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Cathy Marie Buchanan

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The Painted Girls: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Cathy Marie Buchanan (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3.9 1,650 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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A heartrending, gripping novel about two sisters in Belle Époque Paris and the young woman forever immortalized as muse for Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.

1878 Paris. Following their father’s sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant seventeen francs a week, she will be trained to enter the famous ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s naturalist masterpiece L’Assommoir.

Marie throws herself into dance and is soon modeling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her image will forever be immortalized as Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. There she meets a wealthy male patron of the ballet, but might the assistance he offers come with strings attached? Meanwhile Antoinette, derailed by her love for the dangerous Émile Abadie, must choose between honest labor and the more profitable avenues open to a young woman of the Parisian demimonde.

Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change, The Painted Girls is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of “civilized society.” In the end, each will come to realize that her salvation, if not survival, lies with the other.

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Riverhead Books
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January 10, 2013
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Buchanan’s exquisite historical novel details the lives of would-be ballerinas Antoinette, Marie, and Charlotte van Goethem. Responsible for fending for themselves after the death of their father and the absinthe-soaked decline of their mother, the van Goethem sisters struggle to eke out an existence while subsidizing their ambitions at the harshly competitive school of the Paris Opéra. When Marie is selected by Edgar Degas to pose for his future masterpiece, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,and Antoinette snags a bit part in the stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir, the extra income enables them to avoid, for a while, the tragic pitfalls of life on the lower slopes of Montmartre. To make things even more interesting, Buchannan links the sisters’ stories with that of convicted criminals Emile Abadie and Michel Knobloch, the subjects of Degas’ Criminal Physiognomies. By intertwining the narrative threads of these drawn-from-history characters, she paints 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. --Margaret Flanagan

Review

"A captivating story of fate, tarnished ambition, and the ultimate triumph of sister-love." --The Washington Post

"Deeply moving and inventive... Buchanan's evocative portrait of nineteenth-century Paris brings to life its sights, sounds, and smells, along with the ballet hall where dancers hunger for a place in the corps... But nothing is more real or gripping than the emotions of Marie and her older sister Antoinette... Their tale is ultimately a tribute to the beauty of sisterly love." --People

"The ethereal ballerina from Degas's famed sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen comes to life in this richly imagined novel. Amid the glamour of tutus and art emerges a surprisingly gritty story of survival in the gutter of Belle Epoque Paris." --Entertainment Weekly

About the Author

CATHY MARIE BUCHANAN is the author of The Day the Falls Stood Still, a New York Times bestseller, a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection and one of the Canada Reads Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade. She holds a B.Sc. (Honours, Biochemistry) and an MBA from Western University. Born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, she now resides in Toronto.

WEB: CATHYMARIEBUCHANAN.COM

TWITTER: @CATHYMBUCHANAN

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Marie

Monsieur LeBlanc leans against the doorframe, his arms folded over a belly grown round on pork crackling. A button is missing from his w aistcoat, pulled too tight for the threads to bear. Maman wrings her hands—laundress’s hands, marked by chapped skin, raw knuckles. “But, Monsieur LeBlanc,” she says, “we just put my dead husband in the ground.”

“It’s been two weeks, Madame van Goethem. You said you needed two weeks.” No sooner had Papa taken his last breath upon this earth than, same as now, Monsieur LeBlanc stood in the doorway of our lodging room demanding the three months’ rent Papa had fallen behind in paying since getting sick.

Maman drops to her knees, grasps the hem of Monsieur Le Blanc’s greatcoat. “You cannot turn us out. My daughters, all three good girls, you would put them on the street?”

“Take pity,” I say, joining Maman at his feet.

“Yes, pity,” says Charlotte, my younger sister, and I wince. She plays her part too well for a child not yet eight.

Only Antoinette, the oldest of the three of us, remains silent, defiant, chin held high. But then she is never afraid.

Charlotte grasps one of Monsieur LeBlanc’s hands in both her own, kisses it, rests her cheek against its back. he sighs heavily, and it seems tiny Charlotte—adored by the pork butcher, the watchmaker, the crockery dealer—has saved us from the street.

Seeing his face shift to soft, Maman says, “Take my ring,” and slips her wedding band from her finger. She presses it to her lips before placing it in Monsieur LeBlanc’s waiting hand. Then with great drama her palms fly to the spot on her chest just over her heart. Not wanting him to see in my eyes what I know about Maman’s feelings for Papa, I turn my face away. Whenever Papa mentioned he was a tailor, apprenticed to a master as a boy, Maman always said, “The only tailoring you ever done is stitching the overalls the men at the porcelain factory wear.”

Monsieur LeBlanc closes his fingers around the ring. “Two weeks more,” he says. “You’ll pay up then.” Or a cart will haul off the sideboard handed down to Papa before he died, the table and three rickety chairs the lodger before us left behind, the mattresses stuffed with wool, each handful worth five sous to a pawnbroker. Our lodging room will be empty, only four walls, grimy and soot laden, deprived of a lick of whitewash. And there will be a new lock on the door and the concierge, old Madame Legat, fingering the key in her pocket, her gaze sorrowful on the curve of Charlotte’s pretty cheek. Of the three of us, only Antoinette is old enough to remember nights in a dingy stairwell, days on the boulevard haussmann, palms held out, empty, the rustle of the silk skirts passing by. She told me once how it was that other time, when Papa sold his s ewing machine to pay for a tiny white gown with crocheted lace, a small white coffin with a painting of two cherubs blowing horns, a priest to say the Mass.

I am the namesake of a small dead child, Marie, or Marie the First as I usually think of her. Before her second birthday, she was rigid in her cradle, eyes fixed on what she could not see, and then I came—a gift, Maman said—to take her place.

...

“God bless,” Charlotte calls out to Monsieur LeBlanc’s retreating back.

Maman pushes herself up like an old woman, staggering under the heft of widowhood, daughters, monies owed, an empty larder. She reaches into her apron pocket, tilts a small bottle of green liquid to her lips, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

“We owe for the week’s milk, and there’s enough for that?” Antoinette says, chin jutting.

“Haven’t seen a sou from you in a month. Still a walker-on at the Opéra, at seventeen years old. You got no idea about work.” Antoinette pulls her lips tight, looks down her nose at Maman, who does not let up. “A measly two francs they pay you for loitering on the stage,” she says, “and only if whatever costume the wardrobe mistress pressed happens to fit. Too high and mighty for the washhouse. Nothing good will come of you. I can see that.”

“Like mother, like daughter, no?” Antoinette says, holding a pretend bottle to her lips.

Maman lifts the absinthe the smallest bit more but only twists the cork back into place. “You’ll take your sisters to the dance school at the Opéra in the morning,” Maman says to Antoinette; and light comes into Charlotte’s face. Three times a week she says how the Paris Opéra is the greatest opera house in all the world.

Sometimes Antoinette shows Charlotte and me the steps she learned at the Opéra dance school, back in the days before she was told not to come back, and we stand with our heels together, our feet turned out, bending our knees.

“Knees over your toes,” Antoinette would say. “That’s it. A plié.”

“What else?” usually Charlotte asked, but sometimes it was me. The evenings were long and dull, and in the wintertime a few pliés in a bit of candlelight took away the shivering before curling up on our mattress for the night.

Antoinette taught us battements tendus, ronds de jambe, grands battements, on and on. She would stoop to adjust the ankle of Charlotte’s outstretched foot. “Such feet,” she would say. “Feet of a dancer, pet.”

Almost always it was Charlotte she bothered to correct. Maman liked to say how it was time I earned my keep, how even the girls in the Opéra dance school were handed seventy francs each month, but already Papa had slapped his hand down on the table. “enough,” he said. “Marie is to stay put, in Sister evangeline’s classroom, where she belongs.” Later, alone, he whispered into my ear that I was clever, my mind meant for studying, that Sister evangeline had bothered to wait for him outside the porcelain factory and tell him it was so. Still I joined in, and even if Antoinette said my back was supple and my hips were loose, even if I sometimes found myself dancing my own madeup dance when the music of the fiddler down below came up through the planks of the floor, we both knew Papa’s word would hold. her eyes were on tiny Charlotte, extending a leg behind her in an arabesque and then lifting it high above the floor, all the while Antoinette making adjustments and calling out, “Arms soft. Knee straight. Neck long. That’s it. You got a neck like Taglioni, pet.”

On Antoinette’s name day when she was eight, Papa brought out from inside the sleeve of his coat a figurine of Marie Taglioni, hovering barefoot, wings spread, only the toes of one foot upon the earth. Nearly fifty years ago she claimed a place for herself in the heart of every Parisian by dancing La Sylphide, and still her legend lived on. Antoinette kissed the tiny face of the figurine a dozen times and put it high up on the mantelshelf to be adored. Anyone looking there would have seen it, a tiny sylph, beside Maman’s old clock. But then Antoinette failed the examination that would have promoted her from the second set of the quadrille to the first and was dismissed from the Paris Opéra Ballet for arguing with Monsieur Pluque, the director of dance. “That mouth of yours,” Maman said.

“I only said to him I could make more fouettés en tournant than Martine, that my footwork was superior to that of Carole.” I could picture Antoinette standing there, arms crossed, insolence on her face. “I’m ugly and skinny, that’s what he says back to me.”

The figurine was gone from the mantelshelf the next day, maybe to the pawnbroker, maybe smashed upon the cobblestones.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008U4BQWO
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books (January 10, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 10, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 961 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 409 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #408,358 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #465 in Historical Biographical Fiction
- #563 in Biographical Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #1,120 in Biographical Historical Fiction

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3.9 1,650 ratings

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Cathy Marie Buchanan

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New York Times bestseller and book club favourite CATHY MARIE BUCHANAN is the author of three novels.

Her most recent, Daughter of Black Lake, was chosen as a Best Fiction for Fall by Entertainment Weekly and Parade magazine. Her previous novel, The Painted Girls, was a New York Times bestseller, a #1 national bestseller in Canada, and was named a best book of the year by NPR, Good Housekeeping and Goodreads. Her debut novel, The Day the Falls Stood Still, was a New York Times bestseller, a Barnes & Noble Recommends selection and a Canada Reads Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade. Her work has been translated into nine languages. Buchanan holds a BSc (Honours Biochemistry) and an MBA from Western University, and recently became a certified yoga instructor. She lives in Toronto.

She'd be happy to skype your book club. For details see http://www.cathymariebuchanan.com/book-clubs

Visit Cathy Marie's website (www.cathymariebuchanan.com)

Connect with Cathy Marie on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cathymariebuchanan) or follow her on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/cathymbuchanan/)

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Urenna

I experienced heartfelt tears at the ending

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2013

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"The Painted Girls," by Cathy Marie Buchanan, is an exquisite tale of three sisters: feisty Antoinette, tenderhearted, Marie, and the youngest, selfish, Charlotte. However, the book centers on the two oldest sisters Antoinette and Marie.
It is 1878, almost the end of the Long Depression in 19th-century France. The sisters, suffering from inadequate nutrition and poor hygiene live in squalor with their widowed mother, a laundress, addicted to absinthe. Their mother has emotionally abandoned them. She squanders her meager earnings on the toxic, "green liqueur," leaving 16-year-old Antoinette to look after her sisters.
Marie and Charlotte are solely dependent on Antoinette, who becomes their caretaker. Antoinette makes a living as a walk-on in a play presented by Emile Zola. Antoinette is the lioness, the sisters' protector. Through lies and petty theft, Antoinette displays the wherewithal to keep her sisters housed and fed.
Prior to getting her role, Antoinette meets a dangerous, young man she falls in love with.
The second oldest, 12-year-old, Marie, senses a personality flaw in the man that holds Antoinette's undivided attention. Later, the man's vile actions will cause division between the sisters and threaten their strong love, friendship and fragile subsistence.
In the meantime, through the help of Antoinette, the Paris Opera selects Marie and Charlotte to train as ballerinas. Marie receives seven francs a month as a trainee.
Marie comes to the attention of the famous painter, Edgar Degas, who enthralled by her waif-like physique, pays her six francs to pose for him. Degas later sculpts Marie, immortalizing her as his "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen."
A wealthy older man, an abonne--season ticket holder at the Paris Opera, is also attracted to Marie. At that time, every destitute, young ballerina wants an abonne. These wealthy men appeared to have enormous control providing their teen mistresses preferential treatment with the Paris Opera House. Nevertheless, Marie is wary and fearful of the affluent man's attentions, and sensed there was more than his interest in the way she executed a plie or ronds de jambe a terre.
Resilient Marie showed her independence by finding work at a bakery prior to her morning classes at the Ballet. The extra money also provided her private ballerina training. Yet, she knows she will need the assist of the abonne to make her dreams become a reality at the Paris Opera.
I did not enjoy the novel until halfway through the book. After that, it was smooth sailing and a wonderful read. The ending about this family left me with a good feeling. No matter what your circumstances, love and unity is an important family tenet.
The book provides some history of late 19th century Paris, France, ballerinas and the fate of unprotected women. Considered second-class citizens, if a woman had no husband and no skills such as seamstress or milliner, she was destined to be a laundress, maid or lady of the night.
However, I found it interesting, citizens overlooked wealthy men's interest in young ballerinas at that time. Today, these men would be considered pedophiles. More interesting, but understood is the reasoning young ballerinas wanted an abonne. Sadly, they had a barely adequate standard of living. Even today, in some countries this is the norm where poor, young girls and boys, because of their circumstances, are exploited by wealthy tourists.
Great summer read.

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Kathleen Valentine

Belle Epoque Paris: The Dark Side

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2013

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Thanks to Cathy Marie Buchanan, and her new novel The Painted Girls, the Belle Epoque in Paris is fully alive, as well as dark and dangerous. Over the years I have had the opportunity to view several exhibitions of paintings by Edgar Degas. His paintings of ballerinas are especially poignant and, while he painted dancers on stage performing, he also painted what most people never get to witness: tired dancers resting on a bench, bored dancers scratching their shoulders, nervous dancers putting on practice shoes. Degas went into the dance studios and hired young dancers to come and pose for him in his studio. Cathy Marie Buchanan's book takes us even deeper into their lives.

The story is a fictionalized account of the Van Goetham sisters: Antoinette, Marie, and Charlotte. After the death of their father the three sisters struggle to survive in the slums of Paris with their absinthe-addicted mother. If you are looking for a pretty fairy-tale about ballerinas and actresses and lives of glamour and glory, you are in for a surprise because the lives of young, poor Parisian girls of this period were anything but glamorous. Antoinette, the eldest sister, is fortunate to have a part in a new play by Emile Zola, but she also works in the same laundry as her mother to pay the bills. Marie and Charlotte have been accepted into the dance school of the Paris Opera but Marie rises early to knead bread in a bakery before going to class and takes jobs modeling to help the three sisters and their mother keep a roof over their heads. Life is far from pretty.

Antoinette falls madly in love with an alluring but brutish boy of the streets and we soon see her headed down a path that will lead to no good. She loves him deeply but he has little future. He spends his time in taverns drinking with worthless companions while she labors in the laundries. Marie, on the other hand, knows she has talent but in order to improve her dance skills she needs private lessons. She pays for these by posing for Edgar Degas and is, ultimately, the model for his poignant statue, Little Dancer Fourteen Years Old.

The story is both beautiful and harsh. The only way for young dancers, who are not from privileged backgrounds, to survive is to acquire a "protector" - an older, well-to-do man who will buy their slippers and feed them well in exchange for their affection. Life for young women and girls in Paris is full of peril and can go in a very wrong direction, very quickly.

Buchanan's Paris is rich and sensuous but also dark and perilous. Her writing is much like a painting by Degas, beautiful and graceful but depicting harsh realities that all the beauty cannot disguise. It is also the story of three sisters driven by the things sisters are always driven by - jealousy and competitiveness but also deep, deep love.

I loved this book. I loved the honesty of the writing and the complexity of the sisters and the people in their lives. It is not a book for someone wanting a pretty fable, it is a powerful story about people you can understand and sympathize with. This is the dark side of Belle Epoque Paris but, as every artist knows, it is the shadows behind figures in a painting that make them come alive.

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Angel

Back Streets of Paris

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2023

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Three sisters and their widowed mother live in poverty. The mother is hooked on absinthe and is lucky to bring home the pay she earns as a washer woman. Antoinette, the eldest daughter works for the ballet at the opera. She gets the lowest wages as an extra when needed. She trains her sisters in the steps and lessons she has had and one day takes them to see if they can get hired on. She thinks the youngest sister, Charlotte has the most talent but surprisingly it's Marie at 13 who turns heads.

This is life in Paris in the 1800's in the not so glamorous parts. These are people scraping for every penny and doing what must be done to survive. I was really engrossed in these lives until about 3/4 of the way through and then it lagged a bit for me but it was a good read. I liked the characters and it brought the seedier parts of Paris to life for me.

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Nivia de Oliveira

Eu esperava mais Degas...

Reviewed in Brazil on April 15, 2022

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...do que sobre o crime que envolveu as meninas Van Goethem. Uma delas, Maria foi a modelo de alguns quadros e da escultura “Pequena bailarina de cartorze anos”.
Além disso, acho que o livro seria mais interessante se tivesse trabalhado mais a “democratização” da mulher que tanto atraia o artista. Talvez histórias mais tensas (e não apenas breves descrições) para denunciar os magnatas que frequentavam as casas de shows (incluindo os próprios pais) e utilizavam as bailarinas como objetos.
Gostei da presença de Émile Zola (ainda que en passant) com a encenação de L’assommoir que retrata o alcoolismo e a pobreza, temas presentes no livro.

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L.H.

Sehr sehr gut

Reviewed in Germany on May 19, 2023

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Ein exzellentes Buch. Super geschrieben, spannend und sehr interessant, ich konnte teilweise kaum aufhören zu lesen! Klare Empfehlung

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Linda Pfeiffer

Historical fact mixed with fiction

Reviewed in Canada on March 1, 2019

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If you knew that between 1878 and 1881, in Paris, France, lived a family of van Goethem women, a mother, and her daughters, Antoinette, Marie and Charlotte. And you further knew that Antoinette had been student at the ballet school of the Paris Opera and was now an "extra" in the shows put on there. And finally that her younger sisters, both Marie and Charlotte were also students of ballet, then you would certainly be right. And then if you were aware that Edgar Degas frequented the Paris Opera to observe these girls at this time and eventually used Marie as one of his most well known models, including his famous Sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, then you would be a good student of history. For all that is true. At the same time, two young men, Emile Abadie and Michel Knobloch were implicated in some murders and their lives and trials made the papers of the day. This is also true.
Now you can sit back and enjoy reading how the author has cleverly woven these two true stories into an interesting tale of dance, poverty, artistry, and crime. This is a innovative way to use real characters and places to suggest a reason why everything turned out the way it historically did.
I found the first third of the book a little slow paced, but it did pick up after that and was a satisfying read.

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Customer

Over hyped, over rated, a thoroughly forgettable book.

Reviewed in India on November 28, 2014

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A most disappointing book. The story is light weight, the treatment pedestrian, the language crude, misses to bring out the most beautiful period of 19th century alive, All in all waste of my time & money

Claudia Saatchi

Paris Opera - the dark side

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 21, 2013

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I loved this novel, set in the Paris of Degas. It tells the story of three sisters, one of whom becomes the model for Degas' Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.

At times it reads like Balzac but Buchanan gets inside the heads of these three girls and creates an inner monologue that is convincing and often moving.

This is a sordid tales of poverty, desperation, prostitution and exploitation as three young dancers struggle for fame and recognition.
Although it has strong biographical elements ist is essentially fiction and powerful fiction at that. Buy it!

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