It was from the grim and blood-soaked wreckage of post-World War I Europe that historians looked back and named the preceding decades La Belle Époque. A thirty-year span of peace and economic stability, art, and science had flourished, even as the second half of the Industrial Revolution set the scene for the era's sudden and brutal end. Artists and intellectuals like Émile Zola, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, and Sarah Bernhardt helped to upend the status quo. With progress and optimism elevated to a form of faith, movements like Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau found fertile ground.
This is the world author Cathy Marie Buchanan puts on canvas in her second novel, The Painted Girls. In a clear-eyed and heartfelt accounting of the seamy side of that gilded age, Buchanan gives voice to the historic figure of Marie van Goethem, one of the ballet girls who obsessed painter Edgar Degas.
It's 1878 when we meet Marie, whose father, a tailor, has just passed away. Her mother, a laundress whose love of absinthe trumps her concern for her three daughters, has fallen behind on the rent for their Montmartre tenement. Marie's older sister, Antoinette, is no help. Hot- tempered and difficult, she has lost her place as a paid dancer in the Paris Opera ballet. The burden of earning a living thus falls to Marie.
At thirteen, Marie is several years too old to become one of the "petit rats" of the Opera, the lowest rung of the strictly regimented training program. Still, driven by desperation, she auditions and is accepted into the company. The wages she brings in are meager, and the family remains impoverished. Though the accepted way for dancers to bolster their incomes is to accept the favors of certain male patrons, season ticket holders known as abonnes, Marie resists that path. When Monsieur Degas asks Marie to model for his paintings, she agrees. With her graceful back and her loose-hipped stance, she soon becomes his muse.
As Marie earns a living, Buchanan gives her readers an education. While posing for Degas, Marie sees "...a drawing of a ballet girl sitting slumped on a bench. There is no more to the picture than a few lines of charcoal, a few dashes of pastel, but the exhaustion of the girls is there, in the ribs heaving with each breath, the late night and bellowing father of the evening before, also the long hours at the barre, striving to balance a second longer or land a little softer, the aching thighs rolling open even at rest."
Later, once we've learned just how precarious the lives of the Opera's lower-ranked dancers are and how slim their chances of becoming stars, Marie sees the truth of her status in another of Degas's paintings. In this one, "...a dancer bends forward at the hips to straighten her stockings; and another, with a shock of red hair and a face turned to the floor, looks like she is stretching out her tows, but it is impossible to know because a good half of her foot is chopped off, and this time, the top of her head, too. Behind these dancers, fluffing the tarlatan of her daughter's skirt is the mother, with the puffy face of an old concierge, and her friend, rough with her raw nose and plume of feathers bristling from her hat. These girls, Monsieur Degas is saying, do not be tricked by the grace of their backs. These girls are of common stock."
Antoinette, meanwhile, has found work as a day player in Zola's drama L'Assommoir, about a washer woman whose low place dooms her to failure. There, Antoinette meets and falls for Émile Abadie, also a historic figure. With his narrow, sloping forehead and wide, simian jaw, Abadie's face matches the facial characteristics for a criminal, according to a popular scientific theory of the day. True to history, Antoinette's lover is charged with and convicted or murder. As she works to clear Abadie, Antoinette draws Marie deep into a sordid scandal.
Little is known about the real lives of the van Goethem sisters. Antoinette was, indeed, dismissed from the Opera, but her affair with Abadie is pure invention. Charlotte's eventual career with the Opera spanned decades. And though Degas made scores of studies of Marie and then immortalized her in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, the only sculpture he ever exhibited, nothing more is known about the model. It's only through Buchanan's words that the sisters become real. Her vision of La Belle Époque, like that of the painter she portrays, brings the soul and sacrifice of the ballet girls to life.
Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angeles–based journalist, essayist, and playwright. Her literary criticism appears on NPR and in major American newspapers. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank-you note from him a few days later.
Reviewer: Veronique de Turenne
The Washington Post - Susan Vreeland
Edgar Degas's wax-and-fabric statuette "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen" has held the curiosity of millions in its 28 bronze reproductions, but far fewer know the heart-rending history of the model, Marie van Goethem, and her sisters. In The Painted Girls, a historically based work of fiction rich with naturalistic details of late-19th-century Paris, Cathy Marie Buchanan paints the girls who spring from the page as vibrantly as a dancer's leap across a stage…The Painted Girls is a captivating story of fate, tarnished ambition and the ultimate triumph of sister-love.
Publishers Weekly
The struggle of three sisters in 19th-century Paris blossoms into the rich history of Marie van Goethem, model for Edgar Degas's controversial statue, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, in Buchanan's new novel (after The Day the Falls Stood Still). When their father dies, teen sisters Antoinette, Marie, and Charlotte are left to fend for themselves, since their mother's meager wages often dissolve into absinthe. Knowing their best chance for advancement lies in the ballet, Antoinette, an extra at the Opéra, get her sisters auditions. Both are accepted as "petit rats," but to everyone's surprise, bookish Marie actually shows talent for dance, and pays for food and private lessons by modeling for the mysterious Edgar Degas. Meanwhile, Antoinette, who has been guardian to her sisters, begins a love affair with Émile Abadie, a young man of questionable character. As Marie's modeling for Degas leads to the interest of a patron of the ballet, Émile is arrested for the murder of a local tavern owner, driving a wedge between the devoted sisters. Though history loses track of Émile Abadie, implicated in three murders, and Marie Van Goethem after Degas's statuette is criticized as "ugly" with the "promise of every vice" on the girl's face, Buchanan captures their story in this engrossing depiction of belle epoque Paris. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME Entertainment. (Jan.)
author of Alice I Have Been Melanie Benjamin
Awash in period details of the Paris of Degas and Zola while remaining, at its heart, the poignant story of two sisters struggling to stay together.”
author of The Dressmaker Kate Alcott
I guarantee, you will never look at Edgar Degas’s immortal sculpture of the Little Dancer in quite the same way again.”
AudioFile
The narrators transport listeners to the slums and back-alleys of Belle-Epoque Paris…Earthy, erotic, always truthful—this is must listening. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
SoundCommentary.com
Cassandra Campbell, Julia Whelan, and Danny Campbell do a fine job of using a French accent to speak the French words while reading the English clearly…Well done and is a joy to experience.”
Vogue
A dark valentine to Belle Èpoque Paris.”
Booklist
Exquisite…A realistically robust portrait of working-class life in late nineteenth-century Paris.”
author of The Wednesday Sisters Meg Waite Clayton
The Painted Girls offers the best of historical fiction.”
author of Bloodroot Amy Greene
Beautiful and haunting. From the first page, I was swept up and enchanted.”
Entertainment Weekly
Richly imagined.”
Vancouver Sun
Buchanan achieves all that historical fiction asks for in The Painted Girls.
Melanie Benjamin
Historical fiction at its finest. . . . Buchanan also explores the uneasy relationship between artist and muse with both compassion and soul-searing honesty.
Heidi W. Durrow
Part mystery, part love story, The Painted Girls breathes heart and soul into a fascinating era of the City of Lights. One can’t help but be drawn in by this compelling and lyrical tale of sister love and rivalry.
Quill & Quire
Fascinating. . . . Meticulously researched.
The Globe and Mail
Sketched in rich detail and teeming with suspense. The Painted Girls is hard to put down.
Chicago Tribune
In The Painted Girls, a carefully researched, deeply imagined historical novel . . . the Belle Époque comes to vibrant, often aching life.
Meg Waite Clayton
Sisters, dance, art, ambition, and intrigue in late 1800s Paris. The Painted Girls offers the best of historical fiction: compelling characters brought backstage at l’Opera and front and center in Degas’ studio. This one has “book club favorite” written all over it.
Costco Connection
There’s no doubting or denying that Buchanan is a writer, born and made-a masterful narrator who can start with historical people and places and overlay them with powerful stories from her imagination.
Harper's Bazaar
Buchanan’s prose is as haunting as it is elegant.
Vincent Lam
History, coming of age and the art of Degas’s beloved dancers are woven together in this enchanting novel. Utterly captivating.
Good Housekeeping
In this compelling tale, we meet fictionalised Marie Van Goethem (one of the young dancers who posed for Degas) and her sister, whose journeys out of the Paris slums evoke the light and dark of the Belle Époque.
Amy Greene
Beautiful and haunting. From the first page, I was swept up and enchanted.
Toronto Star
Buchanan weaves real and fictional characters and their stories to create a rich stew of drunkards, deceivers and ne’er-do-wells, seasoned by the occasional soft-hearted soul, who change the lives of the sisters.
Booklist
A realistically robust portrait of working-class life in late nineteenth-century Paris. Guaranteed to appeal to fans of Tracy Chevalier, Susan Vreeland, and Melanie Benjamin.
NPR
Belle époque Paris springs to life under the sure hand of Cathy Marie Buchanan. . . . In this book I found a lovely braiding of the real and invented, a seductive world I did not want to leave.
Terry Fallis
Buchanan writes masterfully about the hard life of two sisters in 19th-century Paris. . . . A wonderful tale, beautifully told.
National Post
The reader is completely absorbed in the struggle of Marie to rise above her circumstances. . . . [A] convincing, heartfelt story.
Bust Magazine
As two sisters’ paths converge and spiral out of control, Buchanan powerfully . . . depicts their efforts to navigate the slippery ethical terrain facing them in an era when a young woman’s most lucrative asset was her body.
USA Today
Two impoverished sisters in Belle Époque Paris enter the world of the ballet (Degas) and theater (Zola) but also face temptations that can lure young women in the demimonde.
Christian Science Monitor
[Buchanan] treats her girls with far greater care than do their contemporaries, seeing worth in them despite their misjudgments and calamities.
Ottawa Citizen
We know some, but not all, details of Marie’s life. To provide a full story, those details have been vividly and believably embroidered by Toronto author Cathy Marie Buchanan in a gritty and compelling new novel titled The Painted Girls.
Shilpi Somaya Gowda
You will be swept away by The Painted Girls. Wonderfully imagined and masterfully rendered . . . [it] will change the way you see the world of ballet, art and the lives it portrays.
Washington Post
Buchanan paints the girls who spring from the page as vibrantly as a dancer’s leap across a stage. . . . A captivating story of fate, tarnished ambition and the ultimate triumph of sister-love.
Boston Globe
Based on historical figures and incidents, this novel of family, romance, degradation, and fulfillment delivers great atmosphere and fully-realized characters.
Chicago Tribune
In The Painted Girls, a carefully researched, deeply imagined historical novel . . . the Belle Époque comes to vibrant, often aching life.
Washington Post
Buchanan paints the girls who spring from the page as vibrantly as a dancer’s leap across a stage. . . . A captivating story of fate, tarnished ambition and the ultimate triumph of sister-love.
USA Today
Two impoverished sisters in Belle Époque Paris enter the world of the ballet (Degas) and theater (Zola) but also face temptations that can lure young women in the demimonde.
People Magazine
The Painted Girls is named the People Pick of the Week, and praised as “deeply moving and inventive…evocative…gripping…a tribute to the beauty of sisterly love.
Kirkus Reviews
Buchanan (The Day the Falls Stood Still, 2009) brings the unglamorous reality of the late-19th-century Parisian demimonde into stark relief while imagining the life of Marie Van Goethem, the actual model for the iconic Degas statue Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Marie is the middle Van Goethem sister, the plain one who loves reading. Seven-year-old Charlotte has the looks and charm, while street-wise 17-year-old Antoinette is burdened with raising her sisters because their widowed mother spends most of her meager income as a washerwoman on absinthe. Kicked out of the Paris Opera ballet school but earning a little as an extra, Antoinette arranges for Marie and Charlotte to enter the school--dance is a way to avoid working in the wash house. Soon, Marie attracts the attention of the painter Degas. When he asks her to model for him, she jumps at the chance, both for the money and the attention. Through Degas, she meets Monsieur Lefebvre, one of the wealthy men who "adopt" ballet students of promise. Soon, she is able to quit her part-time job at the neighborhood bakery where she has captured the heart of the owner's son. Meanwhile, Antoinette gets a tiny part in Zola's controversial play L'Assommoir and falls in love with another extra, Émile Abadie. As the story progresses, the sisters come dangerously close to self-destruction. Buchanan does a masterful job of interweaving historical figures into her plot, but it is the moving yet unsentimental portrait of family love, of two sisters struggling to survive with dignity, that makes this a must-read.
