So now we learn Mary has had her paintings rejected while Abigail, her friend in Paris has a showing. That has to be difficult, yet she goes to support her friend. Rejection has caused Mary to doubt her talents as an artist.
"Degas provokes and reveals our prejudices. Wouldn't you like to be good enough to unsettle someone in the same way one day?" Though "good enough" was a shameful understatement. Instead, Mary wished she had said, wouldn't you like to be skilled, sensitive, gifted, brilliant, generous enough, all the things that she, Mary, was not.
Then getting the letter from her father telling her, "Enough my dear. Time to come home. Come back to Philadelphia and find yourself a husband before it is too late." seems to make her second guess what she is doing in Paris.
"And at thirty-three, on had to assess. One had to come to terms. One had to confront dreams."
Degas sees Mary sitting on the bench and asks his friend Manet, who she is. The responses of the two men sure does make me question both of their characters. A bit of a womanizer in both men I dare say. Degas describes Mary almost as if he is describing how he would paint her.
"I meant the elegant woman over there, the one who wears her clothing as if she were the Empress Eugenie herself, come back from England to dazzle us with her finery and impeccable taste. And mind you, leave her alone. I spotted her first." Appreciation spilled from him, and though the woman's eyes were too close together and the shape of her nose was wrong, he admired its misbegotten residence on a face with such magnificent cheekbones. Those were positively architectural.
JoanP., Yes, I have saved old letters from the past. As a matter of fact I think I have saved every correspondence my hubby and I sent to each other while dating. They remain in a box in my attic, with a white ribbon tied around the box. I can't bring myself to part with them. Just like my journals I have kept along the way. I am a writer and romantic by nature, so I imagine if anything happened to my hubby and myself my kids would come across them and possibly read them. I was sorting through my china cabinet yesterday and came across an entire folder of poems I had wrote and submitted for publishing years ago, and the letters of response and awards I received for recognition of excellent work. I had truly forgotten all about them.
Maybe Mary and Degas were romantics at heart, and held on to the letters for memories of what could have been or "was." The letters may be the key, or maybe we will learn everything as we go along to show why they kept them.
My chapters in the downloaded book are numbered beginning with #1 and ends with how many pages are in the chapter. So in other words the page numbers are not ongoing. It is difficult to put a page number with a quote so I will try to use the chapter instead.
Ciao for now~
