5
Paris, July 1949
Jasmine was deep in concentration. She was in La Cour Vitrée, the covered courtyard of the Palais des Études, drawing a cast of a man’s foot and it was taking every ounce of willpower to stay focused on it.
Before beginning, she’d studied the naked foot thoroughly, trying to imagine it wasn’t a foot but a random shape she’d never seen before and was seeing now for the first time. She had noted the proportion between toes and foot, the angle of the turn in the heel, the varying sizes of the individual toes and their placement relative to each other. Then, nervously, she’d begun to draw, building up layers on the paper, shading and cross-hatching until the foot was complete. As she held it up to compare it with the plaster model in front of her, she knew at once it was
