Les Soeurs Jumelles - Fiona J. Mackintosh
(Based on the painting “The Two Sisters” by Théodore Chassériau, 1843)
We were always dressed alike, Maman insisted on it. Everyone called us the Thibaudeau twins, never Clothilde and Marie-Bernardine. Our clothes were beautiful, but they were not mine and hers. People said they couldn’t tell us apart, but no one seemed to notice how different our faces were – the eyebrows, the hairline, the set of our mouths. Maman and Papa were no exception. To them, we were two halves of the same whole, and let no one dare think otherwise.
Yet the truth of it was, we were not even sisters. When Aunt Hélène was ruined back in ’23, by a snuff salesman who had passed through Coligny, she flung herself at Papa’s feet, begging for mercy. Hearing the pitch of their voices, Maman, already wearing her waistband high, came to decide what was to be done. The world was told of a double accouchement in Biarritz, far from home. Maman returned triumphant with two babes in her arms, and months later Aunt Hélène came back from a long stay in the south for her health.
No one told me any of this, but, from the earliest I can remember, I knew I was the seed of Aunt Hélène’s sin. I saw her sallow, pointed face in the mirror, no matter how much I pinched my cheeks to make them round and red like Marie-Bernardine’s. She was the hearty one, while I was sickly and slow to grow. Maman told me there is always a smaller twin, the one who is pushed aside in the womb by the other, but I knew I’d never been inside that cramped ball of darkness with anyone else.
There could not be a moment’s doubt that Marie-Bernardine was everyone’s favourite. Maman doted upon her, and Aunt Hélène’s eyes followed her wherever she went. Even at school, Marie-Bernardine was fawned on by the nuns, at least by those who could tell us apart. At récréation, my twin and her friends prowled around me, the bastard child, the poor relation, their eyes wide like I was a juicy leg of beef or a shiny stone.
After school, I’d run off to play with the gamins of the town in exchange for sugar cubes I stole from home. Maman would bring me to Papa for a beating for ruining my clothes. I’d pretend to wail and cry while she listened at the door, but as her footsteps died away, he let me look at his books. I loved turning the thick crackled paper and touching the blue, green, and gold of the illustrations. The beautiful Cassandre in Ronsard’s Odes and Amours, her nose in a rose. Lancelot leaning on the hilt of his sword, dreaming of Guinevere. And my favourite – the Chanson de Roland. Papa said it made a nonsense of history, but I cared not one bit. I loved to gaze at the handsome young knight Roland, riding up the mountain pass of Roncesvalles with the gallant Oliver by his side. Often in the swoon before sleep, I seemed to feel the fair Oliver stroking my face while the dark Roland kissed the creases of my palm.
By the time Marie-Bernardine and I were nineteen years old, we were alike in height and had the same black tresses looped fashionably around our ears. Young men came from as far as Rennes and Nantes to ask us to marry, but Maman was always sure we could do better. When people saw us walking with our maid on the Rue de la Mairie, they smiled to see the closeness between the Thibaudeau girls, but of our real relations, they knew nothing at all. My twin was everything I was not, and I hated every hair on her head.
When the Journal announced that a portrait artist would be coming to Coligny, Maman clapped her hands and said to Papa, “Let’s have him paint the girls.” Papa looked over his spectacles and asked her why she thought he needed a portrait of the daughters he saw every day at petit dejeuner, but he wrote the letter anyway, offering the painter his hospitality and asking his rates for a three-quarter length portrait with two figures.
The answer must have been satisfactory because we were told the painter would be with us by June. Maman had new silk dresses made for us in a broad red stripe, cut straight across the collar bone in the new style. Concerned too much of our flesh would show, she ordered shawls of soft red cashmere from Scotland.
There was great excitement in town when the man arrived. Children gathered round the diligence to watch the strange-looking easel being handed down from the roof. The painter was dapper and rather full of himself. At the dinner table, he could not stop looking from Marie-Bernardine to me, and when Maman asked if he was preparing for the portrait, he replied, “Ah no, Madame, it’s only that I’m quite a connoisseur of twins. I must have painted a dozen or more in different attitudes. It has quite become my forté.” I saw Maman glance quickly at Papa and then down at the glistening oysters on her plate.
The next day, the painter set up his easel in the salon. Aunt Hélène sat in the window seat to chaperone, sewing a hem saver in Maman’s riding skirt. The painter winked at us when she wasn’t looking. He arranged Marie-Bernardine and me standing side by side against the green wallpaper, slightly turned towards each other, and bade me put my arm through hers. Surveying us with narrowed eyes, he leaned forward and slipped the shawl off my left shoulder.
“Voilà! That’s better.”
At first, trying not to move, I stared at the tapestry Papa bought from the estate of a local marquis who’d lost all his money at the tables and shot himself for shame. It showed a fête champêtre with ladies and gentlemen lolling in a riot of embroidered flowers. One gentleman played a lute, and a unicorn ate an apple from a lady’s palm. I dreamt myself into that garden of delights, the gentlemen attentive, the ladies coy but willing. Under the rippled shadows of the trees, I seemed to hear birds fluting overhead and feel the cool grapes on my lips. The handsomest of the men turned towards me with a smile and I trembled, but the painter cleared his throat, and I was once again beside my sister, back aching, eyelid twitching with the effort of standing completely still. My damp fingertips marked the crisp silk of Marie-Bernardine’s sleeve. Not since childhood had we been so close that our breath mingled, and even then, only when we had scrapped and wrestled over something we both wanted. I knew from the sourness under her arms that she suffered as I did, and I felt sure she could smell my règles under my petticoats. I knew she had hers too as I’d seen our rags steeping in the gaudy pink water of the wash tub.
The painter dabbed and daubed. He stepped back to look at us and then at the canvas, a deep frown on his face as if he found us wanting. In an exaggerated tiptoe, Maman entered the room with a line of local ladies in her wake, gratified to show them the great artist from Paris painting her daughters. There was a bustle of maids moving chairs and bursts of whispered laughter as the ladies settled down to watch, pecking at sugared almonds like turkeys in a field. The painter held his brush out at arm’s length and squinted. “Mademoiselle Clothilde, would you be so kind as to raise your chin just a trifle? Comme ça – très bien!”
My neck ached and my feet throbbed in my shoes, and I felt certain I would faint. As my breathing grew more rapid, I found to my surprise that Marie-Bernardine held me up, her elbow bracing me against her body. Before I could think what to make of it, the painter said, “Mesdemoiselles, you may take a rest,” and Maman rang the bell for coffee and cakes. I stepped away from Marie-Bernardine, and her arm fell to her side. Dabbing my upper lip with a handkerchief, I took my coffee to the window seat where Aunt Hélène moved aside her mending to make room.
The painter took a cup from Maman and settled in among the ladies who listened avidly to his chatter.
“I’ll never forget the twin boys in Lyon, perhaps 10 years old, a banker’s sons. They would not sit still for a moment, not even for sweetmeats. Yet I had exactly the opposite problem with two elderly sisters in Tours who kept nodding off. Time after time, I was obliged to come forward to take them by the shoulders and prop them upright again. I was afraid I might have to draw out a mirror to be sure they were breathing for there was no one in the room but themselves and I, and the maid was too deaf to hear the bell when I rang!”
The Coligny ladies laughed with delight, and Maman looked from face to happy face, puffed with satisfaction. The painter held out his empty cup to her with a bow, and she filled it from the pot. “I couldn’t tell most twins apart if you threatened me with the guillotine. With some, there’s not a hair on their heads or a mark on their skin to show their difference, not in plain view in any event. I do my best to distinguish between them as it pleases the clients. Mercifully, this is not always so difficult to do.”
From my perch on the window seat, I looked down into the courtyard where a drayman’s youth leaned against the wall of the house, shirt open at the neck. Glancing up, he whipped off his cap and grinned a gappy smile, and I fluttered my fingers in his direction. Aunt Hélène made a sound, and I braced myself for her reproof, but she was staring intently at the painter who had not stopped talking.
“Take the young Thibaudeau ladies for instance. They are what is known as non-identical twins.” Maman’s cup halted halfway to her mouth. “While the delightful Mademoiselle Clothilde is the very image of her mother, as soon as I entered this lovely home, I noticed that the charming Mademoiselle Marie-Bernardine takes after her noble aunt, Mademoiselle Vannier – something marked about the bone structure. It is to be expected of course. There is a blood relation between aunt and niece almost as close as between mother and daughter.”
As he bowed towards Aunt Hélène in our corner, her mouth dropped open, and suddenly I knew I’d been wrong all my life about which Thibaudeau twin was the bastard. The painter had seen it at once. From across the room, Marie-Bernardine’s gaze caught mine, and we stared and stared like neither recognized the other.
In a flurry of nervous laughter, Maman rose to urge the ladies away – “We have detained our guest long enough. We really must give art its due!” – and the painter stood to bow them farewell. Aunt Hélène looked as if the house had fallen in upon her, her skin grey as distemper. I leaned close and pressed my hand on hers. “Don’t be afraid, dear Aunt – now all is known, you and she are free to be together.” Her eyes were as large as goose eggs, and I feared a little for her wits.
The painter suppressed a yawn and moved back towards his easel. As he held out a hand to invite us to resume the pose, Maman hurried back into the room, all rustling skirts and hauteur, the color livid on her cheekbones.
“Monsieur, forgive me, but that must be all for today. I’m concerned not to overtire my daughters – they are both feeling a little delicate if you understand my meaning.”
The young man paused in squeezing more paint onto his palette and looked from Maman’s face to Aunt Hélène’s. He put the palette down and wiped his hands on a rag.
“Of course, Madame. I am at your service.” As he turned away to cover up the canvas, he made no attempt to hide his smirk.
By the time I came down the next morning, they were gone – not only the painter and his easel, but also Aunt Hélène and the daughter of her heart. So many empty chairs at the breakfast table. I ate one brioche after another while Maman wept bitter tears for the loss of Marie-Bernardine. Papa’s eyebrows were a V above his nose. So rash of them to heed the gossip, he said. It was just the painter’s foolish notion. Everyone could see the girls were alike as two peas, and there was the document in his library desk that proved Maman had given birth to twins before her due time when she’d been in Biarritz to take the saltwater baths. And it must be obvious to all, he said, that Aunt Hélène was too sickly to have borne a child, even if any man had been willing to have her. But by running off into the night in fear of shame, they’d made it seem the truth. Papa shook his head, and Maman wailed, “We’re ruined!” but I smiled into my tasse de chocolat and tapped my dancing feet on the floor.
Some years later, we got word that Aunt Hélène had died of quinsy in Paris, and I wondered what had become of Marie-Bernardine. It’s possible she was kept by some rich man in a magnificent apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Or perhaps she lived in an atelier with a dirty skylight, scrubbing stains from the underclothes of the bourgeoisie. I knew which one I hoped for.
Now Papa and Maman are gone too, leaving me their only heir. Although I have this fine house and all the money, no one comes to ask for my hand. The townsfolk stopped calling after the scandal, but the servants stay on because I make it worth their while. When I lie abed late in the mornings, resting my book against the stable boy’s long, bare back, my eyes are drawn to the frame mounted above the fireplace in which two ghostly, faceless figures are standing side by side. And strange to relate, I feel again my arm through Marie-Bernardine’s, the rasp of her silk bodice on the back of my hand, and I find myself missing the sharp, clean smell of my sister’s jet-black hair.
Originally published by Imprint, an anthology from Fresher Press, 2022
Fiona J. Mackintosh (www.fionajmackintosh.com) is the Scottish-American author of a flash fiction collection, The Yet Unknowing World published by Ad Hoc Fiction (https://www.adhocfiction.com/). She has won the Fish, Bath, Reflex, and Flash 500 Awards, and her short stories have been listed in several competitions in the UK and Ireland. In 2016, she received an Individual Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council
