Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art

by Christopher Moore

  “I wonder why he didn’t paint her robe,” Lucien said.

  “Maybe he got tired,” said Juliette.

  “Strange.” He wandered away from her then, on to the next painting, this one also a Michelangelo. “Look at this.”

  It was a pietà called The Entombment, and in this one, the Holy Mother’s robe had been left unpainted as well, while the rest of the painting was finished.

  “He didn’t finish this one either,” said Lucien. “In fact, there’s no blue in the painting at all.” Excited at seeing a masterpiece stopped in progress, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “You know the Virgin’s cloak had to be painted blue. It was called Sacré Bleu, because it was reserved for her.”

  “He didn’t finish this one either,” said Lucien. “In fact, there’s no blue in the painting at all.” The Manchester Madonna and The Entombment—Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1497

  “You don’t say,” said Juliette. “Maybe we should go look at the Turners, since we’re in England and all.”

  “Why would he finish the whole painting but not use any blue?”

  “Maybe because he was an annoying little poofter,” said Juliette.

  “A master wouldn’t stop in the middle of painting to be annoying.”

  “And yet here I am, almost four hundred years later, annoyed.”

  “At Michelangelo?” Lucien had never been annoyed by a painting. He wondered if that might be yet another element of a masterpiece that he might never be able to produce. “Do you think someday I could be that annoying?”

  “Oh, cher,” she said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said, and off she glided to look at the Turners and the Constables, or ships and sheeps, as she liked to think of them.

  She was being kind, really. Lucien hadn’t a chance of ever being remotely as annoying as Michelangelo Buonarroti. For one thing, Lucien was, at heart, a sweet man, a kind and generous man, and with the exception of a bit of self-doubt about his painting, which served to make him a better painter, he was delightfully unburdened by guilt or self-loathing. Michelangelo, not so much.

  Rome, Italy, 1497

  THE FLORENTINE HAD BEEN ABOUT THE SAME AGE AS LUCIEN WAS NOW WHEN she’d first come to him. And like Lucien, he had not dealt with the Colorman directly. She found him in Rome, working on The Entombment of Christ, which was to be an altarpiece for the Church of Saint Agostino. He was alone in his workshop, as was often the case.

  She was a young girl, wide-eyed and fresh faced, wearing the gown of a peasant, loosely laced and low cut. She carried the color, freshly mixed and packaged in sheep’s bladders, twisted off to size and tied with catgut, in a basket padded with unbleached linen.

  The painter didn’t even look from his work. “Go away. I don’t like anyone around when I work.”

  “Excuse me, Maestro,” she said with a curtsy. “But I was asked to bring you these paints by the cardinal.” He was painting for the Church; there had a be a cardinal involved somewhere.

  “What cardinal? I have my own color man. Go away.”

  She crept forward. “I don’t know which cardinal, Maestro. I don’t dare look up when I am addressed by a prince of the Church.”

  He finally looked at her. “Don’t call me maestro. Not when I’m doing this. I’m not even a painter, I’m a sculptor. I find the spirit in the stone, guided by the hand of God. I work in paint only in the service of God.”

  Not another one, she thought. The reason she’d left Florence was she had lost Botticelli to his religious conscience, spurred by that maniac Dominican monk Savonarola and his Bonfire of the Vanities. Botticelli himself converted and threw some of his best paintings, her paintings, on the fire. But Michelangelo had been here in Rome for a year. How had he heard of the teachings of Savonarola?

  “I’m sorry, but I must deliver these colors or I will be punished.”

  “Fine, fine, then. Leave them.”

  She moved to where he sat on a three-legged stool and slowly knelt with the basket, making sure one knee pushed out of her skirt, baring a thigh, and the front of her gown fell open. She held the position for what she thought was long enough, then shyly looked up into his face.

  And he wasn’t even looking. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said in English, because she thought it the best language for swearing. “You’re not even bloody looking, are you, you pooft?”

  “What? What?” said the painter. “That is no way for a young girl to behave, showing her body. You should read the sermons of Savonarola, young lady.”

  “You read them?” She snatched up her basket. “Of course, you read them.” She stormed out of the workshop.

  The Colorman was right; no good was going to come of that printing press invention of Gutenberg’s. Fucking Germans and their inventions.

  The next day, when Michelangelo looked up from his painting, it was a young man, little more than a boy, who carried the basket of color. This time he wasn’t quite so dismissive. In fact, as the young man, Bleu was able to inspire him for weeks while he worked on the two altarpieces, as well as some smaller pictures that the Colorman was happy to take, and they followed the maestro back to his workshop in Florence. A month in, it started to go wrong.

  “I can’t get him to paint,” Bleu said to the Colorman.

  “What about those two big paintings he’s been working on?”

  “He won’t finish them. He refuses to even touch blue color. He says it takes him away from God. He says there’s something unholy in it.”

  “But he is fine having you in his bed?”

  “That, too, has come to an end. It’s that charlatan monk Savonarola. He’s ruining every painter in the city.”

  “Show him old Athens or Sparta. They were religious and they loved to bugger each other. He’ll like it.”

  “I can’t show him anything if he won’t paint. And he’s not going to. They’ve just moved the biggest block of marble I’ve ever seen into his workshop. His apprentices won’t even let me in the shop.”

  “I will go see him,” said the Colorman. “I’ll make him paint.”

  “Of course,” said Bleu. “What could go wrong with that plan?”

  It was months before the Colorman could get access to Michelangelo, and he finally did by convincing the apprentices who guarded the maestro’s shop that he dealt in stonecutting tools, not color.

  Michelangelo was on a ladder, working on a huge statue of a young man. Even in the rough, unpolished form, the Colorman recognized the model was Bleu.

  “Why the huge head?” asked the Colorman.

  “Who are you?” said the Maestro. “How did you get in here?”

  “A merchant. His melon is gigantic. Like those simpletons who eat dirt at the convent.”

  Michelangelo put his chisel in his belt and leaned against the statue. “It’s for perspective. When viewed from below, the head will appear the perfect size. Why are you here?”

  “Is that why you made the penis so tiny? Perspective?”

  “It’s not.”

  “If you like the tiny penis, you should try girls. Most have no penis at all.”

  “Get out of my shop.”

  “I’ve seen your paintings. You’re a much better painter. You should paint. The figures in your paintings are not such freaks as this.”

  “He isn’t a freak. He is perfection. He is David.”

  “Isn’t he supposed to be carrying the huge head?”

  “Out! Angelo! Marco! Throw this devil out of here.”

  “Devil?” said the Colorman. “Screw the devil. I tell the devil what to do. The devil licks the dust from my scrotum. Donatello’s David carries the big head. You can’t do better than Donatello. You should paint.”

  Michelangelo started down the ladder, his hammer in hand.

  “Fine, I’m going.” The Colorman hurried out of the workshop, chased by two apprentices.

  “Did you convince him?” Ble
u asked.

  “He’s annoying,” said the Colorman.

  “I told you.”

  “I think it’s because you have a big head.”

  “I don’t have a big head.”

  “We need to find a painter who likes women. You’re better at women.”

  Back in London, in the National Gallery, Lucien was standing before a J. M. W. Turner painting of a steamship caught in a storm, a great maelstrom of color and brushstrokes, the tiny ship seeming to be swallowed in the middle by the pure fury.

  “This is where real painting starts, I think,” said Lucien. “This is where object gives way to emotion.”

  Juliette smiled. “They say that he went mad and tied himself to the mast of a steamship that was headed out into a snowstorm, just so he could see the real motion of a storm from inside it.”

  “Really?” said Lucien, wondering how a shopgirl knew so much about painting.

  “Really,” Juliette said. Not really. Turner hadn’t tied himself to the mast of the ship at all. “It will be fun,” she’d told him. “Hold still, I have to get this knot.”

  They were a week in London and returned to the studio in Montmartre without anyone having ever seen them leave. Lucien walked in and collapsed facedown on the fainting couch. Juliette rubbed his neck until she was sure he was asleep, then kissed him on the cheek and took the studio key from his pocket so she could lock the door on the way out.

  When she stepped out into the warm autumn evening she saw a glint of movement from her right. There was a blinding flash, then nothing.

  The sound, like the striking of a muted, broken bell, rang through the neighborhood, causing even the few bachelors who were sharing in a dinner of pot-au-feu (beef stew) across the square at Madame Jacob’s crémerie to look at each other with a What the hell was that? expression.

  Back in the alley, Juliette lay in the doorway of the studio quite unconscious, her entire forehead turning into a purple and black bruise.

  “Maman,” said Régine, “I think you killed her.”

  “Nonsense, she’ll be fine. Go check on your brother.” Madame Lessard stood over the model, holding a heavy steel crêpe pan from the bakery.

  “But shouldn’t we bring her inside or something?”

  “When Gilles comes home he can carry her in.”

  “But, Maman, Gilles is working on a job in Rouen, he won’t be home until tomorrow.”

  “Ah, the air will do her good.” She stepped over Juliette and into the studio. “Lucien, wake up. Your sister is worried about you,” said Madame Lessard.

  Twelve

  LE PROFESSEUR DEUX

  ÉMILE BASTARD LIVED IN A SMALL HOUSE HIS FATHER HAD LEFT HIM IN the Maquis, just below the Moulin de la Galette, above the cemetery, on the northwestern slope of Montmartre. Since his father’s death, he had installed a wooden floor and plumbing, and removed the tracks and cages for the rodent reenactment of Ben-Hur, but the abode was no less eccentric than it had been under Le Professeur I. The miniature hippodrome had given way to tables and shelves filled with all manner of scientific bricolage, from tiny steam engines, to measuring instruments, to laboratory glass, bottles of chemicals, mineral samples, batteries and Tesla motors, human skulls, unborn animals in jars, dinosaur bones, and clockwork machines that could perform all sorts of diverse and often useless tasks, including a windup insect that could scurry around the floor and count dropped nutshells, then report the number as a series of chimes on a tiny bell.

  Like his father before him, Émile Bastard was a scientist and an academician, who taught at the Académie des Sciences and did field research in several disciplines. He was considered a bit of a Renaissance man by the Académie, and an eccentric and harmless loon by the people of Montmartre. Like his father before him, they called him Le Professeur.

  Le Professeur was at his writing desk, organizing some notes he’d taken on a recent cave-exploring expedition, when he was startled by a knock at his door, which almost never happened. He opened the door to find a very short but well-dressed man, in a derby hat, with a leather satchel slung from a strap on his shoulder. It was a warm day and the little man had his coat draped over his arm, his sleeves turned back to the elbow.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Bastard, I am Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, artist.” He held out his card. “I am here in the interest of our mutual friend, Monsieur Lucien Lessard.”

  Le Professeur took Henri’s card and stepped aside for Toulouse-Lautrec to enter. “Come in, please. Please, sit.” He gestured to a divan on which was perched the partially reconstructed skeleton of a sloth. “You can just push the sloth to the side. A project I’m working on.”

  Le Professeur pulled the chair from his desk and sat across from the divan. He was as tall as Henri was short, and very thin—when wearing a tailcoat, he put people in mind of a praying mantis with muttonchop whiskers.

  Henri cringed as a hazelnut shell crunched under his shoe.

  “Sorry,” said Bastard. “I have a machine that counts the shells.”

  “But why do you have the shells all over the floor?”

  “I just told you, I have a machine that counts them. Would you like to see a demonstration?”

  “Perhaps another time, thank you,” said Henri. He removed his hat and laid it over the skull of the sloth, who had a disturbingly melancholy look on his face, probably because he was only partially assembled. “The matter of Lucien Lessard.”

  “Yes, how is the boy?”

  “You’ve known him a long time?”

  “Over twenty years. I met him when he was very little, during the Prussian War. My father had sent him alone to catch rats in the old gypsum mine by the cemetery. When I found out I went to retrieve him. I caught poor Lucien as he was running out of the mine, terrified. A brilliant academic, my father, but he did not always use the best judgment in dealing with children. He treated them like small adults. No offense.”

  Henri waved off the comment. “I’m concerned about Lucien. It’s difficult to explain, but I feel he may be under the influence of some sort of drug.” At that, he opened the satchel and retrieved a handful of paint tubes. “I believe that these tubes of color may contain some sort of hallucinogen that is affecting Lucien’s health and sanity.”

  “I see,” said the Professeur, who took the tubes from Henri, uncapped them one at a time, and sniffed each in turn. “Smells like linseed oil is the medium.”

  “Professeur, can you test them at the Académie, perhaps, find out if there is anything harmful in them?”

  “I will, but first, tell me what kind of behavior has caused your concern. Normal oil color contains substances that can be toxic, cause the symptoms of madness.”

  “He’s locked himself in the studio behind the bakery with a beautiful girl and he almost never comes out. His sister is most concerned. She says he’s stopped baking the bread and he doesn’t even seem to eat anymore. She says all he does is screw and paint.”

  The Professeur smiled. Lucien had spoken to him of his friend the count and his proclivity for dance halls and brothels. “Respectfully, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, is that so different from your own life?”

  “Please, Monsieur le Professeur, I have done some experiments with absinthe, and I can attest that it has dangerous hallucinogenic powers, in particular the ability to make homely women appear attractive.”

  “Well, it’s eighty percent alcohol and the wormwood in it is poisonous; I suspect what you are seeing are glimpses of your own death.”

  “Yes, but with exquisite bosoms. How do you explain those?”

  “That is a question,” said the Professeur, who, in contrast to all rationality, loved looking for answers to even the most absurd questions.

  “Anyway,” continued Henri, “I suspect there is something in this color that does the same thing, and our friend Lucien is under the influence of it. I believe I, too, have been under the influence of this very same drug in the past.”

  “But not currently?”

&nbs
p; “No, now I’m simply a libertine and a whoremonger. In my past there was obsession and love, which are the spells under which I believe our Lucien has fallen.”

  “And who do you think is drugging him?”

  “I believe it is a conspiracy of the girl and her partner in crime, a dealer of color.”

  “And their motive?”

  “To seduce Lucien.”

  “And you said that she is beautiful?”

  “Exquisite. Radiant. Irritatingly so.”

  “Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, I understand why someone might conspire to seduce you. You have a title and are heir, I presume, to a significant fortune, but Lucien is the poor son of a baker, and while he is a talented painter, as you know, there is no guarantee that he will ever find success or financial reward. So, again, what would be the motive?”

  Henri stood and began to pace in front of the divan, crunching hazelnut shells with every other step. “I don’t know. But I can tell you this: When something like this happened to me, Lucien and some other friends removed me from the situation and the obsession passed. But I lost time. Significant amounts of time. Memories. I have months at a time that I cannot remember. I have paintings that I don’t remember having painted, and I remember painting others that I do not have. I have no other explanation. Perhaps if you can find something in the paint that explains the loss of time, we will find a way to stop it.”

  “Stop your friend from painting and making love to a beautiful woman?”

  “When you say it that way it doesn’t sound like such a good thing.”

  “No, it is. Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, you are a good friend to Lucien. Better than you know. Did Lucien’s sister tell you how their father died?”

  “No, and Lucien only speaks of his father’s love for painting.”

  “His sister thinks it was a similar love for painting that killed him. I will test the paint. It will take a few days, but I will find out the elements from which it is formulated, but even if I find something, if Lucien doesn’t want to be rescued, you will be in a difficult position removing him from the danger.”