Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Read online

  “I have a plan,” said Henri. “I know two doormen from the Moulin Rouge, stout fellows who know their way around a billy club. If you find something, we’ll burst into the studio, knock Lucien out, drag him off of her, and tie him up in my studio until he comes to his senses.”

  “You’re a better friend than I even thought,” said the Professeur. “Shall I call on you at your studio when I have my results?”

  “The address is on the card, but I’m often out, so if you’ll just send word,” said Henri. “Lucien has spoken of you in terms he reserves for his artist heroes, and even his mother has kind words for you, which is a bit of a miracle in itself, so I know I can trust you to keep this confidence between us. I have reason to suspect that the Colorman is dangerous.”

  Just then there was a whirr of motors and something scuttled out from under the divan. Henri screamed and jumped up onto the couch. A brass insect about the size of a squirrel was running around on the floor, from nutshell to nutshell, clicking at each one, then moving on with a whirr.

  “Ah, it must be noon,” said the Professeur.

  “Time for a cognac,” said Henri breathlessly. “Join me, Professeur?”

  EVEN THE THOUGHT OF CARMEN CLOUDED HIS JUDGMENT; HE SHOULD HAVE recognized that. Otherwise, why would he think he could find a single redheaded laundress whom no one had heard from in three years, and in an arrondissement where nearly a hundred thousand people lived! He had a lithograph he should be doing for the Moulin Rouge, a poster of Jane Avril, and if a true and gallant friend, he would be trying to make another attempt to rescue Lucien, but the vision of Carmen pulled him to the Third. Was it the vision? She was pretty but not beautiful, but she had a quality of rawness, of reality, that touched him, and he had never painted better. Was that it? Was it the girl or the painting?

  “Are you in pain, little one?” she would say, the only woman other than his mother he allowed to call him such a thing. “Shall I rub your legs for you?”

  He didn’t even know if she was still alive. What if, as the Colorman said, she had perished—perhaps from grief, when he’d gone away? Abandoned her.

  Jumping from laundry to laundry, with the taxi waiting for him at each, he found himself deep in the Marais, the Jewish neighborhood on the Right Bank of the Seine. By no means a ghetto, this area had been renovated by Baron Haussmann like most of Paris’s neighborhoods and the architecture was the same, uniform, six-story buildings with mansard roofs, so the only indication of any economic or ethnic disparity was the preponderance of goldsmiths, the signs in Hebrew in the bakery windows, and the ubiquitous Hasids out and about in their long coats, even in the August heat. There was a furtiveness to the movement of the people in the Marais these days, as anti-Semitism was rising as a political force in the city, and a Jew wandering in the wrong circles might find himself berated by some drunken gentleman for some imagined offense, or the center of some paranoid conspiracy theory. Much to his chagrin, Henri’s friend the artist Adolphe Willette, otherwise a man of great humor, had run for mayor of Montmartre on the anti-Semite platform and, fortunately, had been soundly defeated.

  “Willette, you dolt,” Henri had told him, “I would love to support you, but being of noble birth myself, if I were to discriminate based on the accident of birth I’d have to eschew the company of all you horseshit commoners, and then who would I drink with?”

  It was sometimes difficult to reconcile a man’s talents with his personality. Even the great Degas, who, as an artist, was a hero to Henri, and probably the best draftsman of all the Impressionists, had turned out, in person, to be a complete prick. Henri had even lived for a while in the same apartment building as Degas, but instead of being able to glean some bit of wisdom from the master, all he got was disdain. At first, a simple dismissive harrumph in the courtyard as they passed, but later, when Henri encountered Degas at an exhibition where they were both showing, Degas, acting as if he didn’t see Henri standing nearby, said, “These redheads of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, they all look like syphilitic whores.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Henri said over his shoulder, but he was hurt. Insulted by his hero, he limped away to a corner of the gallery where people were not so surly. Degas inspired him, and he’d been open in his admiration, showing Degas’ influence in his own art, and that made the rejection all the more painful. Henri was preparing to shrug off his friends and go get outrageously, scandalously drunk in some working-class dance hall when he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see a thin, white-goateed man in his fifties looking at him from under the brim of a rough linen hat: Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

  “Monsieur, take heart. Degas hates everyone. He may be the best sculptor alive, now that his eyesight is too far gone to paint, but I will tell you a secret. His dancers are things to him. Objects. He has no love for them. Your dancers, monsieur, they live. They live on canvas because you love them, no?”

  Henri didn’t know what to say. He was stunned, having gone somehow from a grinding self-loathing at the hands of Degas to an electric numbness at Renoir’s extraordinary kindness. He felt faint and had to steady himself on his walking stick.

  “No. I mean, yes. I mean, merci beaucoup, Monsieur Renoir, I think you know…”

  Renoir patted his arm to quiet him. “Watch. In a moment I will go tease him about his hatred of the Jews until he storms out like a spoiled child. It will be fun. Degas is always separate from his subjects. He separates himself by choice. Always has. He doesn’t know what it is to laugh with a fat girl, but we do, don’t we?”

  A bit of a satyr’s grin under the hat brim, a sparkle of joy in his eye. “Don’t let Degas’ ugliness bring you down. Camille Pissarro, my friend, he is a Jew. You know him?”

  “We have met,” said Henri. “We both show at Theo van Gogh’s. I share a studio with Lucien Lessard, who is close with him.”

  “Yes, Lucien. A student of mine. Always drawing pictures of dogs humping. I think there was something wrong with that boy. Maybe all that time in the bakery—perhaps he had a yeast infection. Anyway, Pissarro, he looks like a rabbi with his big beard and his hook nose, but a pirate rabbi, always in those high boots of his. Ha, a pirate rabbi!” Renoir laughed at his own joke. “When he comes to Paris now, he has to hide out in a hotel room because he looks so Jewish, people will spit on him on the streets. What pettiness! Pissarro! Master of us all. But what they don’t know, that I know, is that from his hotel room window, he is doing the best painting of his life. You do that, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec. Take Degas’ petty treatment and make great paintings from it.”

  Henri felt that he might begin to weep if he stood there any longer. He thanked Renoir again, bowed deeply, and excused himself to leave for an engagement he had only just then made up, but Renoir grabbed his arm.

  “Love them all,” said Renoir. “That is the secret, young man. Love them all.” The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. “Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.”

  “Love them all,” Henri repeated with a smile. “Yes, monsieur. I will do that.”

  And he had tried, still tried to show that in his work, but often his separation from his subjects wasn’t driven, like Degas, by disdain for humanity, but by his own self-doubt. He loved them for their humanness, their perfect imperfection, because that was what they all shared, what he shared. But only one had he really loved, perhaps the only one as imperfect as he. He found her in the third laundry he visited in the Marais.

  The proprietor of the laundry was a scruffy, haggard man who looked as if he might have been hanged and revived at some point. He was badgering a delivery boy when Henri came through the door.

  “Pardon, monsieur, but I am the painter Toulouse-Lautrec. I am looking for a woman who modeled for me several years ago, and I have lost track of her. Does a Mademoiselle Carmen Gaudin work here?”

  “Who is asking?”

  “Forgive me, I didn’t realize you were both deaf and a buffoon. I am, as I w
as ten seconds ago, the Count Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, and I am looking for Carmen Gaudin.” Henri was finding the detective work did not agree with his constitution as it involved talking to people who were odd or stupid, without the benefit of the calming effect of alcohol.

  “I don’t care if you have a fancy name and a title, there’s no Carmen here,” said the scruffy man. “Now fuck off, dwarf.”

  “Very well,” said Henri. Usually his title would ease this sort of resistance. “Then I will have to take my business elsewhere, where I will be forced to hire an assassin of launderers.” Times like these, Henri wished he had the bearing of his father, who, although a loon, carried himself with great pomp and gave no second thought to pounding a counter with his walking stick and calling down nine hundred years of aristocratic authority upon the head of any service person unwise enough to displease him. Henri, on the other hand, dropped his empty threat and limped away.

  As he reached the door, a woman’s voice called from behind him. He turned to see her coming through the curtain from the back room.

  “I am Carmen Gaudin,” she said.

  “Carmen!” Just the sight of her wholly unnaturally red hair, pinned up in a haphazard chignon, with two great scimitar bangs swooping down and framing her face, made his heart race, and he walked, light with excitement, back to the counter.

  “Carmen, ma chère, how are you?”

  She looked confused. “Excuse me, monsieur, but do I know you?”

  Henri could see that her confusion was real, and, apparently, contagious, because now he was confused. “Of course you know me. All the paintings. Our evenings? It’s Henri, chérie. Three years ago?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Now go away,” said the scruffy man. “She has work to do.”

  Carmen’s gaze went from demure and confused to furious, and she directed it at her boss. “You wait!” To Henri, she said, “Monsieur, perhaps if we stepped outside for a moment.”

  He wanted to kiss her. Hold her. Take her home and cook dinner for her. That quality of being both strong and fragile at the same time was still there, and it appealed to a part of him that he normally kept hidden. Take her home, eat with her, and sip wine, laugh softly at sad things, make love to her and fall asleep in her arms: that’s what he wanted to do. Then wake up and put all that melancholy sweetness on canvas.

  “Please, mademoiselle,” he said, holding the door for her. “After you.”

  On the sidewalk she quickstepped to the doorway of an apartment building next door, out of sight of the laundry, then turned to him.

  “Monsieur, three years ago I was very sick. I was living on Montmartre, working in Place Pigalle, but I don’t remember any of it. I forgot things. The doctor said the fever hurt my brain. My sister brought me to her house and nursed me back to health, but I remember almost nothing I did in the time before that. Maybe we met then, but I am sorry, I do not know you. You say I modeled for you? You are a painter?”

  Henri felt his face go numb, as if he’d been slapped, but the stinging lingered. She really didn’t know him. “We were very close, mademoiselle.”

  “Friends?” she asked. “Were we friends, monsieur?”

  “More than friends, Carmen. We spent many evenings, many nights together.”

  Her hand went to her mouth, as if she were horrified. “Lovers? We weren’t lovers.”

  Henri searched her face for some hint of deception, some glimmer of recognition, of shame, of joy, but he found nothing.

  “No, mademoiselle,” he said, the words as painful to him as having a tooth pulled. “We worked together. We were more than friends. An artist’s model is more than a friend.”

  She seemed relieved. “And I was your model?”

  “The best I’ve worked with. I could show you the paintings.” But even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t. He could show her a few of the paintings. But he had only three. Yet he remembered, or thought he remembered, painting a dozen. He could see the nude he painted of her, and remember how reluctant she had been to pose for it, but he couldn’t remember selling the painting, and he certainly didn’t have it now. “Perhaps you could come to my studio. Perhaps I could do some sketches of you, and perhaps your memory will return when you see the paintings.”

  She shook her head, looking at her feet as she did. “No, monsieur. I could never model. I can’t believe I ever modeled. I am so plain.”

  “You are beautiful,” he said. He meant it. He saw it. He had put it on canvas.

  The proprietor of the laundry stepped out on the street then. “Carmen! You want a job or you want to run off with a dwarf, it is no matter to me, but if you want a job, go back to work, now.”

  She turned from him. “I have to go, monsieur. I thank you for your offer, but that time is forgotten. Perhaps it is best.”

  “But…” He watched her hurry by the boss into the laundry. The boss snarled at Henri as he closed the door.

  Toulouse-Lautrec climbed into the taxi, which had been waiting.

  “Another laundry, monsieur?” asked the driver.

  “No, take me to the brothel at rue d’Amboise in the Second. And easy around the corners. I don’t want to spill my drink.”

  Thirteen

  THE WOMAN IN THE STOREROOM

  MÈRE LESSARD HAD NEVER REALLY USED VIOLENCE AGAINST ANOTHER person before. Of course, living on Montmartre, where bohemians, working people, and the bourgeoisie mixed in the dance halls and cafés, she’d seen many fights and had nursed cuts and bruises on her own men. And during the Prussian War, she had not only endured the shelling of the city and helped with the wounded, but she had also seen the riots after the war, when the Communards took the cannons from the Church of Saint-Pierre, overthrew the government, then were massacred against a wall at Père-Lachaise. Certainly she had always implied, even threatened, that she was capable of violence, and had more or less convinced her family and most of the artists on the butte that she might go berserk at any moment and slaughter them all like an angry she-bear, a reputation of which she was proud and had worked hard to achieve. But smacking Juliette in the forehead with a crêpe pan was her first real act of violence, and she found it wildly unsatisfying.

  “Perhaps a different pan,” Régine said, trying to console her mother.

  “No,” said Mère Lessard. “I could have used the copper one from our own kitchen, the one with the tin lining, which is lighter, and better, I think, for crêpes, but the one from the bakery is perfect for braining a model. Heavy, yet not so heavy that I cannot swing it. And I didn’t want to use a rolling pin. The point was to knock her unconscious, not crush her skull. No, the pan was perfect.”

  They had carried Lucien upstairs to the apartment and sat next to the bed where he lay as still as death.

  “Perhaps if there were more blood?” said Régine. “The way we allow just a touch of the fruit to show by venting the piecrusts.”

  “No,” said Madame. “I think the blow was perfect. She went out like a candle, and not a drop of blood. She is very pretty, and blood would have stained her dress. No, I think that conking someone on the head is like the sex: a thankless task we must perform to keep the peace.” She sighed, wistfully, as she looked at the photo of Père Lessard on the bedside table. “The joy is in the threatening. Threats are like the love poems of head conking, and you know what a romantic I am.”

  “Mais oui, Maman,” said Régine. She stood and cocked an ear toward the doorway. “There is someone on the stairs.”

  “Take the crêpe pan,” said Mère Lessard.

  Régine got to the top of the stairs at the same time as did a bull-shouldered man in work clothes, who caught her around the waist with one arm, spun her around, then pressed her to the wall and kissed her unmercifully while she squirmed, his three-day stubble scratching her face.

  “My sweet,” said Gilles, her husband. “My flower. I thought to surprise you, but you are ready to make crêpes for me. My little treasure.”


  “The pan is for hitting you. Put me down,” said Régine. She wriggled in his embrace and he pressed her harder against the wall. “My little love pig, I missed you.”

  “It’s Gilles,” Régine called to her mother.

  “Hit him,” said Mère Lessard. “He deserves it for coming home early.”

  “Oh,” said Gilles, dropping Régine like a poisoned apple. “Your mother is here.”

  “Good evening, Gilles,” said Mère Lessard, a dismissive chill in her voice, for although she liked the burly carpenter very much, there was no advantage in letting him know that.

  Gilles stepped into the bedroom. “What is wrong with Lucien?”

  “That woman,” said Régine.

  “What woman?” Gilles had been blissfully oblivious of the goings-on around the bakery for the last month, as he had been away most of the time, working on a public building in Rouen.

  “There is a girl lying unconscious in the doorway of the storeroom,” said Mère Lessard. “You were supposed to bring her in.”

  “Of course,” said Gilles, as if he’d been a complete cad for not realizing how utterly useless he was. “I will go now.” To Régine, he said, “Keep my crêpes warm, my sweet.” And he was off down the steps.

  “The pan was for hitting you,” Régine reminded him.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mère Lessard. “I have failed you, my child. I let you marry a complete dimwit.”

  “Yes, but he’s strong, and he doesn’t care at all about art,” said Régine.

  “There is that,” said Madame.

  Downstairs, in the storage-shed-turned-studio, Gilles stood before the painting of Juliette. While it was true he didn’t give a toss about art, he was a great enthusiast when it came to the naked female form.

  “Sacré bleu!” he exclaimed, with no irony whatsoever.