Mad for Love Read Online Free

the statue was crated up and carried out of the house to the coach as if it were a queen lying in state. And then Sir Joshua was making his goodbyes, and the groomsmen were mounted, and the whole troupe jangled off down the street, bound for Somerset House. And the public display of a forgery.
    “Oh, Papa. I wish I did not have the most awful feeling of foreboding. The same terrible feeling of dread as that awful week before we left France.”
    Her papa would not be drawn by either sentimentalism or fatalism. “But it was a good thing we left France, a great thing. Look at this house.” He flourished his arm like a conjurer. “We never lived like this in Paris.”
    “You were not selling forged paintings like hot horse chestnuts in Paris.”
    “Ah, where is your esprit de crops , your spirit of adventure?”  
    But it was a rhetorical question, because both of them knew exactly where her esprit had gone—left behind in Paris where it belonged.  
    “These forgeries are our security in uncertain times,” Papa insisted. “What if something should happen to me, and there was no money? What would you do—become a seamstress?” He answered his own question. “No! Better to sell a painting. Or loan out a statue.”
    “Oh, Papa, I wish I could make you understand what you are doing is wrong.”
    He made one of his many sounds of Gallic dismissal. “Don’t look at me like that. The loan of the statue is necessary to enhance the reputation of the Blois collection, so the world will know that Comte Charles Blois escaped France with coaches filled with treasures that I may be persuaded to part with in good time, due to the unfortunate fact that I am separated from the family estates, perhaps forever, by the revolution. I have lost my family, but I still have my treasures. A treasure like the Verrocchio Diana.”
    “Except that it’s not by Verrocchio.”
    “Why must you talk like that? It is art! Brilliant art. Why must you be so negative?”
    “I worry, Papa. These Englishmen, they are great collectors, difficult to fool.”
    “ You have become too English, with your need for precision, and your worry, worry, worry.”
    “You may make light of my worry, but one day, Papa, you will overstep. One of your forgeries you will sell to the wrong man.”
    He dismissed such a possibility. “Who? Who will be able to tell? Who knows more than I?” He answered his own questions. “No one. No, they cannot tell, these Englishmen. They are all too happy to snap up our patrimony at what they think are bargain prices. Well, I have bargains for them. And when I think of the money I have turned down already for the Verrocchio, it gives me palpitations. Why, at the auction of my Vermeer, I was offered ten thousand pounds. Guineas! A fortune.”
    “Papa. It. Is. A. Crime.”
    “ Chut . The problem with you is you’re too honest—a rogue branch off the family tree. I blame your mother, God rest her soul. Oh, I don’t say that to hurt you, my child.” Papa came to sit beside her and pat her hand. “You cannot help what you are.”
    “Thank you, Papa.”  
    “What you need is a sherry.” He moved toward the drinks tray. “I will have cognac to celebrate, but you are too English, and ought best have sherry.” He brought her a healthy measure of the nut-brown fortified wine. “Oh, my darling. You must see that I am proud that our Verrocchio is a forgery. It is nothing to make something from one’s imagination—but to copy or create in the style of a genius, stroke for stroke, line for line, chisel mark, by chisel mark—that takes something more than genius.”
    Mignon had heard similar lectures before, but never with quite so much gusto.  
    The rich wine seared its way down her dry throat as Papa went on. And on. “Be proud that your own grandfather had the cunning and eye to sculpt it, and your own grandmother the beauty and poise and scandalous nature to pose for it. For months she stood naked, without moving a