Chapter 7
Charlotte Leclerc is not going to give up her secrets easily. The fire damage is terrible, the conservation made trickier by the artist’s use of black oil paint as background. The painting remains flat because I find it easier on my neck and shoulders to work this way.
“What happened to you?” My face is inches from the surface as I gently roll the swab over a one-by-one-inch blackened spot. My voice echoes in the room, the air return distracting. I set my earbuds to noise-canceling mode.
Unlike me—I prefer a pin-drop-quiet workspace—my mom loved playing music in her at-home studio while working on freelance projects.
I found the music disruptive so would watch her instead of doing my homework.
Her confident hands moved across the art with such control.
Now, seeing my own hands, I’m momentarily halted by how similar they look to my mother’s.
Long fingers, prominent knuckles, veins beginning to peek through the fascia as my age creeps up.
After the cleaning session, when I remove a narrow band of soot along the bottom, I spend the rest of the day meticulously documenting details. Rereading the notes on previous Leclerc paintings, which Cecil sent in a second file.
I already know most of the lore, but some of the particulars are new to me.
Including the musings of a journalist who gained access to the Leclerc art, under the condition that she would keep the collector’s name and location anonymous.
In the article—published in an art and design magazine about seven years ago—this writer speaks of being overcome with deep melancholy; a sense of “impending doom, like a terrible fate was coming my way” is the exact phrasing she used, upon viewing the pieces at the collector’s home.
Hanging original art in homes is highly unusual nowadays, due to flood and fire risks.
A few photos are included with the article, and I flip through those.
The “Leclerc” room is described as “large, windowless, and nearly empty.” I take in the white walls, high ceilings with elaborate crown moldings, and gallery-style lighting.
There is one round burgundy-velvet bench in the room’s center, its pedestal feet resting on a herringbone parquet floor.
Three of the four walls hold Leclerc paintings.
The Healer. The Dreamer. Then the third piece, believed to be the artist’s last, The Child—the painting my mother conserved, which is the one most familiar to me.
Seeing the artworks together again allows me to appreciate the similarities.
Each piece showcases her preference for memento mori, which translated from Latin means, “remember that you must die.”
“Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and Rembrandt, to name a few, have applied this style to their work,” Mom explained when I asked her what “memento mori” meant.
We were at the dinner table, and it was early in her conservation of The Child.
Mom typed something into the search bar, then turned her laptop around and pointed to the images on the screen.
“See here, and here? Artists use elements like skulls, decaying flowers, hourglasses, clocks, and even bubbles, integrating them into the tableaux. Memento mori is meant to represent the fleeting nature of life, Mathilde. It’s very powerful. ”
The Healer features a sole female subject on a black background, one half of her dressed in a doctor’s lab coat, the other half a bare skeleton.
A tiny clock rests where the doctor’s right eye should be, the hands set to midnight.
The woman in The Dreamer is in repose, nude and flat on her back, surrounded by dark vertical slashes purported to be trees in a night forest. Her one visible eye is rolled to the back of her head, her hands in prayer position on her chest, clutching a bouquet of wilting sunset-orange blooms. Marigold flowers, something I learned when researching Leclerc during graduate school; it was a pet project, not part of my official studies, and it was slim pickings.
Charlotte Leclerc the artist was like a ghost; hardly anything had been written about her with much authority.
But it made me feel closer to my mother, even though my research never revealed the answers I sought after her death.
When I shift my gaze to The Child, my throat tightens.
I think of Clementine, only a couple of years older than Charlotte Leclerc’s daughter was when she died.
The grief in the piece is palpable, discomfortingly familiar, even though the art is more jovial and vibrant than her others.
But there is something deeply tragic about it; something difficult to put words to.
The young girl in The Child—her cheeks rose colored, a yellow polka-dotted dress tied with a bow at the waist, red patent leather Mary Janes—is skipping rope.
The rope’s handles, upon close examination, have skulls sculpted into them.
In the top right corner of the piece a subtle, ghostly image is visible within the clouds.
It appears to be an exact replication of the skipping child.
Though one could argue the brain is mirroring the shape into the cloud’s formation, Mom told me, showing me a photo of the finished conservation.
Both then and now I believe Leclerc meant it to be an echo, the image purposeful.
The skipping child blows a gum bubble, which is glossy and pink. The ground under her is pitch black, though there is visible texture this journalist describes as “impressions of flower petals.” I close the file.
The next photo is of a typewritten card, declared by police to be a suicide note despite being unverified as written by Leclerc. It was found in the room where she died. I study the photo, reading the four sentences out loud.
“If you’re reading this, it means I am dead. I promise that I tried. I hope it was enough. I’m sorry, my darling, if not.”
A hard shiver moves through me. I’ve not seen the specifics of the note before, never released to the public, from my recollection, and it unsettles me more than the paintings themselves.
I click over to the next series of photos that Cecil included.
One of Charlotte Leclerc’s medical school graduation, another from the archived website for the hospital where she worked as a surgeon, both of which I have seen.
The photos are grainy and small, showing Leclerc as an attractive woman with shoulder-length blond hair, blue eyes, and thinnish lips.
I have a desperate longing to call my mother. I’m ever surprised by how close to the surface her loss remains; one small scratch, and the wound weeps.
I click into my personal folder, turning up the volume. “Mathilde, it’s your mother,” she says. I smile, remembering how she always started her messages like this, as though her voice wasn’t as familiar as my own.
“Please send me your Christmas list pronto, or you’ll get toothpaste and laundry soap in your stocking. See you soon, ma belle fille. Je t’aime.”
“Je t’aime aussi, Maman,” I whisper. I never did send my list, and four weeks later she was dead. I click play again, and again. And again.