing a small role in a Zola play which seems to imply that the poor are destined to stay poor, and the reaction to Degas sculpture of Marie is not the praise she expected, but rather comments that her face and posture doom her to poverty.  She is devastated, she had already bought in to Zola's message and when she sees it applied to her she is angry and broken.

When Antoinette's friend, the prostitute, arrives at prison wearing a watch that was stolen from the murdered woman, and the friend tells Antoinette that her boyfriend gave the friend the watch, Antoinette realizes that her boyfriend is indeed rotten.  She reconciles herself with her sister.  Eventually Marie marries the baker's son, who has long been her admirer, her younger sister becomes the accomplished dancer she might have become and the life of the girls becomes more comfortable.

This story really brought the times and the lives of the girls into life.  It was a great read.  The author interspersed the story with newspaper headlines about the boyfriend's trial and Degas art exhibitions.
It was a great read.