The Blue Hour: What the Portrait Saw
A ‘Trevelver Chronicles’ Lady Isadora story
Lady Isadora Hawthorne, Montparnasse, October 1925
Heat 4 · Very spicy 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
All characters involved in this story are over 18. Isadora is 21; Solange is 28.
★☆★
‘Voilà,’ Solange said. ‘It’s gone.’
‘The light, or your patience?’
‘The light. I have more patience than you think, milady.’
She stepped back from the easel, brush held away from her body like a cigarette forgotten between her fingers. Beyond the great north window, the light had deepened from pewter to clear blue. Behind them, the gramophone needle rode Bessie Smith’s last groove with a soft, regular hiss, like someone breathing in the next room.
Isadora remained on the model’s dais, having been told not to move and having discovered, to her surprise, that she liked being told. Black silk georgette by Callot Soeurs, her mother’s pearls, raven-black hair pinned in a low knot — in Montparnasse that autumn, a more conspicuous gesture than cutting it short. And Shalimar, Guerlain’s new perfume, worn deliberately because it entered a room moments before she did.
‘May I see?’
‘Non. You may see when it’s finished, like everyone else.’
‘I’m paying for it.’
‘You’re paying for a frontispiece.’ Solange wiped her brush on a rag. ‘This is me learning your face, so the frontispiece will be true.’
The frontispiece was for the slim volume Isadora’s press would publish: her translations of Renée Vivien, whom no London publisher would touch. Canvases leaned three deep against every wall. Over five sittings, Isadora had studied them like letters left open on a desk.
Most depicted the same woman: small, dark, round-hipped, her fringe cut straight across her brows. Asleep on the divan; naked at the sink, entirely at home in it. A kimono patterned with cranes hung behind the door, six inches too short for Solange.
Her name was Marthe. Solange had mentioned it once, in passing, and never again. The silence had told Isadora the rest.
‘You’re doing the thing again,’ Solange said. ‘Looking at my walls as though they were evidence.’
Solange lit a Gauloise off the salamandre.
Isadora crossed to the nearest canvas: Marthe asleep, one arm flung over her eyes.
‘She’s your friend,’ she said.
‘Mon amie.’ Solange’s mouth moved round the words with something like amusement. ‘In French that can mean anything from the girl I buy bread from to the girl I sleep with. The language is very discreet.’
She looked at Isadora properly then, through the smoke: grey-green eyes with a painter’s squint; brown hair cropped à la garçonne; a faint scent of turpentine and, beneath it, L’Heure Bleue, an old-fashioned perfume on a woman who was nothing of the sort.
‘You knew what she was at the second sitting,’ Solange said. ‘I watched you know it.’
‘I wanted to hear you say it.’
‘Marthe is my lover. There. I’ve said it, in daylight, to an earl’s daughter.’
‘It isn’t daylight.’
‘No. It’s the blue hour. L’heure bleue, between the day and the night. It doesn’t count.’
Oh, I think it counts.
‘And Marthe?’
‘Marthe sits for a Russian sculptor in the Rue Delambre, and sometimes does not come home until Sunday. She is not mine. I am not hers. Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘It’s what I needed to know,’ Isadora said. ‘It’s not the same thing.’
Solange put the cigarette down and crossed the studio without hurrying. She stopped close enough that Isadora could see paint in the fine lines of her knuckles — cadmium, a little Prussian blue, the green she had been mixing for the shadow under Isadora’s jaw.
‘Five afternoons I have painted your face, and every afternoon I have wanted to take the pins out of your hair. For the portrait, I told myself. The line of the neck would be better.’
‘The portrait’s finished for today. You’ve lost the light.’
‘Then it wouldn’t be for the portrait.’
‘No,’ Isadora agreed. ‘It wouldn’t.’
Solange lifted one paint-marked hand and stopped it an inch from Isadora’s temple.
‘Tu permets?’
Tu. Five sittings of vous, and now tu, laid down between them like a card on a table.
‘Je permets,’ she said, and because she had never in her life waited to be asked twice, she turned her head the last inch into Solange’s hand and kissed her.
Solange tasted of black tobacco and coffee. Her free hand slipped beneath the pearls to the nape of Isadora’s neck, drawing her close until they touched from breast to knee. She kissed like a painter mixing a colour she had not quite found: testing it, pausing, then trying again, a shade deeper. Her fingers loosened the first hairpin, then the next, dropping them onto the boards. When Isadora’s heavy hair finally fell, Solange made a low sound against her mouth, as though something had been proved.
‘Voilà. The line of the neck.’
Someone knocked at the door.
They came apart as though a wire had been cut. Solange’s face changed — something older and more practised — and Isadora was back on the dais, gathering her hair into a rope over her shoulder, her face arranging itself into that of an English lady who has been sitting for her portrait and nothing else.
Breathe. You are a client. You are paying for a frontispiece.
It was Madame Brault, the concierge, with a face like a closed shutter. ‘Un petit bleu, mademoiselle.’ Her eyes went past Solange’s shoulder, took in the English lady, the unpinned hair, the hairpins scattered on the boards like dropped stitches, and came back without any change of expression whatever.
Isadora crossed to the door with her bag already open and folded a five-franc note into the concierge’s hand, where it vanished. Madame Brault, who had understood everything and been paid to understand nothing, went back down the stairs.
Solange closed the door and leaned against it. She tore the card open, read it, and began to laugh helplessly. ‘Marthe.’
The handwriting was round, childish, cheerfully misspelt. Je reste rue Delambre ce soir. Ne m’attends pas. Embrasse ton Anglaise pour moi. Don’t wait up. Kiss your Englishwoman for me.
‘She knew,’ Isadora said.
‘She has eyes. She said you had the look of a woman who knows what she wants and hasn’t yet decided whether to be polite about it.’ Solange pushed herself off the door. ‘You tipped the concierge five francs. I think you decided some time ago.’
She did not come to Isadora at once. She went to the stone sink and scrubbed her hands under the cold tap, each finger in turn, then soaped them and did it all a second time. Isadora watched, and did not breathe until the water stopped.
‘Lead white. Cadmium. Turpentine.’ Solange dried her hands finger by finger on a clean towel, not the rag. ‘I’ve no intention of putting any of it inside an earl’s daughter.’ She held them up, pink and raw. ‘There. Clean enough for milady.’
★☆★
The ladder to the gallery was steep and the Callot Soeurs dress was not designed for ladders. Isadora went up it anyway, Solange behind her with one hand flat against her back — steadying, she said, though it did not stay steadying for long. Under the slope of the roof lay a low divan, lit by the salamandre’s orange glow.
‘Arms up.’
The georgette came off over her head in a rush of beads, and Solange laid it over the gallery rail with more care than she had shown anything all afternoon.
‘I am being careful with that dress. I am less interested in being careful with you.’
Beneath it: camiknickers; silk stockings rolled over round garters; and the flat silk bandeau the fashions demanded. Solange ran a thumb along the edge of it where it bit.
‘Why would anyone flatten these? Mademoiselle Chanel has no bosom and no imagination.’
She found the hooks at Isadora’s side and undid them one at a time, looking up after each, as though checking a proof. When the silk fell away, Isadora felt the cool air of the gallery on her bare skin and the warmth rising from the stove below, and her nipples drew hard with it. Solange sat back on her heels and simply looked — a long, unembarrassed painter’s look at the full curves the bandeau had hidden, the dark tips standing up to meet the air — for long enough that Isadora felt her face warm.
‘You’re doing the thing,’ Isadora said.
‘I am. I’ve painted your face five times, and never this. I’m correcting an error.’
‘Is it a large error?’
‘Enormous.’ Solange bent her head. ‘I shall need to be thorough.’
Her mouth closed over one nipple, warm and wet in the cold air, and Isadora’s breath left her all at once. Solange took her time — the flat of her tongue, then the tip, then her lips drawing the nipple in until the sensation ran along a nerve straight between Isadora’s thighs. One long, rough hand cupped the other breast, her thumb circling as though learning its exact volume for a canvas. When she changed sides she did it slowly, leaving Isadora to feel the cold where her mouth had been.
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‘You’re doing that on purpose.’
‘Évidemment. I want to see what your face does.’
Isadora had never been handled like this, without any hurry at all, as though the whole of her were a subject of infinite delight.
‘Doucement,’ Solange murmured, when Isadora’s hands went to the cord at her waist. ‘You have all night. Marthe has given you all night in writing.’
She shed the collarless shirt, the corduroys and the cotton knickers without ceremony: lean all through, small high breasts with brown nipples, a smear of paint along one forearm, a thin white scar under the left collarbone she did not explain. Between her legs she was entirely untended, a dark, wild thicket that had plainly never met a pair of scissors.
She rolled Isadora’s stockings down, kissing the inside of each knee, then drew the camiknickers away, cool and damp, and Isadora knew Solange had seen the dark mark they left on the silk. She had not known. Her body had made up its mind so thoroughly, from so little, without once asking her permission.
Nothing was left on her but her mother’s pearls. Solange looked, and began very quietly to laugh. Two nights before, in her bath, with nail scissors and a hand mirror, Isadora had trimmed the dark hair into a small, neat heart.
‘A heart. Mon Dieu. We have seen everything in Montparnasse, and we have never seen that. You’re a romantic, milady.’
‘And you’re a hedge.’
‘Exactement. Between us we make one well-kept garden.’
She kissed her way up the inside of one thigh and stopped just short, then the other.
‘And if I told you what I wanted?’
‘Say it in English. In English it sounds less like a police report.’
English failed her; it offered a physician’s words or a stable-yard’s. So she said it in French. ‘Lèche-moi. Suce-moi le bouton. Là. S’il te plaît.’
‘Where did an earl’s daughter learn to say that?’
‘From a book I was not supposed to read.’
The first touch of her tongue was broad and flat and slow, from the entrance of her sex right up to the swollen bud of her clitoris, and Isadora heard herself make a sound she would have been mortified to hear in any other room in Europe.
Then the tongue narrowed to a point and circled, patient and exact, adjusting by fractions each time her breath changed. Two scrubbed fingers slid into her, curling forward, and Solange’s mouth drew on her with a gentle, rhythmic suction until her hips rocked up against that hand without any instruction at all.
‘Solange –’
‘Je sais, je sais.’ Never once stopping.
It came up through her like water rising in a lock, slow, then all at once — her back arching off the blankets, her fingers tight in that too-short hair, a cry torn out of her that rang off the great window and went down into the empty studio below, where anyone might have heard it and no one did.
Solange came up the length of her and lay half across her, and kissed her, and Isadora tasted herself on her mouth, which was new, and which she found she liked.
‘Well,’ Solange said. ‘Now I know what your face does.’
Isadora laughed, and pushed her onto her back, her hair falling round them both like a curtain.
‘Your turn.’
‘You don’t –’
‘I have never in my life done anything because I had to,’ said Isadora Hawthorne. ‘Lie still. And stay lying still, whatever I do.’
Solange’s eyes widened, and then she did as she was told.
Isadora had less art than Solange and more determination. She began at the scar, felt Solange go still, and did not ask. She took one small breast into her mouth, then the other, and found that Solange liked teeth, lightly applied, a great deal.
She learned the long, flat plane of Solange’s stomach and the sharp jut of her hip-bones, and felt the muscles of her thighs jump under her lips, and took her time there too, because turnabout was fair play.
‘Salope,’ Solange said, without rancour. ‘Ma belle salope anglaise.’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea what that means.’
‘You know exactly. You were educated by a governess from Tours.’
Isadora settled between her thighs, pressed her face into the wild dark hair and breathed in. It was nothing Guerlain would ever bottle: musk and salt, something like new bread and something like the sea at low tide, and under it the Marseille soap of that morning. No carnation, no L’Heure Bleue. Only Solange.
She was already wet, and tasted of salt. Isadora found the hard little bud of her clitoris and worked it with her tongue, reading every catch of breath and the hand on the back of her head, not pushing, only there.
‘Your fingers,’ Solange said, hoarsely. ‘Use your fingers too.’
Isadora slid two fingers into her, and Solange’s hips came up hard off the blanket. After that there was no more instruction, only the rhythm, and Isadora kept it steady long after her jaw began to ache, because she was damned if she would be the one to stop first.
Then that hand tightened in her hair and pulled her head up.
‘Non. Not yet. I want to come against you, not under you. Lie back.’
Solange knelt over her, hooked one of Isadora’s legs over her own hip and slid a thigh beneath the other, fitting them together like two halves of a pair of scissors until her sex came down wet and open against Isadora’s. The wild hair pressed rough against the close-trimmed heart, and Isadora gasped.
‘The doctors have a word for this. Tribade. They write about it in Latin so the typesetters will not be corrupted.’
‘I don’t care what the doctors call it.’
‘Nor do I.’ She rolled her hips, and Isadora felt the hard bud of Solange’s clitoris drag along her own, and they both cried out. ‘Tiens-moi.’
Isadora held her by the hips as she ground against her, slow at first, then quickening, her small breasts shaking and her head thrown back.
‘Plus fort, ma belle — don’t be polite with me, you’ve been polite for a fortnight –’
Isadora stopped being polite. She dug her fingers in and drove up to meet her, and Solange swore in French, long and filthy and inventive. The divan creaked. A cushion went over the rail.
She came hard and loud, rigid, her cry ringing off the north window, and the grinding through her aftershocks caught Isadora exactly where she was rawest and tipped her over too, a second time, shorter and sharper, so that they shook together in the stove-light until neither of them could tell whose trembling was whose.
‘Voilà,’ Solange said, into Isadora’s neck. ‘Now that — that was not polite.’
Afterwards, she lay on her back with one forearm over her eyes, exactly like Marthe in the painting downstairs, and breathed.
‘Bon. Not bad. For an Englishwoman.’
★☆★
Later, Solange climbed down the ladder, naked and swearing at the cold, and came back up with a blanket, a bottle of red, one glass, and a sketchbook and red conté crayon.
‘That cannot go in the Vivien,’ Isadora said.
‘This one’s mine.’ Solange began to draw. ‘The book will have the lady on the dais in black silk and her mother’s pearls. The English will think you’re a poetess who writes about violets. This one is the truth, so it goes in a drawer.’
Isadora lay back with the pearls warm against her skin and let herself be drawn.
‘You’re thinking about London,’ Solange said, without looking up.
‘I’m thinking that somewhere between London, where it is too dangerous to name, and here, where nobody minds, there must be a way of living where it’s simply true.’
The crayon stopped. ‘That is a very dangerous thing for an earl’s daughter to want.’
‘I know.’
‘Bon. Keep wanting it. Somebody has to.’
At some point Solange put the sketchbook down, pulled the blanket over them both, and fitted her long cold body along Isadora’s back. Downstairs, the petit bleu lay face up among the brushes. Embrasse ton Anglaise pour moi.
A blue card, and a blue hour, and not one person in the world who matters to me will ever know.
She did not mind. Not tonight.
The record ran down, and the needle rode its last groove with a soft, regular hiss, like someone breathing in the next room. Neither of them got up to lift it off.
★☆★
Solange Verrier’s portrait of Isadora will hang, one day, somewhere a good deal more respectable than a studio in the Rue Campagne-Première. The drawing never will.
Specially edited for Erotic Desires — read more Trevelver Chronicles stories at trevelverchronicles.substack.com. You can meet Isadora again, older and carrying a great deal more, in Remembered by Water, available on Amazon US and Amazon UK.
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© 2026 Chris Shallow. The Blue Hour is a work of fiction.
