Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Read online

  “I think so,” said Lucien. He didn’t understand at all.

  “The Colorman is like that carp, Lucien. In all of our paintings, Pissarro’s, Renoir’s, Sisley’s, Morisot’s—even poor Bazille, before he was shot in the war—even back then, from the first days when we all met in Paris, he is there, in all our art, just below the surface.”

  BELOW THE SURFACE OF BOULEVARD SAINT-GERMAIN, THE COLORMAN LIMPED across the limestone floors of a chamber that had been cut into the Left Bank nearly two thousand years before. He held a storm lamp above his head, looking for the carved stone that marked the position and level of the room, but the space was so vast that the light evaporated into relentless murk.

  “We need to follow the wall,” he said to Étienne, who didn’t particularly like going down steps or through narrow passageways, who thought that the dark was a signal to sleep, not something you should travel around in, and generally that this whole underground expedition was complete bullshit. Étienne was along because the Colorman didn’t like being alone in the dark, and he couldn’t allow Bleu to know about this place.

  The entire Latin Quarter was undermined like this, in the most literal sense of the term. These remnants of quarries for limestone, clay, and sand went down ten levels. The upper levels were the oldest, dating back to the time of the Gauls, even before the Romans, but as each generation dug into the banks of the Seine for stone to expand the city, the miners would have to dig deeper, using the floor of the earlier quarry as the ceiling for the newer one, until 1774, when a huge sinkhole opened in rue d’Enfer, swallowing up a whole block of buildings, and a man named Charles-Axel Guillaumot was commissioned by Louis XVI’s royal architects to survey, excavate, and repair the quarries before the entire Latin Quarter sank into the earth. Over twenty years, even through the revolution, when few bureaucrats survived the guillotine, Guillaumot rebuilt the underground, shoring up each level, marking each chamber and passageway to correspond with the street above, until he had reconstructed a stable, safe underground city that plunged twice the depth that any structure at the time stretched to the sky. When the city’s cemeteries began literally to burst at the walls from the weight of centuries of the dead, the bones of millions were moved to the chambers under Montparnasse to make way for the nouveau dead, and the ossuary was christened the “Catacombs” after the ancient crypts of Rome.

  The Colorman had entered through the Catacombs’ entrance at boulevard Saint-Jacques. In a quarter-hour he and Étienne had stumbled past the stacked femurs and fibulas of history and were making their way into the deepest part of the underground city where no one ever went.

  They came to the carved stone that marked their location and the Colorman set his lamp on the floor, pulled a parchment map from his pocket, and spread it out on the floor.

  “Not far now,” he said to Étienne, who was looking at a strand of cobwebs that was streaming from the brim of his new hat, which he felt was just another indicator of what complete bullshit this mission was.

  They were so deep now that even the scurry of rats had ceased as there was nothing to draw them down here. The Colorman skirted a wall for the equivalent of a city block, leading Étienne by a rope, until he came to a bronze ring set in the stone about the level of his knees.

  “Shhhhh,” shushed the Colorman. He cocked his head and listened. Étienne turned his ears away from the wall and scanned the great room: the sound of their breathing, and a very distant sound of dripping water.

  “Did you hear footsteps?” asked the Colorman.

  Étienne didn’t answer, as was his policy. However he thought he might have heard the scrape of a shoe; maybe not.

  The Colorman grasped the bronze ring, and as his body described the shape of the letter C, he pulled on the ring. There was a scraping sound and a panel in the wall swung away. It was, in fact, a thick oak door, only faced with limestone tiles to match the wall.

  “Voilà!” he said, holding the lantern high. The chamber inside was no bigger than the parlor in their apartment, and the lantern illuminated it entirely. Except for a bronze charcoal brazier that shone brightly, and scores of canvases leaning against the far wall, the room was empty. The Colorman shuffled to the canvases and picked one that was nearly as tall as he was, a Manet, a nude of a fair-skinned, dark-haired woman, painted under window light. She was sitting at her vanity in front of an ornate gold mirror, looking back over her shoulder at the painter as if she had expected someone to walk in on her and was pleased about it. More importantly to the Colorman’s purposes, the delicate chair on which she sat was draped with luxurious ultramarine velvet. It was a rare composition and would have been a national treasure as well as a scandal if anyone had known it existed, even now, eight years after the painter’s death. The Colorman, Manet, and the model had been the only ones to ever see the painting.

  It was a treasure for the Colorman, too, and he did not like having to use it, but they needed the blue. He carried the painting out into the greater room and leaned it against the wall while he pushed the stone-clad door closed.

  “I should hang the lamp from your neck,” the Colorman said to Étienne. “I need both hands to carry this.”

  He wrestled with the lamp, tried to tie it around Étienne’s neck, only to find that the smell of burning donkey hair was not something his equine companion was willing to endure.

  “We’re going to have to use Goya’s trick,” said the Colorman. He had packed a half dozen thick candles into his satchel, which he attached to the brim of Étienne’s hat, then lit, so that the donkey was the one who led their way out of the underworld, looking like a long-eared birthday cake, while the Colorman stumbled along behind, trying to steer the canvas through the passageways.

  “Did you hear something?” asked the Colorman when they were almost back to the entrance of the Catacombs.

  Étienne did not answer, because he hadn’t been listening, and he wouldn’t have said anything if he had, because now his new hat was ruined by melted wax, which proved, he thought, that this trip was complete bullshit.

  The Colorman threaded the canvas through a narrow door and into a chamber that was lined floor to ceiling with human skulls. “We’ll take the painting to the flat, Étienne, then we’ll go to market and buy you some carrots. I need to buy a new pistol, too. Bleu is not properly cleaning up after herself.”

  Twenty

  BREAKFAST AT THE BLACK CAT

  UPON HIS RETURN FROM THE SHOW IN BRUSSELS, HENRI DRAGGED LUCIEN out of the bakery and across the butte to Le Chat Noir cabaret for breakfast.

  “But I own a bakery,” Lucien said, still squirming out of his apron as they crossed the square. “The Chat Noir isn’t even open for breakfast.”

  “Today, they are,” said Henri. “Rodolphe Salis has commissioned me to decorate the walls of his cabaret. I must inspect the canvas.”

  “You’ve been in Le Chat Noir a thousand times.”

  “Yes, but today I shall be sober! And I need your opinion.”

  “You’re a lunatic.”

  “On what I should paint.”

  “Right. Sorry. Lead on, then.”

  Rodolphe Salis, a dark-bearded, formally dressed man of forty, unlocked the cabaret for them and led them to a booth where they could see the walls Henri was to paint. Salis had moved the Chat Noir from its location up the street so he might appeal to a higher class of clientele, and the décor in the cabaret, carved Louis XIV tables and chairs—red velvet, gold leaf, and crystal adorning anything that wasn’t moving—reflected his intent. Behind the marble-topped bar was an enormous mural by Adolphe Willette, a cartoon, really, depicting a modern-day bacchanalia, with bankers in tailcoats gunning each other down over half-naked, fairy-winged showgirls at the margins, while the bulk of the revelers danced, drank, and groped in a maelstrom of oblivious debauchery in the center. It was a satirical indictment of Le Chat Noir’s clientele, Paris patricians slumming on Montmartre with their working-poor mistresses, the artist, Willette, simultaneously
celebrating the joie de vivre and biting the hands that fed him.

  “I know,” said Salis, waving to the painting. “It’s quite a painting to have your work in company with. Thank the stars no one actually looks at the art.”

  “I’m flattered for the opportunity,” said Henri. “Perhaps a glass of wine for Lucien and me while we discuss the motif.” He patted a leather briefcase he carried with him.

  “I’ll send it over,” said Salis, heading off to his office.

  “You said breakfast,” Lucien whispered furiously.

  “Yes?” said Henri, looking perplexed. He lit a cheroot and pulled a stack of mail from his briefcase. “All this in just two weeks. Oh look, a letter from Grandmama in Albi.”

  “I’m worried to death about Juliette,” said Lucien. “I can barely sleep.”

  Their wine arrived with a thin, redheaded girl who looked too young to be working in a cabaret, perhaps thirteen. She curtsied as she backed away from the table.

  “Don’t look at her,” said Henri. “She’s Salis’s daughter. I don’t know why she’s not away at a boarding school. Salis certainly has the money. But she’s a redhead, so she’s probably evil, even at her tender age.”

  “I thought you liked redheads.”

  “I do. What’s your point?”

  “Nothing.”

  Henri slurped his wine and returned to his mail. “How sweet, Grand-mère wishes me luck with the show in Brussels. Listen. ‘I would like to hope that my grandson’s brush, when he shows his work in public, will always be in good taste.’”

  “She doesn’t know how you live in Paris, does she?”

  Henri dismissed the question with a wave of his cigar and regarded the empty plaster panels over their booth. “I want to paint a picture of a clown fucking a cat.”

  “I’m not sure that will work, even on the walls of Le Chat Noir,” said Lucien.

  “All right, a ballerina. One of the petits rats from the opera that Degas paints so often.”

  “With a clown?”

  “No, fucking a cat. It’s a theme, Lucien. The name of the place is Le Chat Noir.”

  “Yes, but when you did the poster for the Moulin Rouge you didn’t do a clown fucking a windmill.”

  “Sadly, no, they rejected my first drawings. And I’m good friends with one of the clowns there, Cha-U-Kao. She would have modeled for me. She’s both a clown and a lesbian. At the same time! Art weeps for the missed opportunity.”

  “You could still paint her,” said Lucien.

  “No. She hates cats. But what magnificent symbolism that would be. I tell you, Lucien, these symbolists, Redon and Gauguin, they’re on to something.”

  “You said Gauguin was a self-important tosser,” said Lucien.

  “I did?”

  “Many times.”

  “Well I meant theorist. He’s angry at me because I won’t join any of his movements. Cloisonnism? What is that? Fencing your colors up in line. That’s just Japanese printmaking with a new name.”

  Lucien poured Henri another glass of wine from the carafe, because if he couldn’t somehow force his friend to slow down and listen, he was afraid he was going to have to choke him.

  “I suppose we’ll have to drug the cat, or have the ballerina hide a trout in her tutu.”

  “I went to Giverny,” Lucien said. “Monet says the blue color can stop time. Literally stop time for the painter.”

  “Oh,” said Henri. “So what you remembered, when the Professeur hypnotized you, with the trains, that happened?”

  “Yes,” Lucien said. “Monet really painted six paintings in a half an hour. To him it was hours. The Colorman told him what would happen that day. But before then, and after, the color always came by way of his wife, Camille.”

  “But she died, didn’t she?” said Henri.

  “Monet says they all die, Henri. There’s always a woman and she always dies.”

  Henri twirled his cigar in the crystal ashtray, paring off the snowy powder of ash and punishing the ember, daring it to go out. He looked over his pince-nez at Lucien, studying the baker as if he were a painting, analyzing the brushstrokes that formed his eyelashes. Lucien feigned a cough and looked at the table, unable to hold his friend’s gaze.

  “Not always,” Henri said, his voice soft, the voice of a friend, not the outrageous painter Toulouse-Lautrec. “They don’t always die. Carmen went away. She’s fine. Juliette went away, before, and she came back. Maybe she’ll come back again.”

  “But you said yourself that Carmen nearly died. What if Juliette is sick somewhere? What if the Colorman has locked her up? Who knows what he does to them?”

  “Carmen knows,” said Henri. “We could ask her what the Colorman does, where he goes.”

  “But she doesn’t remember anything.”

  “And neither did you, until the Professeur did his parlor trick with the blue watch.”

  “We don’t have any more blue.”

  “Yes we do, Lucien. We have your Blue Nude. Remember how Renoir reacted when he saw it? It was as if he were transported back to his Margot. We’ll ask Carmen to remember while she’s looking at your painting.”

  “I will try anything, Henri, but won’t seeing Carmen be painful for you?”

  “If she remembers me as I remember her, no. If not, well, I’ll be heartbroken, but she’s a redhead, it’s to be expected. Tomorrow morning you can get your painting from Bruant and bring it to my studio. That gives me time to do some sketches for Salis and run by the brothel at rue d’Amboise for some light evening debauchery. In the morning, I’ll go to the Marais and bring Carmen back to question her before the Blue Nude. Perhaps Le Professeur will help.”

  “He’s gone away, exploring some newly discovered cave in Spain.”

  “Do you know if he fixed my mechanical stilts?”

  “I know he had been working on them. He said he would leave them at your studio. They weren’t there?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been there. I wanted to have breakfast before I started work.”

  “She’s both a clown and a lesbian. At the same time! Art weeps for the missed opportunity.” La Clownesse Cha-U-Kao au Moulin Rouge—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895

  THE COLORMAN UNLOCKED THE DOOR AND WALKED THE MANET SIDEWAYS into the flat. It was dark, not a single gaslight was lit, yet he could see Juliette by the moonlight streaming through the windows. She stood at the stove, stirring something in a pot. It smelled like stew, lamb maybe.

  “Chérie, why are you standing in the dark like a ninny? Come look at what I have. I’ll bet you don’t remember this one.” He leaned the painting against the wall, then took a box of matches from the mantel, climbed on a chair under one of the gas sconces, turned the valve, and lit a match. Even on the chair, he could not reach the lamp. Somewhere there was a brass extension rod that a match could be clipped on for lighting the overhead lamp, but he wasn’t going to find it in the dark.

  “Come help me.”

  She dropped her spoon and moved across the room in awkward, mechanical steps. She took the match from him and held it to the mantel, which sizzled into a white-hot glow.

  She stepped back and stood there, still holding the lit match. The Colorman blew it out before it burned her fingers. She wore the periwinkle dress. A note was pinned on ruffles at her bosom. It read DO NOT BONK THE JULIETTE in bold yet elegant script.

  The Colorman sighed and climbed off his chair. So Bleu had moved on to another body.

  The Colorman said, “The concierge wouldn’t let Étienne come upstairs, the bitch. But I left some carrots with him in the stable. And I got a new pistol.” He pulled the small revolver from his waistband and waved it in the air like a tiny broken buckaroo.

  Juliette said nothing, but turned to watch him as he tucked the pistol away and went to the stove to taste the stew.

  “You remember this Manet?” He moved the painting into the light. “Berthe is nearly as pretty as you, eh? Darker eyes, though.”

  Juliette
blinked, that was all. He knew she wasn’t going to answer. This kind never talked, which, truth be told, he liked better than when Bleu was in residence. Although this was a rare occurrence, happening only when she created a model from scratch. Most of the time she just moved from one body to another, even back and forth, often leaving the person whose body she had used confused and unable to remember where she had been while Bleu was in control. Sometimes, however, as she had with Juliette, Bleu simply found the meat, a corpse (this one had been a drowned woman in the morgue on Île de la Cité) and she would shape it into a whole new living, breathing creature. Juliette had never existed before Bleu made her, so when Bleu moved on, the Juliette shell became little more than a doll. She could move and would take instructions, do simple tasks, and she would eat, drink, and go to the lavatory without being prompted, but she had no will of her own.

  “I didn’t need the note,” said the Colorman. He went back to the stove and ladled out two shallow bowls of the stew. He placed the bowls on the table and went back to the kitchen for spoons and a baguette. “Come, sit. Eat,” he said.

  Juliette went to the table, sat down, and began to eat.

  “Slowly,” the Colorman said. “It’s hot. Blow on it.” He showed her how to blow on a spoonful of stew before eating it and she followed him in the gesture, blowing on it exactly four times, as he had, before putting each spoonful in her mouth. A drop of brown gravy ran down her chin and dripped onto the tablecloth.

  The Colorman climbed down from his chair, snapped up her napkin from the table, and tucked it into the high collar of her dress, taking the care to smooth the bib over her breasts several times to make sure it was secure.

  “There, you won’t ruin your dress. See, I didn’t need the note.”