A physics professor obsessed with Renaissance art and French cuisine travels to Paris to test the limits of her latest research.
Image generated with OpenAIThe trip that changed the world began modestly one afternoon in the Rubens Gallery of the Louvre. I had taken the midnight supersonic from Los Angeles to Paris for a well-deserved weekend’s respite from months of unremitting work. Not surprisingly, Paris is my favorite place on earth, the only place where I can simultaneously indulge the two great passions of my life: Renaissance art and La Grande Cuisine.
My friends have hastened to point out that Paris lacks a certain degree of romance when one travels alone, but then, I have never thought of myself as a romantic woman.
I was sitting blissfully on a bench, contemplating the lush bodies of assorted nudes cavorting with a variety of nymphs, cupids, and satyrs, when it occurred to me that I had been born in the wrong century. But for a mere accident of 400 years, I could have been the reigning beauty of an age.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gabrielle Van Eck, professor and the present occupant of the Heisenberg Chair of Theoretical Physics at the International Technological Institute, soon to be acclaimed for the discovery of the most significant scientific advance of the century; but of that, more later.
I am French on my mother’s side, Dutch on my father’s, although the purity of the line has been somewhat diluted by twenty decades of Yankee blood. I am thirty-three years old, a shade under six feet tall, and substantially too plump to be fashionable. I do, however, boast a flamboyant mass of bright red hair, unquestionably my most compelling feature, and undoubtedly a recessive throwback to some remote ancestor.
Unfortunately, my body type is not exactly à la mode for the twenty-first century. We are a spare and efficient age, not given to excesses of any kind. Our ideal appears to have been modeled after an American First Lady of the mid-twentieth century whose flat chest and boyish derriere were the inspiration for generations of couturiers.
Being large has ironically made me invisible. The opposite sex ignores me. The bigger I grow, the more invisible I become. Men turn their backs on me at bars. I’m ignored at parties, and my few first dates have never generated a second. I gave up on romance years ago.
This is, in a way, unfortunate. I am a sensualist by nature and would dearly love to indulge more fully in all the pleasures of the flesh. However, no one was interested in my brain since it had the bad fortune to be encased in my substantial body.
The food of my era is spare and lean. Everything is instant, easy, freeze-dried, filled with minimum daily requirements, and tasteless. Eating long ago ceased to be a social activity among the upper classes. The wasted hours once devoted to food preparation and consumption are now put to better and more efficient use in intellectual or sexual endeavors.
Eating is my vice. I inherited it from my mother. She bequeathed me a large collection of out-of-print, twentieth-century cookbooks in whose crumbling pages I have found undreamt of delights. On weekends I often take my vehicle to the agricultural outskirts of Los Angeles, where it is still possible, for a price, to buy fresh produce and freshly slaughtered meat and poultry.
I return home with my bounty and spend hours preparing my feast; confit de canard en croustille, entrecote aux echalottes, crepe aux marrons, all washed down with a bottle of Chateau Troplong Mondot, Grande Cru Classe, St Emilion 2021. I always set my table with silver, old Limoges, and fine crystal, and spend hours savoring each sumptuous morsel.
My friends think that I am insane, but fortunately physics professors are permitted their little eccentricities, and no one ever mentions it, at least, to my face.
Naturally, I pay a price in pounds. I rapidly outgrew most fashionable clothing long ago, but then, one does not need to dress in the height of fashion to lecture undergraduates.
I graduated from university some years ago with a major in Renaissance Art. As you might imagine, most of the world’s leading museums already had their curators, and for lack of suitable employment I was forced to embark upon a graduate education. My mother, who wished for me to be more upwardly mobile, suggested that I go to medical school. I rejected that idea as quite unacceptable.
It is true that there is a certain drama in appearing masked and gowned in the operating room, like a deus ex machina, scalpel in hand, to save someone’s life at four in the morning, but I am, after all, a Libra, and Libras are very smart, very sensuous, and exceedingly lazy.
It was clear that I needed to devote my life to something more cerebral and less strenuous. I found it in Physics. It took me some years to complete my doctorate in temporal field theory, but it was, if I say so in all modesty, a brilliant piece of work. I was hired on the spot as an assistant professor at the Institute, rose rapidly through the ranks of academe, and settled my – by now quite ample – bottom, comfortably into the Heisenberg Chair of Theoretical Physics in which you may find me seated today.
I had come to Paris on sabbatical to clear my head, and to contemplate the consequences of my most recent piece of work. My paper on “The Theoretical Implications of Temporal Mass-Energy Transport,” destined for Physical Review Letters, was in a secure, encrypted file on my computer. In lay terms, I had just invented the proverbial time machine.
Aficionados of science fiction no doubt expect it to be at least the size of a small limousine, complete with gears, panels, and flashing red lights. In fact, the entire temporal field generator is about the size of a fingernail. I live in mortal fear of dropping the thing into a bowl of bouillabaisse or flushing it down a toilet.
I have, of course, tried it out, but not in any big way. I’ve gone back in time a few hours, usually after a particularly divine meal, and eaten dessert all over again. The second slice of strawberry cheesecake was even better than the first. Thus far, I might add, this activity has not produced any symptoms of indigestion.
I have not yet shared my discovery with the physics community at large. As you can imagine, the moral implications are staggering, not to mention the commercial possibilities. I felt somehow that the first big journey had to be mine alone. I wanted to get there before someone started selling tickets to the Crucifixion or writing “Atlantis on $15 a Day.” It was that afternoon, in the Medici Gallery of the Louvre, that my itinerary became clear.
Being a rather sophisticated and experienced traveler, I kept two contradictory maxims firmly in mind; travel light, and be prepared. Preparation was a complex matter. I began by requesting computer searches on every aspect of early seventeenth-century European life: clothes, coinage, cuisine, customs, religions, sanitation, morals, medicine and local politics. I supplemented this with all the information I could find on the lives and personalities of my favorite painters. I spent hours in the language laboratory, mimicking recordings of seventeenth-century Dutch, Flemish, and Italian. I could never hope to pass anywhere as a native, but with luck, I could convince people that my dreadful accent was English.
I engaged the services of a dressmaker and a silversmith, the former to furnish me with a small but basic wardrobe, and the latter to issue me an adequate supply of Dutch coin. I also had him create a setting for my field generator so I could wear it on a sturdy chain around my neck. To the uninitiated, it appeared to be a locket of old, oxidized silver.
Although I considered taking a weapon, I decided against it. One could always disappear into the future if things got too dangerous. The remainder of my preparations were medical. I confess to being something of a hypochondriac. My greatest fear was that I might contract some incurable disease in the course of my travels. Consequently, I devoted a major part of my baggage to medical equipment: antibiotics, antipyretics, analgesics, antidiarrheals, and a small but complete minor surgical kit. I had a booster on my yearly contraceptive shot and had myself vaccinated against every obscure malady I could think of. How embarrassing it would be if the world’s first time traveler died of smallpox, or even worse, of the clap.
Finally, I was ready. Dressed in costume, in my hotel room, my equipment stashed in a large, shabby linen bag, I opened my locket, set the date, time, and GPS coordinates for my journey, and activated the temporal field.
The Maison de Rubens is still a tourist attraction in present-day Antwerp. It lacks, of course, the magnificent collection of art and of Greek and Roman antiquities that once graced it, but it is still a most impressive structure. The forty-room house is on the Place de Meil, a quiet street in a pleasant residential district. In its day it was considered quite lavish. Rubens’ first wife, a plump hausfrau named Isabella Brandt, presided with considerable finesse over the two kitchens, keeping her spouse, her three children, and eight or ten live-in apprentices exquisitely well fed.
I materialized at approximately eight AM in an empty spot in the front courtyard. Fortunately, there were no witnesses. At that hour, I knew the house would be wide-awake and into its work routine. At precisely noon, the studio would open to the public so that Rubens’ wealthy patrons might admire, purchase, and commission his work. I planned to join them for an unobtrusive view.
As I was getting my bearings, the front door was opened by a handsome young man in a paint-stained smock.
“There you are,” he said. “You’re late.”
“Excuse me?”
“Hurry up,” he said, “We’re all waiting. We can’t start without you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I mumbled.
“You are the new model, are you not?” he asked in a tone just bordering on exasperation.
“Oh,” I said, “Yes, of course I am.”
I followed him, not without some trepidation, into the house.
“I am Peter Van Breen,” he told me as we ascended the stairs. I am apprenticed here.”
“Gabrielle Van Eck,” I said.
Surprisingly his name was unfamiliar to me. So much for the thoroughness of my computer data search.
We entered a bright noisy room on the top floor. Numerous people were busily engaged in applying paint to canvas. I recognized several segments of the famous Maria de Medici series; twenty-one magnificent paintings, glorifying one of the ugliest women in all Europe.
Presiding over it all was Master Rubens, a tall, bearded aristocratic man who never seemed to stop working or smile. He stared at me as we entered the room. Then he approached and circled me as if I were a prime piece of horseflesh.
“She’ll do,” he told Peter.
“You may take your clothes off in there,” he informed me, gesturing toward a curtained alcove. For a moment I was paralyzed. Fear and embarrassment wrestled with scientific training. Finally, the latter won out.
To be painted by Rubens! What an incredible coup. I overcame my anxiety and undressed.
Not surprisingly, my anatomy aroused about as much prurient interest as a used tube of oil paint. I was poked, prodded, and rearranged into a pose that I can only describe as excruciatingly uncomfortable. After only a few moments I was ready to concede that modeling was far more difficult than physics. My neck ached. My spine was stiff. Beads of sweat dropped relentlessly down my forehead and between my breasts. Every muscle in my back seemed to be in simultaneous spasm.
Finally, it was over.
“You did well,” said Rubens. “I shall require you tomorrow at the same time. My wife will show you your room and you may join us for the mid-day meal.”
Madame Rubens, a plump, graying lady in an immaculate white cap escorted me downstairs to a tiny but scrupulously clean chamber. There was a narrow bed heaped with white pillows and a heavy comforter. The floor was bare but scrubbed pale and clean. A bright blue pitcher rested atop a small chest, and a chamber pot lay discreetly in the corner. I thanked her warmly and immediately collapsed.
Lunch was a noisy and delicious affair. The entire establishment feasted on freshly baked bread, hot noodle pudding, roasted fowl, and a hearty red wine. Peter Van Breen chose a seat next to me, staring at me between courses while I pretended not to notice.
He sought me out after lunch.
“Your face,” he said, “is quite perfect. It would give me great pleasure to paint you. Could I persuade you to pose for me when you are not otherwise engaged?”
I groaned. The very thought of sitting still for one more moment was almost unendurable. On the other hand, Peter was remarkably attractive. There was something about the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck; something about the gusto with which he attacked his chicken leg that I found almost irresistible. I agreed.
The following Sunday I went to his room; a spacious well-lit chamber where he did his own work. I sat quietly, fully clothed, as he examined my face from all angles and carefully applied oil to canvas.
There was an excitement each time he looked at me that kept both of us on edge. It hung in the air like a tangible presence. When the light finally faded, Peter put down his brushes and drew me to my feet. I looked at the canvas and caught my breath. It was truly a masterpiece.
Behind me I felt his hands, lightly brushing my shoulders. I turned towards him. Our mouths met, touched slowly, languidly, his tongue gently probing all of my secret places. My nipples came erect under his palms as he guided me gently to his bed. I had always known that my body was as much a connoisseur as my palate. In the hours that followed I found myself aroused in ways I had never thought possible. When it was finally over, I knew that I had been waiting for him all my life. It was clear, from then on, that we would be together.
At first, we were quite discreet. The Rubens were the epitome of respectability, and Isabella would not tolerate any but the most conventional behavior in her home. After a while, however, it became apparent to the small community of artists in residence that we were in love, and we were treated with a mixture of tolerant amusement and indulgence.
The weeks passed. My days were filled with modeling, listening, observing and secretly recording my careful observations. My nights were filled with Peter.
Peter was a delight; a magnificent painter and an accomplished lover, he shared with me all the passions of the flesh. Our lovemaking was tender, inventive, exciting and frequently followed by a six-course feast, eaten languidly in bed. The sequence of portraits of me that he did showed a gradually increasing girth and a rapidly increasing sense of contentment and pleasure. I should have known it could not last.
One Sunday morning, my blissful repose was shattered by a series of coughs. I rolled over and buried myself under the nearest pillow. The coughs persisted. Admitting defeat, I warily opened one eye. Peter was sitting at the edge of the bed looking ghastly. I touched his forehead. It was burning hot. His breaths were labored and rattled, interspersed with great hacking coughs that brought forth large quantities of yellow sputum. His face was a ghostly gray.
“Dear one, what is it?” I asked, although I already knew.
“I can’t breathe,” he whispered. “I feel like I’m dying.”
Unfortunately, he was probably correct. Pneumonia was usually fatal. Now I understood why Peter had never made it into my computer database.
“Of course, you’re not dying,” I lied. “Get into bed.”
I propped him up with a few pillows and smoothed the covers.
“Gabrielle,” he whispered, “get the doctor.”
That was about the last thing I intended to do. Rudimentary as my knowledge of medicine was, I was certain that to obtain a physician would be a fatal mistake.
I nodded compliantly and left the room. Shortly thereafter I returned, laden with my supplies. I coaxed him into drinking a hot broth mixed with antibiotics and aspirin and slipped him a mild sedative so that he could rest. When he awoke, I pounded his back, forcing him to cough up the foul mucus that blocked his lungs.
“What is this?” he grimaced, disliking my potion.
“The doctor sent it,” I lied. “Finish it now.”
He made a face but complied, too weak to do anything else.
I sat up all night, soothing him with cold cloths and dosing him with antibiotics. About four in the morning, his fever broke and he slept quietly.
I had acted without hesitation and without thinking of consequences. Only now did I realize that I had saved a life that perhaps should not have been saved. The woman had overruled the physicist. It was the physicist who must now calculate the consequences.
In the morning, a knock on the door brought Isabella and a dour-faced man in black whom she introduced as the physician.
Peter smiled. “I’m much better this morning, doctor. Thank you for the medicine. It tasted foul but it worked well.”
“I sent no remedy,” he said. “Mistress Rubens sent for me only this morning.”
“Hush, my dear,” I said. “You were delirious last night. You must have dreamt it.”
The doctor examined Peter thoughtfully.
“You must be bled,” he announced.
“No,” I protested. “You’ll only make him weaker. Leave him alone.”
“Gabrielle!’ said Peter. “How dare you question him? This is no business for a woman. Leave us. You embarrass me.”
I stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind me. It was like waking up from a long, drugged sleep. I had embarked upon a brilliant and pioneering scientific expedition and had spent it all in bed with the first attractive body that had come to my attention. How could I? I was a visitor who didn’t belong there. I knew Peter loved me, but as what? I was his model, his muse, and his inspiration, but I could never reveal to him the intellect that undoubtedly surpassed his own.
It was time to go home. Sadness gradually replaced my anger and I returned to Peter’s room. He was lying in bed, pale and enervated but not feverish.
“I’m sorry, my love,” he said. “I didn’t mean to get angry.”
“I know,” I said and held him quietly.
That night I lay in his arms for the last time. Although it was against my medical judgment, I allowed him to make love to me. I do not consider myself a sentimental woman, but I confess that there were tears in my eyes as I realized how much I had come to care for this good-natured and extraordinarily talented man.
As soon as he fell asleep, I assembled my things and slipped quietly out of the house. I found a deserted spot in the alley and activated my temporal field.
Two minutes and 457 years later I arrived in my hotel room. I changed rapidly to my twenty-first-century clothes, rearranged my hair, and took a taxi to the Louvre.
It was early morning and the air smelled of spring. The lilacs were blooming in the Tuilleries. I had left late in summer, and I wondered how much of my sabbatical still remained. I walked across the courtyard, anxious to reexamine the Rubens, knowing which ones I had appeared in, and which corners had been the work of my Peter.
I strolled serenely into the gallery and stopped in horror. The Rubens were gone. In their place, on all sides, were paintings of me. It was like a hall of mirrors. There I was, lounging half-nude with a cupid at my feet. In another corner, I was sitting demurely, one breast coyly protruding from my bodice. Yet another wall revealed me as Diana the Huntress with a bow and arrow. I recognized all the paintings but one. He must have done that from memory. I was sitting at a window at sunset, my red hair ablaze, staring sorrowfully into the distance.
Those were not all. The next two rooms were filled with his later work; sadder, more mature, in darker more somber colors, but still with that magnificent play of light and shadow and the exquisite rendering of features that had marked his earlier efforts. I was awed, so I purchased the catalog.
Peter Van Breen, born 1599, died 1658, began his career as an apprentice of Peter Paul Rubens, a minor but popular Renaissance painter. Van Breen rapidly surpassed his master to become the giant of the Flemish school of the seventeenth century. His earliest works are all portraits of his mistress Gabrielle, who disappeared mysteriously and is believed to have died in 1623. Van Breen spent years trying to find her.
I hovered between delight, sadness, and horror. I had unthinkingly violated all the well-established rules of time travel. What other changes had I accidentally wrought in my century?
I sauntered casually out of the Louvre, my heart pounding. There was a newsstand at the corner. I bought the International Herald Tribune and the Paris edition of Vogue. Something was wrong with the cover. The cover girl weighed at least 200 pounds. I flipped through the pages. My God! They were all 200 pounds. A special edition? I went back and purchased Playman. The centerfold was a cornucopia of abundant flesh.
I glanced up and surprised a very attractive Frenchman in a conservative business suit who was eyeing me appreciatively. Things were beginning to make some sense now. He smiled. I blushed.
I wondered if I still occupied the Heisenberg Chair of Theoretical Physics at the International Technological Institute. Indeed, I wondered if there still was an Institute. I smiled back at the Frenchman and decided I could wait until tomorrow to find out.
