Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Read online

  Père Lessard put his arm around Lucien’s shoulders. “Promise me, son, that you will become a great painter and that you will not let a spiteful woman ruin your life as I have.”

  “A beautiful and spiteful woman,” said Mother.

  “Of course, ma chère,” said Lucien’s father, “but I don’t need to warn him off of beauty, do I?”

  “Warn him off taking in paint-spattered vagabonds as pets, then, would you?”

  “We must forgive Madame her ignorance, Lucien. She is a woman and therefore hasn’t the capacity to appreciate art, but one day she will realize that my painter friends are great men, and she will repent for her unkind words.”

  Lucien’s parents did this sometimes—talked through him as if he were a hollow tube simply muting the harsh tone and timbre of their words. He had learned that at these times, it was best to stare at a distant and neutral spot on the wall and resist the urge to appear attentive until one of them formulated an exit line sufficiently droll to dismiss the whole exchange.

  Mother sniffed the air, which was rich with the smell of baking bread, and harrumphed. “You have a few minutes before the bread is done. Monsieur, why don’t you take your son outside to watch the sunrise. Once you turn him into a painter he’ll never be up in time to see one again.” And then she waltzed past the heavy wooden table and up the stairs to the family apartments.

  Lucien and his father slipped out the side door of number 6 rue Norvins and crept down between the buildings and behind the back of the waiting customers, across the Place du Tertre, to look out over all of Paris.

  The butte Montmartre rose four hundred feet above the north end of Paris. For hundreds of years Montmartre had been a village unto itself, outside of the city walls, but as the city walls moved out and were torn down to make way for boulevards, Montmartre had become a country village in the midst of one of the biggest cities in the world. If you were an artist in Paris, Montmartre was where you came to starve, and it was Père Lessard who kept you from it.

  Père Lessard produced a small pipe from his apron pocket and lit it with a match, then stood with his hand on his son’s shoulder, as he did six mornings a week, and smoked as they watched the city turn pink under the dawn.

  This was Lucien’s favorite part of the day, when most of the work was finished, school was still ahead, and his father spoke to him as if he was the only person in the world. He imagined himself a young Moses, the Chosen, and Father’s pipe the Burning Bush, except that he was a short, French, Catholic Moses and didn’t understand a word of the Hebrew that the bush was speaking.

  “Look there, you can see the Louvre,” said Père Lessard. “You know that before Haussmann changed Paris, the courtyard of the Louvre was a shantytown where workmen and their families lived? Monsieur Renoir grew up there.”

  “Yes,” said Lucien, eager to show Father how grown-up he was. “He said he used to play pranks on Queen Amalia’s guards when he was a boy.” Lucien knew Monsieur Renoir better than Father’s other painters, as Renoir had agreed to tutor Lucien in drawing in exchange for bread, coffee, and pastries. Despite their time together, Renoir didn’t seem very fond of him. Lucien thought it might be the syphilis.

  It had come up during their second lesson, when Lucien was lamenting that he just wasn’t smart enough to be an artist.

  “Art is not about thinking, Lucien,” said Renoir. “It is about the skill in your hands. I am not an intellectual, I have no imagination. I paint what I see. There is more to be said in the look of a man’s hands than in his discourse.”

  “But your hands are tiny, monsieur,” said Lucien. Renoir was a very slight fellow. Madame Jacob, who owned the crémerie across the square, was always trying to convince him to marry one of her two daughters, who she promised would put some meat on his bones and save him from his domestic helplessness.

  “What are you trying to say?” asked Renoir.

  “Nothing,” said Lucien.

  “Your hands are tiny too,” said Renoir.

  “But I am only nine,” said Lucien, who was only nine at the time.

  “This is why no one likes you, Lucien,” said Renoir. “You probably have small hands because you have syphilis.”

  Lucien didn’t know what syphilis was, but he worried it would ruin him as a painter.

  “You don’t have syphilis,” said Father. “Your hands are fine and strong from kneading dough. You will be a great painter.”

  “I don’t think Monsieur Renoir thinks I will be great. He says I’m simple.”

  “To Renoir, simplicity is a virtue. Hasn’t he told you how he loves simple women?”

  “I don’t think he means virtue simple,” said Lucien. “I think he means stupid simple.”

  Not long after Renoir agreed to tutor Lucien, Père Lessard took the boy down the butte to the color shop of Monsieur Tanguy at Place Pigalle and bought him a drawing pad, pencils, a sanguine crayon, and some drawing charcoal. Then they rode on the top deck of a horse-drawn omnibus to the Louvre to look at paintings, so Lucien would have a reference point from which to start his career as an artist.

  “There are many pictures of the Holy Mother,” said Lucien. “But each is different.”

  “The Holy Mother has many faces, but you know it’s her from her blue cloak. She is said to be the spirit in all women.”

  “Look, here she is naked and the baby Jesus has wings,” said Lucien.

  “That is not the Holy Mother, that’s Venus, and that’s not Jesus, that is Cupid, the Roman god of love.”

  “Wouldn’t she have the spirit of the Holy Mother as well?”

  “No, she is a pagan myth.”

  “What about Maman? Is the spirit of the Holy Mother in her?”

  “No, Lucien, your mother is also a pagan myth. Come, look at these paintings of wrestlers.”

  Back on the butte, Lucien watched his father watch the sunrise break the horizon, turning the river Seine into a bright, copper-colored ribbon across Paris. A wistful smile shone in his father’s eyes.

  “Why don’t you paint, Papa?” Lucien said. “I can make the bread.”

  “The racks are too heavy for you. And you are not tall enough to see in the top oven. And I am too old to learn. And if I did, I would have to do it in secret or my painter friends would tease me. And besides, I’m too old to start now, I could never be good.”

  “If you keep it a secret, why do you have to be good?”

  “How do you ever expect to learn anything if you are always arguing, Lucien? Come, the loaves are ready to come out,” Father said. He tapped out his pipe on the heel of his shoe, then cuffed Lucien playfully on the head and strode off across the square to work.

  The crowd had grown around the bakery, maids and wives, young girls and old men, concierges, café owners, factory workers looking for a loaf to carry for their lunch, the odd whore, dancing girl, and piano player stopping for breakfast on the way home from a late night’s labor. All trading bonjours and gossip as the smell of freshly baked bread grew tall in the morning air.

  At the edge of the group Lucien spotted the painter Camille Pissarro and ran to him.

  “Monsieur!” said Lucien, stopping a respectful distance away, resisting the urge to throw his arms out to be swept up for rough kisses from the artist. Pissarro was Lucien’s favorite of Father’s artist friends. He was a bald, hawk-nosed Jew with a wild, graying beard and fringe; a theorist and anarchist who spoke French with a lilting Caribbean accent, he could argue fiercely in the bakery or café with his artist friends one minute, then give his last sou to them for bread, coal, and color the next.

  He had a son Lucien’s age, who was also named Lucien (but there was no confusion when they played together, for reasons to soon be revealed), and a daughter, Jeanne-Rachel (called Minette), who was a year younger than Lucien. Minette was petite, and pretty, and could throw a rock as well as any boy. She inspired a love in Lucien so profound that it made him nearly breathless with the need to pull her hair and profess he
r passionate cooties to the world. Lucien was relatively sure that he would one day have to take her as his wife, if only she could be taught to be as spiteful as his mother, so she could properly ruin his life. But she was not with her father today.

  “Rat Catcher!” called Pissarro, foiling Lucien’s respectable-distance strategy by snatching the boy up by one arm and mercilessly planting a beard-cushioned kiss on each of Lucien’s cheeks before dropping him back to his feet.

  “Look, monsieur, how they gather to see who will win your painting.”

  “I think they gather for your father’s bread,” said Pissarro. He exchanged a warm handshake with Père Lessard, who was about to recite the virtues of his friend’s painting and the deep ignorance of the Salon for rejecting his work when there came a tapping on the glass from inside and everyone turned to see Mère Lessard brandishing a demitasse spoon like a petite battle-axe, an eloquent and urgent eyebrow raised to convey that the loaves were ready to come out of the oven and Father could dawdle if he wished, and the bread could burn, but at some point he would have to sleep, and it should not surprise him in the least should he wake up dead with a small spoon driven into his brain by way of an ear or nostril.

  “In a moment, my friend,” said Père Lessard. “The loaves.” He shrugged and hurried around the corner.

  “I’ve been drawing,” said Lucien. “Monsieur Renoir has been teaching me to draw what I see.”

  “Show me,” said Pissarro.

  Lucien was off in an instant, down the alley, in the back door, through the bakery, up the stairs, and back with his sketchbook before Pissarro could get a good ember going in his pipe.

  “See?” said Lucien, handing the sketchbook to the painter. “It is two dogs I saw fighting in the Maquis yesterday.”

  Pissarro looked at the drawing, nodding and turning it in the air, holding it at arm’s length while he studied it and stroked his great thundercloud beard, as if he were Jehovah surveying an extracted rib for creative possibilities.

  “These dogs are not fighting.”

  “Yes they are. Like the paintings we saw in the Louvre,” said Lucien. “Gecko-Roman wrestling, Father called it.”

  “Ah, of course,” said Pissarro, as if it had become clear. “Yes, Gecko-Roman dog wrestling. Superb! I presume you haven’t shown your wrestling dogs to Madame Lessard, then.”

  “No, monsieur, Mother doesn’t appreciate art.”

  “Ah, well, then I must insist that you give it to me for my collection.”

  Lucien felt he would nearly burst with pride. “Really, monsieur, you want it?”

  “It will hang next to a Cézanne. I believe he has an affinity for wrestling dogs.”

  “And you will tell Minette that I drew it?”

  “Of course.”

  Lucien started to tear the drawing out of his sketchbook, then paused and looked up. Lucien had dark eyes that often seemed a bit too wide for his face, like those of a hungry kitten, and now they bore distress that bordered on tears. “But, monsieur, I don’t want your Lucien to feel bad when he sees my wrestling dogs in your house.”

  Pissarro laughed. “Your friend has his own sketchbook, Rat Catcher, don’t you worry about him.”

  Lucien smiled, tore out the page, and handed it to the painter, who folded it carefully in half and tucked it into his coat pocket.

  A murmur rose in the crowd and there was polite maneuvering for position at the door. Mère Lessard pulled up the shade, turned the sign, and opened the door. Madame called out a joyful bonjour to the customers and welcomed them into the shop with a breezy flourish and a smile such as one might find on a pre-revolution Marie-Antoinette painted on a teacup, which is to say, sparkling with charm and warm possibility.

  “Maman reserves her stormy side for her family,” Père Lessard would say, “for the world she has only sunshine and butterflies.”

  It was then that she smacked young Lucien in the head with a baguette. The crunchy yet tender crust wrapped around his head, bending but not breaking, showing that the oven had been precisely the right temperature, there had been exactly enough moisture, and in fact, by the ancient Lessard test method, it was perfect. Lucien thought this was the way of all French boulangers, and he would be a young man before anyone explained to him that other bakers did not have a test boy who was smacked in the head with a loaf of bread every morning.

  Madame Lessard held the perfect baguette up to the crowd. “Voilà,” she said, pronouncing the day’s sales begun.

  “May I pick the ticket, Maman? May I pick the ticket?” called Lucien, hopping up and down, crumbs falling from his hair before the customers, who waited four-deep at the counter, most of whom looked quite perplexed at his enthusiasm.

  “I already have, Rat Catcher,” said Lucien’s oldest sister, Régine, who was sixteen and had joined her mother behind the counter. Régine had her father’s dark hair and eyes, and stood taller than either of her parents. Père Lessard said that she would make someone a fine wife someday, and in lieu of that, he could send her to Quebec, where she would be the prettiest lumberjack and Red Indian fighter ever. Régine held the winning ticket in the air. “Number forty-two,” she said. “Does anyone have number forty-two?”

  As it turned out, no one had number forty-two; in fact, no one in the bakery that morning had bought a ticket at all. An hour later the ticket had been tacked up on the wall under Pissarro’s painting, a small landscape looking down from a hill in Auvers-sur-Oise, portraying the red tile roofs and the river below. Pissarro sat at the little café table outside the bakery with Père Lessard. Lucien danced from foot to foot beside the table, his schoolbooks tucked under his arm.

  “We can’t even give them away,” said Pissarro forlornly.

  “Nonsense,” said Père Lessard. “The winner simply hasn’t shown yet. And all the better if they don’t. You have the ten francs we got for selling the tickets, and your magnificent painting will hang in my bakery where the people may admire it.”

  “But, Papa—” said Lucien, who was about to correct the arithmetic when Father shoved a buttered roll in his mouth. “Mmmpppf,” Lucien continued with a spray of crumbs. After all, the tickets had only sold for a sou each, with twenty sous to the franc, and they’d only sold seventy-eight tickets—why, it was less than four francs! And Lucien would have said so if his father hadn’t muzzle-loaded him with un petit pain while handing a ten-franc note across the table to Pissarro.

  Across the square a donkey brayed, and they turned to see a bent little brown man in an ill-fitting suit trudging up the street, leading the donkey, but their attention was immediately captured by the girl who walked but ten paces ahead. Lucien’s mouth fell open and a ball of half-chewed bread tumbled out of his mouth onto the cobbles. Two pigeons in the square cackled at their good fortune and made a fast walk for the gift from above.

  “I’m not too late, am I?” the girl called. She held her raffle ticket before her.

  She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, a delicate thing in a white dress with puffy sleeves and great ultramarine bows all down its front and at the cuffs. Her eyes matched the bows on her dress, too blue, really, and even the painter, a theorist and student of color, found he had to look a bit askew at her to keep from losing his train of thought.

  Père Lessard stood and met the girl with a smile. “You are just in time, mademoiselle,” he said with a bit of a bow. “May I?”

  He plucked the ticket from the girl’s hand and checked the number. “And you are the winner! Congratulations! And how lucky it is that the great man himself is here. Mademoiselle…”

  “Margot,” said the girl.

  “Mademoiselle Margot, may I present the great painter, Monsieur Camille Pissarro.”

  Pissarro stood and bowed over the girl’s hand. “Enchanted,” he said.

  Lucien, who was, indeed, enchanted—thought she might be the single most beautiful thing he had ever seen—stared at her, wondering if Minette, in addition to learning to be sp
iteful, might someday wear a dress with blue bows, and if her voice might take on the sound of a music box like Margot’s, and her eyes sparkle with laughter, and if so, he would have her sit on the divan and he would just look at her without blinking, until water came to his eyes. He didn’t know that it was strange for the sight of one girl to inspire love to the point of tears for another, because Minette had been his only love, but there was no question that the sight of Mademoiselle Margot had opened his heart for Minette so it felt like it might leap out of his chest with joy.

  “Come inside, mademoiselle,” said Père Lessard, deftly slipping his hand under Lucien’s chin and closing the boy’s mouth. “See your painting.”

  “Oh, I have seen it,” Margot said with a laugh. “And I was wondering if instead of the painting, I might have one of your sticky buns as my prize.”

  The smile with which Pissarro had greeted the girl fell as if he’d been suddenly shot in the face with a paralyzing dart of Pygmy art critics from the darkest Congo. He sat down as if suddenly exhausted.

  “I’m teasing,” said Margot, touching Pissarro’s sleeve coquettishly. “I am honored to have one of your paintings, Monsieur Pissarro.”

  The girl followed Père Lessard into the bakery, leaving Pissarro and Lucien outside, both a little stunned.

  “You, Painter,” came a scratchy voice. “Do you need colors? I have the finest hand-ground pigments.” The twisted little man and his donkey had moved to the side of the table.

  Pissarro looked up to see the little man waving a tin tube of paint in the air, the cap off.

  “The finest ultramarine,” said the Colorman. “Real color. True color. Cinnabar, madder, and Italian earths. None of that false Prussian shit.” The little man spat at the pigeons to show his disdain for Prussians, man-made colors, and, in general, pigeons.

  “I get my colors from Père Tanguy,” said Pissarro. “He knows my palette. And besides, I have no money.”

  “Monsieur,” said Lucien. He nodded to the ten-franc note, which Pissarro still held in his hand.