Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Read online

  “I need to find her,” said Lucien.

  “So, no, then.”

  “I’m fine. I need to find Juliette.”

  “I understand. But if I may ignore you for a moment, we need to speak to Theo van Gogh.”

  “So you’re not going to help me find her?”

  “I thought I made it clear that I was ignoring you on that count. We can’t just burst into the gallery and start interrogating him about his brother’s death. I do have pictures hanging there, as do you, I believe, but I can’t think of how to move the conversation from our pictures to Vincent without seeming uncouth.”

  “Heaven forbid,” said Lucien.

  “We need to take him your painting.”

  “No, it’s not finished.”

  “Nonsense, it’s magnificent. It’s the best thing you’ve ever done.”

  “I still have to paint in a blue scarf tied around her neck, to direct the eye. And I have to get some more ultramarine from Père Tanguy.”

  “I’ll fetch you a tube from the studio.”

  “It’s not just that, Henri…”

  “I know.” Toulouse-Lautrec took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Why is it so hot in here?”

  “It’s a bakery. Henri, I’m afraid of the painting.”

  “I know,” said Toulouse-Lautrec, his head bowed, nodding somberly in sympathy. “It’s the penis, isn’t it?”

  “There’s no penis!”

  “I know, I was just trying to lighten your mood.” Henri clapped his friend on the back and flour dust rose from Lucien’s shirt. “That shall be our conceit to Monsieur van Gogh. We will take your painting to him and ask his opinion about adding the scarf. He will see that it is a masterpiece, be flattered that we asked, then, while his guard is down, I’ll ask him what he knows about the circumstances leading up to his brother’s death.”

  “That’s a horrible plan.”

  “Yes, but I have chosen to ignore that.”

  BECAUSE HE SELDOM APPEARED ON THE BUTTE DURING THE DAY, MANY OF THE boys of Montmartre had actually never seen the “little gentleman.” He was rumor, a myth, a legend. They had, of course, heard of him; they knew he was of royal birth, an artist and a bon vivant, and they had concocted tales that they shared among themselves, that he was actually a troll, the cruel master of a circus, and possibly a pirate, but the things they all knew to be true about him—by way of warnings from their mothers—were that he was always to be referred to as “the little gentleman,” was never to be teased, whispered about, or laughed at, because he was, in fact, a gentleman, always polite and well dressed, usually generous and charming, and Madame Lessard had promised that any child caught being unkind to the little gentleman would be disappeared, never to be seen again except as an unappetizing pie with eyelashes in the crust. (Madame Lessard was only slightly less mysterious than the little gentleman himself, but more menacing, as she could deceive you by giving you a treat today, only to set you up for a proper poisoning later, or so the story went.)

  But now, the legend had materialized, better than a bear on a bicycle eating a nun: the baker and the “little gentleman” were carrying across Place du Tertre a large picture of a naked woman who had recently been murdered by Madame Lessard, and the boys of the butte were drawn to the spectacle like sharks to blood.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t ask van Gogh to come to the studio,” said Lucien, trying to cantilever his end of the painting into the wind. (There were reasons why windmills had been built on Montmartre.) They were progressing across the square in a sideways, crablike manner, to keep the painting from being ripped from their grasp. Thus, because of the length of the canvas, nearly eight feet, and the crowd of boys who had gathered to look at the nude as it progressed, they were displacing the space normally required to allow passage for three carriages, with horses, and were going blocks off course to accommodate the wind and their entourage.

  “Why don’t we hire some of these urchins to help?” said Henri. “You would help, wouldn’t you, urchins?”

  The urchins, who were also moving in a crablike manner, their eyes pinned on the blue nude as if attached by mystic cords, several, unashamed, tenting their trousers with innocently stiffened peckers (they knew not the cause, only that the sight of the blue nude was simultaneously pleasant and unsettling, the exact effect she had on adults, sans trouser tents), nodded. “We’ll help,” said one boy, his finger far enough up his nose to tickle a memory nesting in his frontal lobe.

  “Not a chance,” said Lucien. “The paint’s not even dry. They’ll get their dirty little hands all over her. Back, urchins! Back!”

  “Was she blue in real life?” one boy asked Henri.

  “No,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “That is merely the artist’s impression of the light.”

  “Did you touch her boobies?” another urchin asked.

  “Sadly, I did not,” answered Henri, grinning at Lucien and bouncing his eyebrows, the very caricature of a light-opera lecher.

  “Why didn’t you make them bigger?” asked Nose-finger.

  “Because he didn’t paint her!” barked Lucien. “I painted her, you annoying little maggot. Now fuck off, all of you. Off you go. Pests! Vermin!” Lucien couldn’t wave them away without letting go of his end of the painting, but he was doing some powerful head tossing and eye rolling.

  “Well, if you’re going to shout at us, we’re not going to help you anymore,” said Nose-finger.

  “Lucien,” Henri said, “it is still a crime to beat a child to death, but if you feel you must, I will prevail, on your behalf, upon a team of lawyers my family retains for just such emergencies. My father is notoriously careless with firearms.”

  “Is that why Madame Lessard killed her?” asked one urchin, who, for some reason, Lucien had begun to think of as Little Woody. “Because you were painting her instead of baking bread like you’re supposed to?”

  “That’s it,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “I’ll do the beating. Shall we lean the painting against this wall?”

  Lucien nodded and they carefully set the painting on its edge. Henri had been holding his walking stick braced against the back of the canvas stretcher, but now he waved it with a great flourish and closed his eyes as he drew the brass pommel. A collective gasp rose from the urchins. Henri ventured a peek.

  “Would you look at that?” he said. There, instead of the cordial glass he was nearly sure he would be holding, he was brandishing a wicked spike of a short sword. “I’m glad I didn’t offer to console you with a cognac, Lucien. En garde, urchins!”

  He thrust the sword in the direction of the boys, who let loose with a cacophony of shrieks as they scattered to every corner of the square. Henri looked over his shoulder and grinned at Lucien, who couldn’t help but grin back.

  “She’s too skinny,” came a voice from where had once stood a thistle of street urchins. A slight man, today wearing a broad straw hat and buff linen jacket and trousers, his gray goatee trimmed and combed, and an amused smile in his blue eyes: Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

  “Monsieur Renoir,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “Bonjour.” He sheathed the sword in his cane and offered his hand to the older painter.

  Renoir shook it and nodded a bonjour to Lucien. “You are better, then?”

  “Much better,” said Lucien.

  “Good. I heard you were going to die over some girl.” Renoir looked again at the painting. “This skinny blue girl?”

  “I was just exhausted,” said Lucien.

  “Well, Rat Catcher, I guess you did learn something.”

  Lucien looked at his shoes, feeling himself blush at the master’s comment.

  “I like big butts,” Renoir explained to Toulouse-Lautrec. “This one is too skinny, but that’s not Lucien’s fault.” Renoir took a step back from the canvas, then another, and another, until he was across the street, then retraced the steps and bent down until his nose was nearly touching the paint.

  He looked up at Lucien, who was s
till steadying the canvas against the breeze. “This is very good.”

  “Merci, monsieur,” said Lucien.

  “Very, very good,” said Renoir.

  “It’s nothing,” said Lucien.

  “Ha!” Renoir slapped his leg. “It’s no humping dogs, but it’s very good.” Renoir pushed his hat back and he broke into a wide grin, a gleam in his eye betraying something joyful surfacing in his memory. “Do you remember moving that big picture of the Moulin de la Galette across the butte with me, Lucien?”

  “Of course,” said Lucien, now sharing the smile.

  “It was a big canvas,” Renoir said to Henri. “Not as big as this one, but too big for one person to carry. Caillebotte has it now.”

  “I know the painting,” said Henri. Of course he knew it. He’d been so impressed with it that he’d painted his own version of it a few years ago.

  “Anyway, I wanted to paint a party, all the life that happened on a Sunday at the Moulin de la Galette—dancing, drinking, gaiety. It was going to take a big canvas. And I could only work on Sundays because my models, Margot and the others, all worked during the week. So every Sunday, Lucien and I would walk the big canvas from my studio on rue Cortot to the dance hall, and I would paint while my friends posed. After the rough sketch, I could only keep them still one or two at a time. It was like herding cats. They wanted to drink, dance, celebrate, the very things I was trying to capture, and I was making them pose. I’d paint all day, doing a little of each model until they got impatient. Except little Margot. She would pose like a statue for as long as I needed her to. Then in the late afternoon, we would move the canvas back across the butte to my studio. Oh là là, the wind. We had to pick leaves and pine needles out of the paint every week, and I would fix each little scar, just to have a new set to fix the next week. You remember, Lucien?”

  “Oui, monsieur. I remember.”

  “You remember that white dress with the blue bows Margot wore?” Renoir asked, the gleam in his eye now going misty.”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “I loved that dress, but I had already painted her in it for my swing picture, and another picture of her dancing in it. I painted her in the blue stripes for Le Moulin de la Galette. Margot in blue.” A tear streamed down the painter’s face and he looked away, ashamed. “I’m sorry, messieurs, I don’t know what has come over me. Seeing your picture, Lucien—see what you’ve done.”

  “I’m sorry, Monsieur Renoir,” Lucien said. He was sorry for his mentor, but he didn’t know how to comfort him. This was not the realm of their relationship. They were student and master. Best now, as men do, to pretend that nothing had happened.

  Henri stepped over to Renoir, took a clean handkerchief from his breast coat pocket, and offered it to the master even as he turned to look the other way.

  “These winds make my eyes water,” said Toulouse-Lautrec to no one in particular. “The dust, I think, and the soot from the factories in Saint-Denis. It’s a wonder a man can even breathe in this city.”

  “Yes,” said Renoir, wiping his eyes. “The soot. Used to be we only had to put up with the coal soot in the winter. Now it’s all the time.”

  “Monsieur Renoir,” said Henri. “About those days, when you painted Margot. Dr. Gachet said he treated her?”

  Lucien picked up his end of the painting and began blinking furiously, shaking his head in tiny jerks to signal Henri to come on and let Renoir go about his day, but because Toulouse-Lautrec was ignoring him, Lucien looked instead as if he had suddenly developed a very elaborate facial tic.

  “I was very fond of Margot,” said Renoir. “She fell ill with a fever and I had no money for a doctor. I wired Gachet and he came immediately. He tried, but he couldn’t help her.”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Henri. “I can tell from your paintings she was extraordinary.”

  “I would have married her if she had lived,” said Renoir. “She was such a sweet little thing. But I know as the years passed, her bottom would have gotten huge. She was lovely.”

  “Did you ever lose time with her?” Henri asked.

  Lucien nearly let the painting drop. “We should go, Henri. Let Monsieur Renoir get back to his day.”

  Renoir dismissed Lucien’s distress with a wave of his delicate hand (his fingers were starting to knot with arthritis). “It was a long time ago. That whole time is a blur for me. I painted all the time. After Margot died I just traveled and painted. Just changing scenes to clear my head, I think. I don’t remember much of it.”

  “I’m sorry to bring up a painful time, monsieur,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “I only hope there is something that we younger painters might learn from your experience. Lucien has suffered a heartbreak recently.”

  “I have not,” said Lucien.

  “Your mother didn’t really kill this girl, did she?” asked Renoir. “That’s just Montmartre milling rumors, right?”

  “No, monsieur, just rumor. She is fine. We should go now. Please give my best to Madame Renoir and the children.”

  “Wait,” said Henri, sounding desperate now. “In those days, did you ever buy color from a strange little man? Smaller even than me. Dark, almost apish? Broken?”

  Suddenly, whatever sweet melancholy had animated Renoir a moment ago drained from his face.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I knew the Colorman.”

  “I like big butts.” Self-Portrait—Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1910

  THEO VAN GOGH’S GALLERY STOOD IN THE SHADOW OF THE BASILICA OF SACRÉ-COEUR, the white, Moorish–meets–Taj Mahal fairy-tale church built on Montmartre by the state to atone for the army massacring the Communards (the leaders of whom came from Montmartre) after the Franco-Prussian War. Like Paris’s other architectural anomaly, the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Coeur would often cause neck-wrenching double takes to those new to the city. But because it was visible from the entire city, it provided a convenient landmark to help travelers find Montmartre and patrons to find the Boussod et Valadon gallery, run by Theo van Gogh. “It’s right behind that big, white, mosque-looking thing on the butte,” they would say.

  “Have you ever been tempted to paint Sacré-Coeur?” Henri asked Lucien as they swung the blue nude around to fit it through Theo’s door. The gallery had a glass storefront framed in red and a wide red canvas awning with the words ART DEALER sewn on its outside edge.

  “You mean paint the whole thing or make a painting of it?”

  “Make a painting of it.”

  “No.”

  “Me either.”

  “My mother says that God wouldn’t be caught dead in that garish harlot of a church.”

  “A moment, Lucien, I may have just had a religious epiphany,” said Toulouse-Lautrec.

  They rested the canvas on its edge as Lucien opened the door.

  Theo van Gogh, thirty-three years old, thin, sandy haired, with a meticulously trimmed beard, wearing a houndstooth suit with black cravat, was sitting behind a desk at the rear of his gallery. When he heard the door open he rose and hurried to the front to help.

  “Oh my. Henri, is this yours?” Theo said, holding the door out of their way as they carried the painting in. His French was slightly clipped by a Dutch accent.

  “Lucien’s,” said Henri.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur van Gogh,” Lucien said with a nod as he steered the painting to the middle of the gallery. Lucien knew Theo, had sold some paintings in the gallery, but remained a bit formal with him out of respect for his position. The younger van Gogh looked thinner than when Lucien had last seen him, alert to the point of being almost jumpy but not healthy. Pale. Tired.

  “Shall I fetch an easel?” asked Theo. “I don’t know if I have one large enough.”

  “The floor will be fine. Just a wall to lean it against. The paint is still wet, I’m afraid,” said Lucien.

  “And you carried it here uncrated? Oh my,” said Theo. He ran to the back of the gallery, grabbed the chair he had been sitting on, and brought it to Lucien. “Lean the stretch
er against this.”

  The entire gallery, which took nearly the whole lower floor of the four-floor brick building, was hung floor to ceiling with paintings, prints, and drawings. Lucien recognized the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pissarro, as well as Gauguin, Bernard, and Vuillard; drawings by Steinlen and Willette, the butte’s leading cartoonists; the odd Japanese print by Hokusai or Hiroshige; as well as many, many canvases by Theo’s brother Vincent.

  Once they had the painting in place, Theo stepped back to take a look.

  “It’s not finished, I—” Lucien started to explain about wanting to add the blue scarf, but Henri signaled for him to be quiet.

  Theo took a pair of spectacles from his waistcoat and put them on, then crouched down and looked more closely at the canvas. He removed the spectacles and stepped back again. Here, for the first time, really, Lucien could see in the younger brother the intensity he’d seen in Vincent. Theo tended to be a bit fussy, often had the air of a clerk, assessing, accounting, measuring, but now he was evincing the sort of burning concentration that Vincent seemed to wear constantly, like a mad prophet. Henri had teased him that he knew he could always find a seat at a party next to Vincent because the Dutchman’s gaze had frightened everyone away.

  Lucien was beginning to fidget under the pressure of Theo van Gogh’s silence when the gallery owner finally shook his head and smiled.

  “Lucien, I don’t know where I could hang it. As you see, the walls are full. Even if I took down all of the prints—it’s so large.”

  “You want to hang it?” Lucien said. He hadn’t really heard Renoir’s praise over the piece, so now, for the first time, he looked at it as something besides a reminder of Juliette.

  “Of course I want to hang it,” said Theo. He offered his hand to Lucien, who took it and endured a shoulder-wrenching handshake. “You know, Vincent used to say that someone needed to do for figure painting what Monet had done for landscapes, and that no one had. I think you have.”

  “Oh, come now, Theo,” said Henri. “It’s a nude, not a revolution.”

  Theo smiled at Toulouse-Lautrec. “You’re just jealous.”