Page 59 of The Muse (Beautiful Magic 1)
The Raft of the Medusa is an early eighteenth-century painting of survivors of a French shipwreck clinging to a raft in a storming sea. I take the marble steps to the upper floor two at a time, my mind on where I’m going, not where I am, and I nearly flatten a red-haired woman heading the opposite way. I say sorry, but she’s already gone.
If people are running away, it’s got to be worse than the drip Gustave’s friend reported.
I turn the corner and freeze. It’s like gawking at a train wreck—wanting to look away, wanting to see everything, wanting to help and knowing you can’t. The Raft of the Medusa is gushing. Seawater pours out of the massive canvas from the rocky waves Géricault painted, the ones Clio helped him to create.
A custodian races by with a mop and a bucket, wholly inadequate. Next comes management—a man in a suit, barking instructions into a phone until he sees the flood and stops, jaw agape, no clue what to do. When an assistant runs in, slips, and belly-surfs across the gallery, the suit goes back to yelling, and the custodian gets to mopping futilely.
“Close this gallery. Close this gallery now!”
No one notices me duck through the crowd trying to get a look at the chaos. I find the Ingres in the next gallery and recoil at the sight. The blue cushions have folded over the concubine, and all that’s left of her is one eye staring out desperately as the cushions squeeze and strangle her.
The candle in the La Tour has become a red-hot flame, setting the whole canvas ablaze. I reach the Titian just as the mirror tips out of the canvas and plummets to the floor with a deafening crash and a spray of shards. I find Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath shriveled up into tiny hardened pieces, like pork rinds, on the floor.
I text Remy as I join the stream of visitors exiting the Louvre. It’s short and not so sweet.
* * *
Julien: I need to talk to the Muses. Now.
23
Sophie opens the iron gate to the courtyard at the Montmartre house as if she’s been waiting for me. “I heard about the Louvre,” she says.
“That’s why I’m here. Remy says the Muses write notes. Maybe they’ll write me a to-do list for this disaster.”
We head inside and down the hall lined with art, the Jasper Johns and Monet’s bridge, then into the media room and down the dark, spiraling stairs. Meeting me halfway are the bell-like voices I heard the night of Remy’s party. There’s something of Clio’s pure, sweet voice in the sound. It pierces me in a new way, imagining her on these stairs, coming and going with her sisters.
Remy waits at the bottom, waving a piece of paper. “Thalia left a note for you, Julien!”
Not the employee handbook, sadly. It’s only one sheet of thick embossed stationery with a line of handwritten script.
Julien—I’m working at La Belle Vie today. Fastest way to get there is to take the third door on the right. —T
I look at Remy. “Is this a summons?”
He shrugs that Gallic shrug. “You said you wanted to talk to them.”
“Have you met her before?”
He smiles, which eases my nerves some. “She has crazy red hair, and she smells like pomegranates.”
I look for a door, on the right or otherwise, and the closest thing to it is the rectangular outline on the floor, edged by the silver Muse dust. I nod to it. “Do we go through that?”
Remy shakes his head. “You go through that. Sophie and I stay here.”
“It’s for Muses only,” says Sophie. “Only they—and you—can open it.”
I look from sister to brother to the door. So, if anything happens on the other side, there’ll be no one to let me out.
But there’s no time to worry about that. Art is dying, collapsing like a sandcastle at high tide.
“I swear,” I say as I crouch to touch the floor, “if I get stuck underground in Paris like the Phantom of the Opera, my ghost will haunt you both forever.”
Remy laughs. “That won’t be the strangest thing to happen in this house.”
“Good point.”
I kneel outside the shimmering outline. I could ask Remy or Sophie what the Muses do, but I can feel my way through this on my own. I spread my hands over the slab like I did over Clio’s canvas last night and then place my palms on the stone, expecting resistance. But the stone slides over like a door at a department store. Instead of tumbling into a magical underground world of endlessly blue sky and sunlit green hills, I catch myself before I fall into the catacombs.
I don’t understand the fascination with the Paris underground. It’s creepy and airless, and I orient myself as my eyes adjust to the dark. Third door on the right, and I can’t see my hand in front of my face. Taking out my phone, I thumb on the flashlight and find the door quickly, pulling it open by the old rusty handle. A staircase leads up to another door, which puts me in the back room of La Belle Vie, a famous perfume shop on the Rue de Rivoli. It’s full of old-fashioned bottles with puffy atomizers, all hand-painted with delicate flowers and vines. They’re works of art, beauty for its own sake, and it’s somehow not surprising to find a Muse working here while the place is closed.
