All my childhood memories have horses. When we were ten, my girlfriends and I, after class, would remove saddles and reins, and ride our ponies to the village with a simple halter and lead rope, singing and laughing or inventing stories. Then we would tie the ponies up at the olive trees, the rope long enough that they could eat the grass, and cross over a narrow street to a little grocery store where an old lady prepared our prosciutto panini. I can remember the smell of meat and fresh bread, along with the texture of the butcher’s paper. We crossed the street again, being careful and looking at the traffic mirror, and then run toward the ponies, who were more interested in the grass than in us. Sitting in the olive grove with our ponies while having a snack – in Italian we call it merenda – was my favorite time of the week. The ponies had been brought from England to Tuscany by our teacher Sheena, and we loved them. I wrote long poems titled with their names, bad imitations of Shakespeare’s sonnets from the translations I occasionally found in my house. One day my favorite pony, Tredegar, was kicked by another horse in the paddock and broke her leg. This event drove me into the realm of loss for the first time. As a child, you know that danger, illness, death exist but you categorize them as something outside of yourself, your world, and the people you love. I remember Sheena reading my poem for Tredegar in her ‘80s style living room: the leather couch, the burning wood in the fireplace, her English accent holding up despite the crying. Tredegar’s leg eventually recovered and became strong enough not for us to ride her again, but for her to become a mother. That was a new chapter of her life, and for us little girls a lesson on how life goes on and love transforms. Although I couldn’t ride my favorite pony anymore, I could visit her in the paddock, bring her apples and carrots, hug her and get familiar with her newborn.

When I was fifteen, I had a pony in a riding stable close to my house, but not a dog. I never understood why my parents didn’t want me to get a dog. We have a house with a garden in the middle of the countryside, but every time I tried to have this conversation, they cut it short with refusals. I dreamt of a German shepherd; a big dog that could join my horseback riding adventures. But the day I found my dog at the stables he was little, black, scared and joyful, and I knew he was meant to be with me. I named it right away, Calimero, after an old Italian cartoon featuring a black baby chick, and brought him home. My parents said he had to leave the day after. The next day, Calimero was sleeping on the couch between the two of them. Although he was little, not only would he join me on my horseback riding routes, but he would guide them, eventually getting mad at my horses if they didn’t walk fast enough, or follow his instructions. Over the years, he collected the most weird, extraordinary adventures, and since he never got sick and always kept his puppy’s energy, the legend that Calimero was immortal became popular among my friends and family friends.

In 2019 my parents started lamenting that my dog couldn’t walk like he used to. They had to help him get on the couch or in bed and his appetite wasn’t good. He was seventeen. I saw him every morning on FaceTime, from Los Angeles, and dismissed the implications: my dog wasn’t going to die. At the end of July, I flew to Paris and decided to stay there for the month of August, a time when the city is reminiscent of that Camus passage, “I enjoyed the return of silence, the evening’s mildness, the emptiness of Paris. I was happy.” The more my parents urged me to go see the dog, the more I planned to extend my Parisian sojourn. My dog wasn’t going to die, and this would soon become clear.

In the morning, I would walk Rue Napoleon to Jardin du Luxembourg and buy breakfast. There, I would stop for a moment to look at the building where Bernardo Bertolucci filmed the final scene of his most criticized film, Last Tango In Paris. Bertolucci, who passed away the year before, said that at the end of his film Marlon Brando’s character wants to marry Maria Schneider’s character but she runs away. Brando’s character, Bertolucci says, isn’t a hero but a desperate man. He follows Schneider’s character, entering the same building I was staring at while eating my pain au chocolat, and she kills him, shooting him in the balls. According to Bertolucci, that represented the end of the patriarchy. Being aware that the patriarchy was, outside of fiction, more alive than ever, I had a list of things I wanted to do: go see the Calder exhibition at the Picasso Museum, visit Petit Palais, go to Louvre at night, watch Fanny and Alexander director’s cut at L’Arlequin cinema and, most importantly, Berthe Morisot at Musée d’Orsay. What I was trying to do, I think, wasn’t to distract myself from the idea that my dog was dying but, more specifically, to prevent this event. “Time does not exist,” André Aciman told me back in 2017. Few days later, at the Met Museum, in front of Rodin’s Orpheus and Eurydice I could still hear those four words: Time does not exist. 

Walking around Saint-Germain, I decided to visit the Musée Rodin, spending a long time in what I ironically called Camille Claudel’s “room of her own.” I remember being particularly enchanted by her little onyx marble and bronzes The Gossip or Women Chatting and The Wave or The Bathers. I also breathlessly admired her marble Vertumnus and Pomona and the famous bronze The Mature Age. Claudel, who was a child prodigy, spent part of her childhood in Villeneuve-sur-Fère, a commune in northern France, where she began to create sculptures in clay, alone and with the help of anatomical models. Her early works featured Greek mythology and historical characters. Claudel would spend her days in the forest creating, enrolling her young sister and brother – the writer Paul Claudel – as assistants and models. Her first biographer, Mathias Morhardt, wrote that her clay study of David and Goliath had so much strength that the director of the École des Beaux-Arts asked if she had taken lessons with Rodin. But Claudel didn’t even know who Rodin was and, as a woman, couldn’t enter the prestigious school. She went to the Académie Colarossi instead, and rented a studio at 117 rue Notre-Dame des Champs, soon joined by other female students. Paul Claudel noted that “for a man, being a sculptor is a constant challenge to common sense; for an isolated woman, especially one of my sister’s character, it is pure impossibility.” Camille Claudel, who had a “ferocious gift for sarcasm” and an aversion for compromises, ran the atelier until she entered the all-male Rodin studio as an apprentice; she was twenty years old. Rodin recognized her as a woman of genius and an artist on his same level. She rejected bourgeois values and kept fighting to have the same rights as her male colleagues, although she had to face restrictions on nudity and erotic themes, was paid less, and constantly dismissed by those who said she wasn’t really creating her own sculptures. But Claudel had an extraordinary talent for carving marble, she would spend twelve hours a day, standing up, working on a sculpture. Rodin used his influence on her behalf, helped her to get commissions, exhibit her work, and feature in newspapers. 

In 1898, after a ten-year relationship, Claudel moved on in order to be independent, and opened her own atelier. That is when she conceived her most personal work, The Mature Age, a study on the passage of time. The three-figure group, according to interpretation, illustrates Rodin walking away from a girl, Claudel, together with an old woman, Rodin’s longtime companion Rose. In 1899, the French government canceled the commission of the work before a bronze was cast under unclear circumstances. The next year Claudel tried to exhibit it at the 1900 Universal Exhibition and got another rejection. She knew too well that these two events had to do with Rodin. In the gorgeous 1988 film “Camille Claudel,” director Bruno Nuytten entrusts the role of the rebellious French artist to Isabelle Adjani. She challenges Rodin on The Mature Age, saying: “You’re wrong to think it’s about you. You’re a sculptor, Rodin, not a sculpture. You ought to know. I am that old woman with nothing on her bones. And the aging young girl, that’s also me. And the man is me too. Not you. I gave him my toughness. He gave me his emptiness in return. There you are, three times me. The Holy Trinity, trinity of emptiness.” It is true that Rodin had always helped and supported her even after their break-up, but it is also true that he let her down at the time she needed that support the most. Rodin knew that that commission would have changed her career and financial situation in a considerable way, but still he prevented it from happening. Claudel became herself a female David engaged in a battle that was, as she genuinely thought, against not only the French Government or what she called ‘the Rodin clan’, but more specifically against an entire patriarchal society of Goliath. Because her success or her failure depended on the powerful men around her, there was no way she could win. Claudel ended up in disgrace and was imprisoned in a mental asylum where she died thirty years later. Because they wanted her to work on her sculptures, she never did. Even after an entire life of abuse, they couldn’t touch her will. In 1905, Charles Morice wondered why enlightened art collectors weren’t buying Claudel’s affordable pieces which “in the painful ‘later’ of glory and tomorrow, will most certainly reach vengeful prices.” He was quite right. In 2017 an auction in Paris sold her artworks for 3.5 million euros ($4.1 million), three times their estimate. I like to think that somewhere in Northern France thirteen-year-old Camille, a young girl who didn’t believe in creativity but only in work, is smiling.

As I was trying to make sense of time, I knew the time to go to see Proust’s house in Combray had come. My friend Mojca and her boyfriend, Claude, joined me and we decided to go by train. Mojca had visited my family a few months earlier and showed me pictures of my dog, saying yes, he was old, but healthy and happy. She too rejected the idea that he was dying. 

Proust’s house is actually the house of Proust’s aunt Léonie, and Combray is Illers (named Illiers-Combray after Proust’s oeuvre), a commune about two hours from Paris. According to the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way, every year young Marcel (Proust’s fictional self) and his family would get a train to Combray where they spent their Easter vacations. As we approached the town, walking from the station, we finally had a visual sense of Proust’s words:

“One could recognize the steeple of Saint-Hilaire from quite far off inscribing its unforgettable form on the horizon where Combray had not yet appeared. (…) Without really knowing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, of pretension, of meanness, which made her love and believe rich in beneficent influence not only nature, when the hand of man had not, as had my great-aunt’s gardener, shrunk and reduced it, but also works of genius. (…) I believe above all that, confusedly, my grandmother found in the steeple of Combray what for her had the highest value in the world, an air of naturalness and an air of distinction.”

Once we arrived in the village, I soon realized how close my childhood was to that imagery: the church, the countryside, the little grocery store, the narrow streets. Everything corresponded not just to what I’d previously read, but also to the world I grew up in. Maybe in the European countryside houses are all alike, because Maison de Tante Léonie was for me a familiar place that I’d already been; it reminded me of my parents’ house, my grandmother’s house, my grandparents’ friends’ houses. The garden where I spent so many days reading Proust, now corresponded to the garden that opened out in front of a house built on two floors (plus the attic), and many little rooms furnished with ancient things. As Marcel and his family used to call their walks “Swann’s way” and “Guermantes’ way,” so my parents would say, “let’s go to Count Borghini’s way” or my grandmother, “let’s take Doctor Pitto’s way,” they too naming our walks after our neighbors’ names. From the window I looked at the garden, imagining a young boy sitting and reading, while adults dismissed him, urging him to do something real. If the staircase was a memory of pain for the narrator, it roused curiosity and even self-affirmation in me because that was the spot from which I could spy on the grown ups’ secretive life. We walked along Swann’s way, trying to decide where Marcel had met Gilberte. Proust describes her as a little girl with reddish-blonde hair, holding a gardening spade; he says her eyes were so intensely black that every time he thought of them again, they appeared vivid azure to him, so that he especially loved Gilberte for her “blue” eyes, which actually happened to be black. He thought that she had looked at him with disdain, something that she later denies, adding that she was the one thinking he wasn’t interested in her. On that false note of disdain, Proust builds not only an indissoluble bond between love and jealousy but also an entire theory where love always presents itself in the same form. His feelings for Gilberte, he says, were just an initial manifestation of his future love for Albertine and, at the same time, an equivalent of the pain he felt when, as a child, he was waiting for his mother’s kiss before going to bed. “I loved her,” Proust writes about Gilberte, “I was sorry I had not had the time or the inspiration to insult her, hurt her and force her to remember me. I thought her so beautiful that I wished I could retrace my steps and shout at her with a shrug of my shoulders: ‘I think you’re ugly, I think you’re grotesque, I loathe you!’” Laughing at Proust’s tragicomedy scene, we had a picnic and took the train back to Paris. There, I read again:

“This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have become difficult for me to understand. It was a very long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama: “Go with the boy.” The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me.”

The morning I went to see Berthe Morisot’s exhibition, my mother called me while I was on my way to Musée d’Orsay. From her broken voice I understood that the time to go home had come. Suddenly, I felt so overwhelmed that I had to control myself not to burst into tears. “Mademoiselle,” the guy at the security check told me. I gave him my bag and walked in. If I know anything about myself, I know that when in panic, I need to put things in order. And to put things in order for me meant go and see that exhibition.

I’ve always had a special predilection for Musée d’Orsay. I love its permanent collections, its curators, its events, and above all Gae Aulenti’s architecture. As I walked upstairs, two things immediately grabbed my attention: a gorgeous painting of Berthe Morisot made by her sister, Edma, and a statement on a black panel: “Modern novelists, modern painters bore me. I only like extreme novelty, or else things of the past; truth be told, only one exhibition amuses me, the Independents, and I love the Louvre.” 

Manet’s family called her “la belle peintre,” the beautiful painter. She first met Manet at the Louvre and he asked her to pose for Le Balcon. “Poor boy,” Morisot’s mother wrote, “his lack of success saddens him. He tells you with the most natural air that he meets people who avoid him in order not to have to talk about his painting (…) He said naively that Berthe was bringing him luck. Poor Manet, his exhibition, as usual, does not appeal to the public.”  What Berthe Morisot – who sees herself in Le Balcon “more strange than ugly” – really wants from Manet is a feedback on her work, which isn’t easy to get because his praise turns into contempt in an instant. During the war, she leaves Paris to be with her sister Edma and her husband. Manet writes to her: “I hope, Mademoiselle, that you will not stay a long time in Cherbourg. Everybody is returning to Paris; besides, it’s impossible to live anywhere else.” This letter is echoed by her mother’s: “Edouard kept asking me whether you are coming back, or abandoning all your adorers because you have found others…”

Morisot goes back to Paris and keeps working on her vision. She understands too well that in art the only thing that matters is what you do all by yourself, for yourself. She can flirt with Degas and let Manet paint her, but she doesn’t follow either one of them. She is an artist in her own right. On the contrary, Manet is the one who attempts plein-air painting, influenced by her. In 1874, Berthe Morisot was the only female artist at the first exhibition of the Impressionists. Her former teacher Guichard writes to her mother: “As painter, friend and physician, this is my prescription: she is to go to the Louvre twice a week, stand before Correggio for three hours, and ask his forgiveness for having attempted to say in oil what can only be said in water-color. (…) She must absolutely break with this new school, this so-called school of the future.”

Her mother, a bourgeois who despises Zola and considers her daughter’s work as something of no “commercial value,” urges her to marry. She eventually does, late for that time, with Manet’s brother, Eugène. This choice revealed itself fortunate because while he was busy adoring her, she had time to focus on her real interest: her art. After Manet’s death she becomes closer friends with Monet, Renoir and poet Mallarmé. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions from 1874 through 1886, and she exhibited in seven of them. In her work, men see femininity and grace, they recognize a delicate touch, a female hand, and she couldn’t be more frustrated. Morisot is not at all fascinated with the female sex. After the birth of her daughter, Julie, she writes: “I’m just like everybody else! I regret that Bibi is not a boy (…) mostly for the simple reason that each and every one of us, men and women, are in love with the male sex.” Years later she will specify: “The truth is that our value (of female artists) lies in feelings, in intention, in our vision that is subtler than that of men, and we can accomplish a great deal provided that affection, pedantry, and sentimentalism do not come to spoil everything.” Morisot paints women because they’re part of her life and that makes her life a constant study at the service of her art. Her project is to reproduce an emotion and, at the same time, to capture movement. She doesn’t paint just ladies, but maids, servants and wet nurses who are the protagonists of their lives, not as mothers but as workers. In her illuminating essay Morisot’s Wet Nurses, Linda Nochlin wrote: “In insisting on the importance of work, specifically the traces of manual activity, in Morisot’s production, I am not suggesting that Morisot’s work was the same as the onerous physical labor involved in farm work or the routine mechanical efforts of the factory hand – nor that it was identical with the relativity mindless and constricted duties of the wet nurse. We can, however, see certain connections: in a consideration of both the work of the wet nurse and that of the woman artist the element of gender asserts itself.”

Berthe Morisot is a radical painter, and the most stylish of the Impressionists. Since she was never satisfied, her style continued to develop. In her final years she worked on deconstruction, and surely anticipated certain Post-Impressionist studies. Nochlin noticed again: “If we consider that erosion of form to be a complexly mediated inscription of internalized conflict – motherhood versus profession – then surely this should be taken as seriously as the more highly acclaimed psychic dramas of male artists of the period: Van Gogh’s struggle with his madness; Cézanne’s with a turbulent sexuality; Gaugin’s with the countering urgencies of sophistication and primitivism.”

Although not isolated like Claudel, Berthe Morisot still could not be taken seriously. During her life, she sold only 30 paintings. Her death certificate says: “no profession.”

Once I arrived home, my dog lived one more week. He passed away while I was holding him, in his garden. Our neighbors’ stereo was playing an aria from Bellini’s Norma, Ah! bello, a me ritorna. We laid him carefully on the outdoor sofa, with a sheet that belonged to my great-grandmother. While my father and my neighbor were preparing a corner of the garden for his body, my mother painted his portrait on a terracotta. The day before his death, my father and I brought him on his favorite walk. My father was holding him and he looked at the sunset: his eyes were eager and ready.

Camus’ excerpt is taken from Justin O’Brien’s translation.
Proust’s excerpts are taken from Lydia Davis’ translation.