Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Read online

  Nine

  NOCTURNE IN BLACK AND GOLD

  London, 1865

  A LIGHT FOG WASHED THE BANK AT BATTERSEA BRIDGE. BARGES MOVED like great black ghosts on the Thames, silent but for the clop clop of a team of draft horses on the shore echoing off the houses of Chelsea.

  Out on Battersea Bridge, the Colorman looked like a pile of wool haunting the night, wrapped in an overcoat that reached all the way to the ground, the collar up higher than his ears and brushing the wide brim of a black leather hat. Only his eyes showed above a thick wool scarf.

  “What kind of loony paints at night, outside, in the cold?” he said. “This bloody island is always cold and damp. I hate it here.” When he spoke steam, diffused by the scarf, came rolling out from under the brim of his hat.

  “He’s as mad as we’ve made him,” said the redhead. She pulled her own coat tight around her. “And it was on this island they made you a king, so don’t be such an ungrateful little wanker.”

  “Well, fix him. If he paints at night, we’ll lose him.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes you lose.”

  She walked down off the bridge into Chelsea and up the river toward the painter, who stood at an easel with a small lantern hung from it so he could see his palette and canvas.

  WHAT KIND OF LUNATIC PAINTS AT NIGHT, OUTSIDE, IN THE COLD? WHISTLER WONDERED. He stamped his feet to get the blood flowing in them, then washed some of the ultramarine blue across the center of the canvas with a wide sable brush.

  He’d thinned the paint so much that he had to brace the canvas so that it stuck out from the easel horizontally, to keep the color from running, as if he were painting with watercolor. Just as well he was doing his nocturnes outside; the fumes from that much turpentine would have sent his head spinning if he’d tried to paint them in the studio, in winter, with the windows closed. As if being in the studio at all, with her, didn’t send him spinning anyway.

  Jo—Joanna, his wild redhead, his blessing, his curse. She was like some siren from an Edgar Allan Poe story, “Ligia,” perhaps. Preternaturally intelligent, frighteningly beautiful in that detached, untouchable way that he so loved touching. But he was so unsettled around her, losing time, lately, going to the studio in the evening to find that he’d finished a painting that day without any recollection of having done it. At least he remembered the work he was doing on these night paintings.

  But how could she be the cause of his, well, instability? And why did it subside when he worked at night?

  A woman’s voice behind him. “I think throwing your brother-in-law through the window might have marked the moment when it all went tits-up, wouldn’t you say, love?”

  Whistler turned so quickly he nearly knocked over his easel. “Jo, how did you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t. I was out for a walk. I thought you were probably home with your mum.”

  Whistler’s dire, puritanical mother was visiting from the States. She’d come over to check on him when his sister wrote her to say that she was worried about his “well-being of mind,” prompted, no doubt, by Whistler throwing her husband through a café window.

  “Well that was stupid,” Jo had told him that night.

  “He said that you looked like my attending tart.” He couldn’t believe he had to defend defending her.

  At that point she’d pulled her nightgown over her head and slid naked into his lap. “If the shoe fits, love,” she said. “If the shoe fits.”

  He lost most every argument to her that way.

  Upon finding out his mother had arrived in London, Whistler and Jo quickly removed from the house all evidence of what Mother would have called his “decadent life”—from his collection of Japanese prints, to his bar, to Jo herself, whom he moved into his studio a few blocks away.

  As soon as he’d been out of Jo’s company for a few days, he started to feel different, as if a part of him that had been lost had returned, but he also started to have vivid, detailed dreams of working on paintings that didn’t exist, of going places with her he had never been. But now, in the cold, damp London night, rather than feeling obsessed by her, inspired by her, or overwhelmed by her, he was … well … he was afraid of her.

  With his palette still in hand, Whistler went to her and kissed her on the cheek. “Sorry, I’ve been experimenting with the points of light on the river, using washes of oil to produce atmosphere.”

  “I see,” she said. “Does Mum think you’re mad, then?”

  “No, just deeply corrupted.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, snaking her arm around his waist. “You’ve had supper?”

  “I did. One dines early when the Lord is expected at every meal. He’s on a tight schedule, evidently.”

  “Come back to the studio, Jimmy. I’ll make you a treat.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not hungry.”

  “Who said anything about food?”

  He stepped out of her embrace and up to the canvas. “No, Jo, I need to work.”

  “It’s not like you have to capture the bloody light; it’s dark as a black dog’s ass out here. Come in and warm up.”

  “No, you go. I’ll try to stop by the studio to see you tomorrow.” But he wouldn’t be stopping by. If things went as he’d planned, he’d be on a steamer to South America tomorrow. He unfolded and sat on a three-legged stool before the easel, pretended to be engrossed in his painting.

  She said, “That creepy little brown chap came by the studio today. He said you owe him a painting.”

  “I’m beyond that, Jo. My work is selling. I can’t trade a painting for a few tubes of paint.”

  She nodded and removed her gloves with more care than was really required, as if considering what would come next. “I think you know it’s more than a few tubes of paint.”

  “Fine then, I’ll pay him in cash. If he comes by again, tell him I’ll be in the studio on Monday.”

  By Monday he’d be in the middle of the Atlantic, steaming his way to Chile to paint the war there. His mother haranguing him about his dropping out of West Point to become a painter, as well as his brother’s noble service as a surgeon in the Confederate army, had given him the idea. He wondered what it said about a man that he would actually go into a war zone to avoid his mistress.

  She went to him, ran her hand through his hair, traced the fringe on his forehead with her fingernail. “You’re not still angry about my posing for Courbet?”

  They’d gone to Normandy with Whistler’s friend and mentor the French Realist painter Gustave Courbet, and one afternoon James returned from painting fishing boats on the beach to find Jo spread out naked across one of the beds, the sun through the window lighting up her red hair like copper fire, and Courbet at his easel, painting her. Whistler didn’t say a word at the time. They were artists, after all, and Courbet’s mistress was in the next room doing needlework, but he’d exploded at Jo as soon as they were alone.

  “No, I’m not angry,” he said, not looking up from the nocturne he was painting. “His picture wasn’t as good as mine of you.”

  “Ah, so that was the issue. That explains it.” She ruffled his hair, then took the crown of his head in one hand and his chin in the other and held his head against her breast. He didn’t push away, but he didn’t lean into her embrace.

  “Ah, Jimmy, you’re such a love.” She bent then and held his head tightly as she whispered in his ear. “Good night, my love.”

  She kissed his cheek, stood, and walked away toward Battersea Bridge.

  He watched her go and realized that he had been holding his breath from the time she’d first touched his chin. He thought for a moment about painting her as a shadowy figure in the fog, but then it spilled back on him, the lead poisoning, the wave that nearly killed him, the temper tantrums, the loss of memory, the deep unsettledness that always seemed to follow his painting her, and he shivered and put his brush into the tin he’d hung from the easel.

  She turned back toward him then. He c
ouldn’t even see her face, just the corona of red around her head, the gaslights of Chelsea reflecting off her hair. “Jimmy,” she said in a whisper, which he heard as if it were coming from inside his head instead of from fifty yards away. “That day in Normandy? I’d just fucked Gustave, right before you came in. He had both of us, me and Elise, one after another, and we had each other while he watched. I thought you should know. That was a lovely painting you did of the fishing boats, though. One of my favorites. I gave it to the Colorman. Don’t be angry. You don’t know it, but Gustave saved your life. Tonight. Bon voyage, love.”

  “Ah, Jimmy, you’re such a love.” Weary—James McNeill Whistler, 1863

  “WELL?” SAID THE COLORMAN.

  “No painting,” said Bleu.

  “But soon, yes? No more painting in the dark? A painting soon, yes?”

  “No. He’s leaving. I went by his house. There are trunks in the foyer. He ordered enough color for a whole season from Windsor and Newton. The bill came to the studio, but the delivery went to the house.”

  “Those fucks at Windsor and Newton. They’re using Prussian colors.” He spit off the bridge to show his disdain for those fucks at Windsor and Newton, Prussian colors, and the river Thames in general. “Where are we going?”

  “You and I are going to France. I don’t know where he is going.”

  “You’re going to just let him get away?”

  “I have someone else in mind,” she said.

  “But who? Who will you be to him?”

  “That’s the beauty of it. He’s already taken with Jo.” She did a half curtsy as if presenting herself. “I don’t even have to change shoes.”

  “Sounds dodgy,” said the Colorman. “Let’s use this one up.”

  “No, Courbet is very talented. A great painter.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Perhaps it’s always true,” she said.

  They went to France, they found Gustave Courbet working in Provence, where it was warm, which made the Colorman happy. Jo would be Courbet’s mistress and model on and off for ten years, after which the man who had once been called France’s greatest painter was exiled to Switzerland, and there, broke and alone, drank himself to death.

  “See,” the Colorman would say. “That could have been that fucking Whistler. We could have fed him to a Saint Bernard.”

  The Colorman had never really cared for Whistler.

  Ten

  RESCUE

  COUNT HENRI-MARIE-RAYMOND DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC-MONFA BURST into the room, drew his weapon, and shouted, “Madame, I demand you unhand this man, in the name of France, Le Boulangerie du Montmartre, and Jeanne d’Arc!”

  Juliette quickly covered herself with her robe; Lucien looked up from his canvas and held his brush at port arms.

  “Really, Henri, ‘Jeanne d’Arc’?”

  “Well, we don’t have a king anymore.”

  Juliette said, “Why is he waving that cordial glass at me?”

  “Oh balls,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. Instead of his sword cane he had grabbed his flask cane, which concealed a flask of cognac and a cordial glass (a gentleman does not drink directly from his walking stick) for visits to his mother, and he was, indeed, brandishing a crystal cordial glass at the naked girl.

  “Because a snifter would not fit into my cane,” he said finally, as if that explained everything.

  “I thought you were at your mother’s in Malromé.”

  “I was. But I have returned to rescue you!”

  “Well that’s very thoughtful of you.”

  “You’ve grown a beard.”

  Lucien rubbed his cheek. “Well, I’ve stopped shaving.”

  “And you’ve stopped eating as well?” Lucien had been thin before, but now he looked as if he hadn’t eaten the entire month that Henri had been gone. Lucien’s sister had said so much in a letter she’d sent to Malromé:

  Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, he has stopped making the bread. He won’t listen to my mother or me. And he physically threatened my husband, Gilles, when he tried to intervene. He locks himself in the studio every morning with that woman, and he drags himself out in the evening and leaves through the alley, without so much as a bonjour for his family. He rants about his duty as an artist and won’t be reasoned with. Maybe he will listen to another artist. M. Renoir is in Aix, visiting Cézanne. M. Pissarro is in Auvers, and M. Monet never seems to leave Giverny. Please, help, I do not know the other artists of the butte, and Mother says they are all useless scalawags anyway and wouldn’t be able to help. I disagree, as I have found you to be a very kind and useful scalawag, and overall a very charming little man. I implore you to come help me save my brother from this horrible woman.

  Regards,

  Régine Robelard

  “You remember Juliette, from before?” said Lucien.

  “You mean before when she ruined your life and reduced you to a miserable wretch? Before that?”

  “Before that,” said Lucien.

  “Yes.” Henri tipped his hat with the cordial glass, now feeling quite silly for holding it. “Enchanté, mademoiselle.”

  “Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec,” said Juliette, still in pose, dropping the silk robe to offer her hand.

  “Oh my,” said Henri. He looked over his shoulder at Lucien, then back at Juliette, who smiled, calmly, almost beatifically, not as if she wasn’t aware that she was naked, but as if she were bestowing a gift upon the world. He forgot for a moment that he had come here to rescue his friend from her villainy. Her lovely, lovely villainy.

  Henri bowed quickly over her hand, then wheeled on a heel. “I must see your painting.”

  “No, it’s not ready.” Lucien caught him by the shoulders to keep him from moving behind the canvas.

  “Nonsense, I’m an artist as well, and your studio mate; I have special privileges.”

  “Not on this one, Henri, please.”

  “I have to see what you’ve done with this—this—” He was waving toward Juliette while trying to get a look at the canvas. “The form, the luminosity of the skin—”

  “Lucien, he’s talking about me like I’m a thing,” said Juliette.

  Lucien crouched and sighted over his friend’s shoulder. “Look at the subtlety of the shadows, soft blue, barely three levels of value between the highlights and the shadows. You’d never see that except with indirect sunlight. With the surrounding buildings diffusing it, the light is like this most of the day. It’s only for an hour either side of noon that the highlights become too harsh.”

  “Lucien, now you’re talking about me like I’m a thing.”

  “Nonsense, ma chère, I’m talking about the light.”

  “But you’re pointing at me.”

  “We should put a skylight in the studio on rue Caulaincourt,” Henri said.

  “There’s an apartment upstairs, Henri. I fear the effect wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Good point. Is this the pose? You should do her from the back when you finish this one. She’s a finer ass than Velázquez’s Venus in London. Have you seen it? Exquisite! Have her looking over her shoulder at you in a mirror.”

  “Still here,” Juliette said.

  “Put a naked cherub on the couch with her to hold the mirror,” said Henri. “I can model if you need.”

  The idea of Henri as a hirsute cherub seemed to jolt Lucien out of his enchantment with the light on Juliette’s skin, and he steered the count to the door. “Henri, it’s good to see you, but you have to go. Let’s meet at the Chat Noir this evening for a drink. I need to work now.”

  “But I feel as if my rescue has been, well, somehow less than satisfactory.”

  “No, I’ve never felt so thoroughly rescued, Henri. Thank you.”

  “Well, this evening, then. Good day, mademoiselle,” he called to Juliette as Lucien pushed him out the door.

  “À bientôt,” the girl said.

  Lucien closed the door behind him and Henri stood there in the little weed-choked courtyard, holdi
ng a crystal cordial glass with a heavy brass knob on its base, wondering exactly what had just happened. He was sure that Lucien was in grave danger; otherwise, why had he hurried back from Malromé? Why had he come to the bakery? Why, in fact, was he even awake at this ungodly, midmorning hour?

  He shrugged, and since he was holding the cordial glass anyway, he worked the long cylinder of the silver flask from his cane and poured himself a cognac to steel his nerves for the next stage of the rescue.

  Inside the studio, Juliette resumed her pose and said, “Have you ever seen the Velázquez Venus, Lucien?”

  “No, I’ve never been to London.”

  “Perhaps we should go see it,” she said.

  TOULOUSE-LAUTREC WAITED ACROSS THE SQUARE IN MADAME JACOB’S CRÉMERIE, watching the alley next to Lessard’s boulangerie. The girl appeared at dusk, just as Lucien’s sister said she would. He quickly chomped on a bit of bread spread with Camembert that he had left, drained his wine, placed some coins on the table, and climbed down from the stool.

  “Merci, madame,” he called to the old woman. “Good evening.”

  “Good evening, Monsieur Henri.”

  Henri watched as the girl made her way across the square and down rue du Calvaire toward the bottom of the butte. Henri had never had cause to follow anyone before, but his father was an avid hunter, and despite Henri being a sickly child, he had grown up stalking animals. He knew that it was folly to follow too closely, so he let his prey get two blocks ahead before he limped along behind. Fortunately, her trail was all downhill, and he was able to keep up with her easily, although she didn’t dawdle or stop at any stalls or markets as did most of the other shopgirls crowding the sidewalks on their way home from work.