Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art

by Christopher Moore

  She actually passed his studio on rue Caulaincourt, and Henri was tempted to stop in and refresh himself with a cognac before continuing, or more likely, not continuing, and finish his evening out at the Moulin Rouge, but he fought the urge and followed her around Montmartre Cemetery and into the Seventeenth Arrondissement, to the neighborhood known as the Batignolles. This was one of Haussmann’s new neighborhoods, with wide boulevards and standardized buildings, six stories tall, with mansard roofs and balconies on the second and top floors. Clean, modern, and devoid of much of the squalor that had marked old Paris, and for that matter, Montmartre.

  When they had gone perhaps twenty blocks southwest, most of it with Henri huffing and puffing to keep up, the girl turned abruptly off rue Legendre to a side street that Henri did not know. He hurried to the corner, as fast as his aching legs would carry him, so as not to lose her, and nearly ran into a young girl in a maid’s uniform who was running the other way. Henri excused himself, then removed his hat and peeked around the corner. Juliette was not ten feet away. Beyond her stood the little Colorman.

  “Was that our maid?” asked Juliette.

  “Accident,” said the Colorman. “Couldn’t be helped.”

  “Did you scare this one, too?”

  “Penis,” he explained.

  “Well there’s really no excuse for that, is there?”

  “Accident.”

  “You can’t just accidentally penis someone. She better have made supper and drawn me a bath before you frightened her off. I’m exhausted and I’m taking Lucien to London tomorrow, where I’m going to bonk him in every corner of Kensington.”

  “How do you bonk someone in the Kensington?”

  She growled something in a language that Henri didn’t understand, unlocked the gate, and led the Colorman up the stairs. Henri stepped around the corner and watched the gate swing shut.

  So that was it. She was connected to Vincent’s little Colorman. But how? Father, perhaps? Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would find out. Now he had to be back on the butte at the Chat Noir to meet Lucien. He limped to avenue de Clichy and a cabstand, then rode back up the hill in the back of a carriage.

  He waited for Lucien at Le Chat Noir until nearly ten, then, when the baker did not show, made his way to the Moulin Rouge, where he drank and sketched the dancers until someone, he thought it may have been the clown La Goulue, poured him into a taxi and sent him home.

  THE NEXT MORNING, AT WHAT HE CONSIDERED A SAVAGE HOUR, HENRI crouched in an alley off avenue de Clichy, with a portable easel, paint box, and folding stool, waiting for the girl to pass. Every few minutes, a boy he had hired would bring him an espresso from the café around the corner, he would splash a bit of cognac into the cup, then he would shoo the boy away and resume his watch. He was three espressos and a cigar into the mission when he spotted Juliette as she rounded the corner, wearing a simple black dress and parasol and a hat decorated with iridescent black feathers with a smoke chiffon scarf as its band, which trailed behind her as she walked. Even from a block away her blue eyes were striking, framed by all the black silk and white skin, and he was put in mind of Renoir’s vibrant, blue-eyed beauties, all of the color, but none of the softness, at least not here, on the street. In Lucien’s studio yesterday, well, there her edges had softened.

  He ducked into the alley and extinguished his cigar on the bricks, then flattened himself against the wall. As a boy, he had sat in hunting blinds with his father, on their estate outside of Albi, and although he’d spent most of his time in the blind sketching the trees, the animals, and the other hunters, the count had taught him that stillness and patience could be as vital to a hunt as the stealth and agility of the stalk. “If you are still enough,” his father would say, “you become part of your surroundings, invisible to your prey.”

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Henri,” Juliette called as she walked by.

  Well fuck the count—great, eccentric, inbred lunatic that he is, anyway, thought Henri.

  “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Juliette,” he called back. “Tell Lucien I waited for him last evening.”

  “I will. Forgive him, he had an exhausting day. I’m sure he’s sorry he missed you.”

  He watched as she was carried away by the stream of people on the avenue, then signaled to the coffee boy, on whom he loaded up the easel, the stool, and the paint box.

  “Come, Captain, we are on to Austerlitz!”

  The boy rattled along behind him, dragging the legs of the easel and barely able to keep himself from tripping over the stool and the paint box. “But, monsieur, I am not a captain and I am not allowed to go to Austerlitz. I have school.”

  “It’s just an expression, young man. All you need to know is you shall receive twenty-five centimes for your efforts, providing you don’t dash my poor paint box to splinters on the cobbles.”

  After a few blocks Henri led the boy down the street where he’d followed Juliette the night before, then paid the boy to set up his easel on the sidewalk opposite her building. It occurred to him, then, that if he were going to pretend to paint, for perhaps hours, that he was going to have to actually paint. Should the Colorman appear after watching him out the window for hours, he’d actually have to have some color on the canvas.

  He had only one small canvas in the holder in his paint box. A bit of a dilemma. He hadn’t painted en plein air very often, but the master of the method, Monet, said that no decent painter should ever work outdoors on a single painting for more than an hour at a time, lest he be trying to paint light that is no longer there. Even now, the master was probably in Giverny or Rouen with a dozen canvases set up on a dozen easels, moving from one to the next as the light changed, painting exactly the same subject, from the same angle. If someone thought he was painting haystacks or a cathedral, Monet would have thought them quite the dimwit. “I’m painting moments. Unrepeatable, singular moments of light,” he would say.

  Fortunately for Henri, this little street looked as if it held one single, intolerably dull moment. Although just two blocks off the bustling avenue de Clichy, it might have been a street in a ghost town. There wasn’t even the obligatory bent-backed oldster sweeping his or her front step, which he was certain was an ordinance in Paris. A whore, a shitting dog, or an oldster sweeping the steps—one or all was required by law. He’d run out of cognac before he ran out of canvas, unless something exciting happened, like a cat decided to jump onto a windowsill.

  He sighed to himself, set up his stool, poured a bit of linseed oil into one of the little palette cups, some turpentine into the other, then squeezed out a small dollop of burnt umber onto the wooden palette, thinned it with the turpentine, and began to sketch the Colorman’s front door in oil with a thin bristle brush.

  Having decided that the theme of this picture would be a deserted street, he was almost disappointed to hear footsteps from the courtyard of the Colorman’s building. The building’s concierge, a wizened widow, appeared at the first-floor window, then ducked behind a curtain as the gate latch clanked. Every apartment building in Paris had a concierge who, by some sort of natural selection, was both extraordinarily nosy yet loath to be accused of it.

  The Colorman backed his way through the wrought-iron gate, pulling behind him the wooden case nearly as large as himself.

  Henri could feel the hair stand up on the back of his neck and he wished he hadn’t become so engrossed in his painting that he’d completely forgotten to drink, because he could have used another cognac to still his nerves. Now he leaned into his canvas and pretended to be meticulously working on an edge when, in fact, he very seldom worked up close to the canvas and preferred long-handled brushes.

  “Monsieur!” said the Colorman, crossing the street, his great case bumping his heels as he moved. “Remember me from avenue de Clichy? Monsieur, can I interest you in some color? I can tell from your excellent hat that you are a man of taste. I have only the finest earths and mineral pigments, none of that false Prussian shit.”

  Henri loo
ked up from his painting as if he’d been awakened from a dream. “Ah, monsieur, I did not see you. I tell you honestly, I do not know the state of my paint box today. Perhaps I will have need of your wares.” Henri pulled his paint box out from under the easel, unsnapped the latches, and opened it. As he’d planned, it was a sad cemetery of crushed and depleted paint tubes, twisted sacrifices to beauty.

  “Ha!” said the Colorman. “You need everything.”

  “Yes, yes, one of everything,” said Henri. “And a large tube each of lead white, ivory black, and ultramarine.”

  The Colorman had opened his own case on the street, but he stopped. “I don’t have a large tube of ultramarine, monsieur. Only a very small tube.” His eyes were set so far back under his brow that Henri had to bend down to see what emotion was there because the Colorman’s voice sounded full of regret. Not what Henri expected.

  “No matter, monsieur,” Henri said. “I will take what you have, a small tube is fine. If I need more blue I can always—”

  “None of that Prussian shit!” barked the Colorman.

  “I was going to say that I can always use stand oil and glaze what little I have over white.”

  The Colorman cocked his head. “No one does that anymore. That’s the old way. You new fucks putting paint on with a trowel, that’s the way now.”

  Henri smiled. He thought of Vincent’s calculatedly violent palette-knife paintings, paint so thick it would take half a year to dry, even in the arid South. Then his thought of Vincent went dark as he remembered the letter. The Colorman had been in Arles.

  “Well,” Henri said, “better the old ways than use that Prussian shit.”

  “Ha! Yes,” said the Colorman. “Or that synthetic French ultramarine. I don’t care what they say, it’s not the same as the blue from lapis lazuli. It is not the sacred blue. You will see. You will never find a finer color, monsieur.”

  At that moment, seeing the color in the case, the pentimento that had been rising in Henri’s mind became a clear, vivid image. He had seen them together, one time outside of his studio, Carmen and the Colorman. How had he forgotten? “Actually, I have used your color before. Perhaps you remember?”

  The Colorman looked up from his case. “I would remember selling to a dwarf, I think.”

  Henri wanted right then to bash the twisted little creature’s brains in with his walking stick, but he calmed himself enough to just snap, “Monsieur, I am not a dwarf. I am fully seven centimeters taller than the requisite for a dwarf, and I resent your implication.”

  “So sorry, monsieur. My mistake. Still, I would remember selling to you.”

  “Your color was obtained through a girl who modeled for me, a Mademoiselle Carmen Gaudin. Perhaps you remember her.”

  “Is she a housemaid? My maid quit yesterday.”

  “Your standards were perhaps too demanding for her?”

  “Penis,” explained the Colorman with a shrug.

  “Ah, I understand,” said Henri. “Mine refuses to do windows. No, Mademoiselle Gaudin was a laundress by trade. A redhead, perhaps you remember?”

  The Colorman lifted his derby and scratched his head as if trying to conjure a memory. “Sure, maybe. The redheaded laundress. Yes, I wondered where she got the money for color.”

  Actually, at the time, Henri had wondered that as well, since she’d brought him the paint as gifts. “For our pictures,” she said.

  “Do you know where she is now?” asked Henri. “She used to work at the laundry near Place Pigalle, but they haven’t seen her.”

  “That one was called Carmen, right?”

  “Yes, Carmen Gaudin.”

  “She got very sick. I think maybe she died.”

  Henri felt a blow to the heart. He hadn’t intended to ask about her at all. He thought he was through with her. But there was a loss, in that instant, at hearing the Colorman’s words.

  The Colorman put his hat back on. “She had a sister who lived in the Third, not far from Les Halles, I think. Maybe she went there to die, huh?”

  “Perhaps. How much for the color?” said Henri. He took the paint tubes and laid them across the bottom of his paint box, then paid the little man what he asked.

  The Colorman pocketed the bills. “I should be making more blue soon, if you run out. I’ll come around to your studio.”

  “Thank you, but I prefer not to be disturbed at my studio. I will come to you, now that I know where you live,” Henri said.

  “I move a lot,” said the Colorman.

  “Really, have you ever been to Auvers-sur-Oise?” Aha! Henri thought. I have you now.

  “Auvers?” The hat came off, more head scratching, looking at the upper floors of the buildings for an answer. “No, monsieur, why do you ask?”

  “A friend of mine wrote me a letter from there, saying he had purchased some fine oil paints from someone who looked like you. He was a Dutchman, dead now, sadly.”

  “I don’t know any Dutchman. I don’t do business with fucking Dutchmen. Fuck Dutchmen and their Dutch light. No. I have to go.” The Colorman snapped his case shut, then hefted it onto his back and started to make his way down the street.

  “Adieu,” Henri called after him.

  “Fucking Dutchmen,” grumbled the Colorman as he wrestled his case around the corner.

  Carmen had moved in with her sister in the Third Arrondissement? If he took a taxi, Henri could be there in thirty minutes. No one had to know.

  But first, he needed to find out about the color.

  Eleven

  CAMERA OBSCURA—

  London, 1890

  WHILE HENRI HAD SPENT THE DAY STALKING THE MYSTERY OF THE Colorman, Lucien had spent a week in London looking at art and bonking Juliette in every corner of Kensington.

  “If you bolt on the hotel bill after only one night they don’t even bother with the police,” Juliette had said.

  “But shouldn’t we change neighborhoods?” Lucien had stayed in very few hotels in his life, and he had never run out on the bill.

  “I like Hyde Park,” Juliette said. “Now come to bed.”

  There had been a lot of firsts on his first trip to London, not the least of which was the realization that France and England had been at war since, well, since they had been separate countries, really. Outside of the National Gallery, at Trafalgar Square, he looked at the great pillar built to Admiral Nelson, in honor of his victory over Napoleon’s navy (and the Spanish) at Trafalgar. The painter Courbet had been exiled for rallying to destroy Napoleon’s version of the column outside the Louvre (supposedly at the urging of his Irish mistress, Jo).

  “Courbet was a tosser,” Juliette said. “Let’s go look at pictures.”

  Lucien didn’t ask how she’d known he was thinking about Courbet, or when she started using the English term “tosser”; he’d given up on that sort of thing and had just given himself over to her will. In a few minutes they were through the rotunda and Juliette led the way, breezing by masterpieces like they were leprous beggars, until they stood in front of Velázquez’s Venus.

  “Put a naked cherub on the couch with her to hold the mirror,” said Henri. “I can model if you need.” Venus at Her Mirror—Diego Velázquez, 1647

  She lay on a chaise lounge with her back to them, her skin a smooth, peach-kissed white, and although Henri had been right, her bottom was not quite so fine as Juliette’s, she was a beauty to be sure, and because she was looking at you looking at her, in a mirror held by a cherub, there was just the slightest feeling of naughtiness, the voyeur exposed. But she didn’t regard you, size you up and dismiss you the way Manet’s Olympia did. She didn’t tease you the way Goya’s Maja did. She was just watching you watch her do what she did, which was display the most sublime backside in art. But for all the real dimension, tone, and even light in her skin, on her back and legs, her face in the mirror was dark, out of focus, as if she watched you from a different place, through a window, not really a mirror.

  “He must have used a camera obsc
ura,” Lucien said. The camera obscura: an actual camera that existed before film. The lens flipped the image and projected it onto a sheet of ground glass, often with a grid etched into it, so the artist essentially painted what had already been reduced to two dimensions in a real, living version of a photograph.

  “Why would you say that?” Juliette asked.

  “Because her face is out of focus, but her bottom is sharp. I mean, soft, but sharp. That’s not the way he paints the cherub, whose face is in vivid focus but in the same plane as the mirror—because he was painted from imagination, or from a different sitting. Your eye changes focus when you look at the different elements of a scene, regardless of distance, but the camera can only focus on a certain range of depth. If he had painted it by just his eye, her face would be in focus.”

  “Maybe he just couldn’t see what she looked like.”

  Lucien turned to her. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Me? You’re the one making up machines.”

  He laughed, then looked from her, to the painting, then all around the gallery, at all the paintings, then to her again. “Juliette?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for showing me this—these paintings.”

  “Lot of good it does you if you won’t see them.” She grinned and began to walk away. He followed her, as he was supposed to, but then stopped in front of a very large canvas, a Renaissance Madonna.

  “Holy mother of…”

  “What? What?” She stopped.

  “It’s a Michelangelo,” Lucien said. The picture, while almost ten feet tall, looked to be part of a larger piece, perhaps an altarpiece, with the Madonna in the center and the Christ child, a toddler, reaching for a book that she was holding. Her breast was exposed, for no apparent reason, as she was otherwise fully covered by her robe. The shadow of her robe had been shaded in black, but otherwise it had never been painted.