PORTRAIT OF MARGUERITE BERARD

        "Painted shortly after Renoir encountered the
        seven-year-old Margot in tears...after a difficult
        lesson with her German tutor."
             Note by the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Margot is most chagrined.
She could not conjugate 
 the verb Glauben
She could not say she believes
 in good and orderly German.

Margot has been soundly corrected
in no uncertain terms,
instructed in belief
in the proper Prussian way.

She would like to twist her tutor's ear.

She would like to bite her scrawny arm.
It would be so delightful,
 Entzucken, indeed,
to pull the fraulein's scarecrow hair
or give her one good kick.

But for now she has fled
down the long hallways
past the family portraits and the dark armoires
past the gleaming mirrors
 with angels on the frames
past the small statues
 of centaurs and nymphs,

Until she runs smack into
 that nice Monsieur Pierre
with the lumps of paint
thick on his palette
 and a spanking new canvas
 propped up before him
and best of all of course
 his eyes
 his quick good eyes
which catch the light 
and give it to his hands.

And Monsieur Pierre dries her tears
with a small cotton kerchief
 a cheap thing really
 of no value at all

And he tells her to stand still
while he sketches her quickly,
then pats her on the bottom
and tells her to go play

As he takes out tubes of blue
 and tubes of white
and a bit of red
 for the high spots
 on her pale cheeks
and brilliant blacks and browns
 to make her two bright eyes

And he squeezes and he mixes
and he strokes and he daubs,
he cuts, he wipes, he pats,
until he has a painting,

a painting of Margot!

which will hang in a museum
many years from now
where other little children
who do not have to learn German,
no, do you hear, not one word,
not one syllable or tense,

will see her and be jealous
long after the fraulein
is good and dead,

so there!

          copyright 1987, James B. Chevallier