The Painted Girls

I grew up admiring Edgar Degas' stauette Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.  My father frequently took me to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, where a bronze casting of this work was located in the Impressionist galleries, one of my favorite parts of the museum.  The subject was a girl like me, and the ribbon tying her hair was real.  It was enough to make me wonder what her life was like.

Cathy Marie Buchanan was similarly struck by theframed Degas pieces in the ballet studio where she took lessons growing up, but she has turned her admiration into the novel The Painted Girls (#267).  Her book is based loosely on the lives of Marie van Goethem, the model for Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, and those of her sisters Antoinette and Charlotte, all of whom danced at one time or another in the Paris Opera Ballet.

If you're expecting a prettified and romantic version of what life was like for these "petit rats" in the Opera Ballet school, prepare to be disappointed.  If you want to know what life was really like for these girls and women in late nineteenth century Paris, you'll get a faint glimmering from a contemporary review of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen quoted in Ms. Buchanan's novel: "The vicious muzzle of the young, scarcely adolescent girl, this little flower of the gutter, imprints her face with the detestable promise of every vice."   With the paltry wages paid to those lucky enough to make the corps de ballet, the endless struggle to pay the rent, find enough food and keep themselves in practice clothes for the hours and hours of rehearsal required, often meant these "petit rats" had no choice but to seek out one of the wealthy patrons who frequented the theater.  Such a protector could mean an adequate diet and advancement up the ranks of the ballet through their favor. 

Just how Marie, Antoinette and the youngest, Charlotte, try to maintain themselves as a family while supporting a mother addicted to absinthe is tragic, heroic and heartbreaking.  While sticking to the facts known about the van Goethem girls' lives, Ms. Buchanan manages to weave in the story of a notorious pair of murderers which drive the story along to what you think will be the inevitable conclusion...

A gripping read, and one of the best historical fiction novels I have read in a long time.