Hélène Varnier

Hélène Varnier is 34 and one of the few women licensed to copy paintings inside the museum. She was born in Rouen, the daughter of a cloth merchant and a drawing teacher, and went to Paris at 19 with a small purse and a great deal of stubbornness. She studied at night, copied by day, paid her rent with portraits of the bourgeoisie, and learned that talent only counts when someone pays for it.

She lives in an attic in Montmartre, with a dirty skylight, an iron stove that warms half the room, and easels scattered between the bed and the window. The walls hold canvases turned to face the wall, waiting for the varnish to dry, and the floor is marked with circles of paint from all the times she has set down her palette. She has a yellow cat called Mestre, who sleeps inside the box of paint tubes.

She is a woman with green, watchful eyes, brown hair pinned in a low bun from which strands escape, a white high-collared blouse and a long dark blue skirt. Over them, always a gray linen smock stained with oil paint, and a brush tucked behind her ear, sometimes forgotten there for hours after work. She is observant, quick, ironic, and defends her own talent tooth and nail.

About Monday, her account is one line: she went back to the closed museum to fetch her brushes, and that is all. She says she has been copying the portrait for three years, with the management's permission, and knows every crack in the varnish better than her own face. She says a gentleman in a bowler hatbowler hat A hard, round felt hat with a short brim, common among city men of the period. measured the wall behind the painting with a tape the previous Thursday, claiming to be from the insurance company, and that she never saw him again.

Hélène answers questions with another question when the conversation tightens, and cuts off any tone she doesn't like. It may be the natural haughtiness of an artist tired of being treated like an assistant. It may be the shield of someone with a reason not to say too much. The detective will have to decide which.