Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Page 5

  It is not so much a break from my work I need, for it goes well, but a break from the city, from routine. I shouldn’t be staying more than a month, as I need to be back in the city in the fall to prepare to show my paintings with the Twenty, in Brussels. I look forward to breathing the fresh air and spending the afternoons with you and Aunt Cécile. Give her my kisses, and to you, always, many loving kisses.

  Yours,

  Henri

  Perhaps a month would do it. However long, he could not be in Paris now. He began to see the image that rose in him, the pentimento in his heart, upon seeing first Lucien’s Juliette, then the little Colorman. It was Carmen; not her sweetness, her soft voice and touch, it was something different, and dark, and he did not want to see it fully again, or he knew he would never be able to send it away.

  Now a bath, then back to the Moulin Rouge, watch Jane Avril dance, La Goulue the female clown sing and can-can, and then he would ride the green fairy into one of his friendly brothels and stay there in a haze until his train left for Mother’s castle in the country.

  HENRI HAD FOUND HER FIVE YEARS BEFORE, ON HIS WAY TO A LATE LUNCH with Lucien, Émile Bernard, and Lucien Pissarro, the son of Camille. They were all young artists, full of themselves, their talent, and the infinite possibilities of the results of mixing imagination and craft. They had spent the day at Cormon’s studio, listening to the master prattle on about the academic tradition and techniques of the masters. In the midst of the lecture on the atmosphere of the room, of creating the chiaroscuro play of shadow and light like the Italian master Caravaggio, Émile Bernard had painted the backdrop of his painting with bold red stripes. His friends had laughed, and they were all ejected from the class.

  They decided to adjourn to the Café Nouvelle Athènes on rue Pigalle. Toulouse-Lautrec paid for a cab to bring them down the hill and they tumbled out of it in front of the café, laughing. Just down the block, a young, redheaded woman was leaving her job at the laundry, her hair in a bun that was unraveling, her hands and forearms were pink from her work.

  “Look at her,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “She’s magnificently raw.” He held his arms out to push his friends back. “Stay back. She’s mine. I must paint her.”

  “She’s yours,” said Bernard, the baby-face, barely a beard pushing through on his chin. “Like new mold on cheese,” Henri had teased him. “We’ll wait for you inside.”

  Toulouse-Lautrec waved them off and called to the redhead, who was trudging down toward the butte. “Pardon! Mademoiselle? Pardon!”

  She stopped, turned, seemed surprised that anyone could be calling to her.

  Henri approached her with his walking stick held before him with both hands, as if in supplication. “Pardon me, mademoiselle. I don’t mean to bother you, but I am a painter. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec is my name. And I—I…”

  “Yes?” she said, looking down, not making eye contact.

  “Pardon, mademoiselle, but you are—you are extraordinary. Your look, I mean… I must paint you. I will pay for you to model.”

  “Monsieur, I am not a model.” A quiet voice, shy.

  “Please, mademoiselle. I assure you, this is not a ruse, I am an artist by profession. I can pay you well. More than you make at the laundry. And even then, I will accommodate your other work.”

  She smiled then, flattered perhaps. “I’ve never been painted. What would I have to do?”

  “You’ll pose for me then? Splendid! Simply splendid! Here is my card.” He handed her his calling card with the address of his studio, as well as his full name and title embossed with the family crest.

  “Oh my,” she said. “A count?”

  “It is nothing,” said Henri. “Come to my studio tomorrow afternoon, after you finish work. Don’t worry about dinner. I’ll have food for you. Just come as you are.”

  “But, monsieur—” She gestured to her work clothes, plain, black and white. “I have a nice dress. A blue dress. I can—”

  “No, my dear. Come just as you are now. Please.”

  She tucked his card into her skirt. “I will come. After four.”

  “Thank you, mademoiselle. I’ll see you then. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to my friends. Good day.”

  “Good day,” said the girl.

  Toulouse-Lautrec turned but then remembered. “Oh, mademoiselle, I apologize, what is your name?”

  “Carmen,” she said. “Carmen Gaudin.”

  “Tomorrow then, Mademoiselle Gaudin.” And he was through the café doors.

  Carmen trudged across the Place Pigalle toward Montmartre, then cut down one of the narrow alleys that would lead her to rue des Abbesses and up the hill. Halfway down the alley a pimp, just out for the evening, smoked a cigarette and leaned against a ramshackle shed. There was grunting coming from behind the shed, one of the pimp’s whores, perhaps, performing an early stand-up with a customer.

  The pimp stepped into Carmen’s path. “Ah, look how sweet you are,” he said. “You looking for work, my little cabbage?”

  “I’m going home,” she said, not looking up.

  The pimp reached down and took her by the chin, blowing smoke in her face as he appraised her. “You’re pretty, but not for much longer, eh? Maybe you should take the work while you can get it?” He tightened his grip, pinched her cheeks roughly to make his point.

  “Are you a painter?” she said, a quiet voice, shy.

  “No, not a painter. What I am is your new boss,” said the pimp.

  “Oh, then I have no use for you,” she said.

  She knocked his hand away and grabbed him by the throat, her fingers sinking into the flesh around his windpipe, then slammed him against the brick wall as if he were a rag doll, crushing his skull. As he bounced off the wall she yanked him backward over her bent knee and his spine snapped like kindling. It had taken a second. She dropped him to the bricks and a last breath sputtered out of him like a wet, lifeless fart.

  “No use at all,” she said, a quiet voice, demure. She trudged down the alley and was making her way up the butte when she heard the whore begin to scream.

  RÉGINE SAW HER YOUNGER BROTHER OPEN THE DOOR TO THE BAKERY FOR A very pretty dark-haired girl in a blue dress. Strange, she thought, Lucien never brings his girls to the bakery.

  “Juliette, this is my sister Régine,” said Lucien. “Régine, this is Juliette. She’s going to model for me.”

  “Enchanté,” said Juliette with a slight curtsy.

  Lucien led Juliette around the counter and into the back room. “We’re going to take a look at the storage shed in the back.”

  Régine said nothing. She watched her brother grab the ring of keys from the wall, then lead the pretty girl out the back door of the bakery and into the little, weed-choked courtyard behind. A pentimento rose in her heart now, too, of another pretty girl being led to the storage shed, one she’d barely gotten a glimpse of. She backed to the stairs and took them two at a time up to the apartment.

  LUCIEN THREW OPEN THE WORN PLANK DOOR, REVEALING A LONG, OPEN, whitewashed interior filled with sunlight from a large skylight. Particles of dust, or perhaps flour, chased one another through the sunbeams in faerie maelstroms. Bags of flour and sugar were stacked near the door. An old, disused easel covered in dust stood at the far end of the room.

  “My father put in a skylight,” said Lucien. “And look, there’s plenty of room for you to pose.”

  Juliette joined in his enthusiasm, squeezed his arm and kissed his ear. “It’s perfect. Private, and with plenty of sunlight. You can pose me like that Manet you took me to see.”

  “Olympia,” said Lucien. “A masterpiece, but you are much prettier than Manet’s model, Victorine. He painted her for Luncheon on the Grass, too. Both masterpieces. Monet and Degas are trying to get the State to buy them from Madame Manet for the Louvre. If Manet had a model like you, France would go to war to get those paintings, I promise you.”

  She slapped his arm playfully. “I think it is the painter, not the mod
el. Will you paint a masterpiece of me? Shall I undress?”

  Lucien felt the storeroom suddenly get very warm and his collar very itchy. “No, my sweet, we can’t start today. I need to clear out these supplies, sweep. My paints and easel are at the other studio. I need to move the fainting couch down from the apartment upstairs to pose you on so you’ll be comfortable.”

  “Will we both be comfortable on it?”

  “I—we—I can start tomorrow. Will you be ready in the afternoon?”

  “I’m ready now,” she said. She leaned into him for a kiss. He leaned back to avoid it. There was no place he wanted to be more than lost in her embrace, but not now, in the doorway of a storage shed, with the sound of footsteps coming from the bakery.

  “We need to go now,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her out of the way so he could close and lock the door. As he turned the key, he said, “There’s a narrow passage between the buildings to the square. Only boys use it, but it’s wide enough for a determined thief, too.”

  When they stepped back into the bakery Mère Lessard was standing by the bread board, her arms crossed over her bosom, her jaw jutting out so she might sight accurately down her nose at her son.

  “Maman!” said Lucien.

  “You made your sister cry,” said Mère Lessard. “She is upstairs weeping like you slapped her.”

  “I didn’t slap her.”

  “A grown, married woman, weeping like a little girl. I hope you are proud of yourself.”

  “I did nothing, Maman. I’ll speak to her.” Then he composed himself, shaking off the prickly lust from a moment ago and plunging forward into the fiery recrimination coming from his mother. “This is Juliette. She’s going to model for me, and I need to use the storage shed as a studio.”

  “Enchanté, Madame Lessard,” said Juliette, again with a suggestion of a curtsy.

  Mère Lessard said nothing for a moment but raised an eyebrow and regarded Juliette until Lucien cleared his throat.

  “Is this the Juliette who broke your heart and sent you on a drunken binge? The Juliette who nearly killed you and the rest of us for having to do your work for you? That Juliette?”

  Lucien really hadn’t thought out the idea of getting Juliette through the bakery in the middle of the day, so excited had he been by the promise of seeing sunlight on her naked body.

  “The same,” said Juliette, stepping forward. “But I’ve changed.”

  Lucien nodded furiously to affirm she had changed, although he wasn’t sure how.

  “Lucien is my only and my ever now,” said Juliette. She pulled Lucien to her by his tie and kissed his cheek.

  For some reason, Lucien thought of the Crucifixion, when Christ looks down upon the Roman soldiers and prays, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.”

  Madame Lessard’s eyebrow of recrimination worked its full circuit of rising and falling, like a drawbridge to damnation, and when it settled, she said, “You know his sister Régine will get the bakery when I’m gone? So there’s no fortune to be found here.”

  “No, Madame,” said Juliette. “I wouldn’t—”

  “Even so, he is determined to be a painter, so he is as shiftless and lazy as are all of that breed, so even without the bakery he will likely never be able to provide for you, and you two will die penniless and starving, clutching each other’s pox-ridden bodies in the street, smelling of cheap English gin and opium, and rats will eat what is left of your skinny thighs, you know this?”

  Juliette fidgeted a bit herself now, the cool pool of promise that had shielded her from the heat having evaporated under Madame Lessard’s scrutiny.

  She ventured to say, “Madame, I assure you—”

  “And I’ll have you know that if you hurt my son again, if he so much as sighs sadly over his coffee, I will hire a man, a Russian, probably, to hunt you down and rip all that shiny black hair from your head, then break your skinny arms and legs, and set you on fire, and then put you out with a hammer. And should there be children from your beastly rutting, I shall have the Russian man cut them into tiny pieces and feed them to Madame Jacob’s dog. Because, although he may be only a worthless, simpleminded, libertine artist, Lucien is my favorite, and I will not have him hurt. Do you understand?”

  Juliette just nodded.

  “Good day, then,” said Madame Lessard. “Go with God.” And she glided across the bakery and up the stairs to the apartment.

  “I’m her favorite,” said Lucien with a big smile.

  Five

  GENTLEMEN WITH PAINT UNDER THEIR NAILS

  Paris, May 1863

  ALTHOUGH HE WOULD NOT REMEMBER IT, WHEN LUCIEN WAS BORN, the first thing he saw as he peeked over the edge of the world was Madame Lessard’s bunghole. Well that can’t be right, he thought. And he thought he might cry for the shock. Then the midwife flipped him over and the second thing he saw was the blue sky through the skylight. He thought, Oh, that’s better. So he cried for the beauty and was at a total loss for words for almost a year. He wouldn’t remember the moment, but the feeling would come back to him from time to time, when he encountered blue.

  “Perhaps I’ll call it Luncheon on the Grass, then,” said Manet. “Since I’ve clearly forgotten to paint the model wet enough.” Édouard Manet—Henri Fantin-Latour, 1867

  ON THE DAY LUCIEN WAS BORN, PÈRE LESSARD WAS NOT TO BE FOUND IN THE bakery or the apartment above. While Madame Lessard was alternately pushing Lucien out and cursing the baker’s very being, Monsieur Lessard made his way across Paris to the Palais de l’Élysée to look at paintings, or, perhaps more important, to look at people looking at paintings. Although he would not remember it later, that day, the day his only son was born, was the first time Père Lessard would encounter the Colorman.

  He wouldn’t have noticed them at all among the crush of people lined up to get into the palais, except that the woman was wearing a full veil of Spanish lace over her hat, which made her look like a specter against the white macadam paths and marble palace façade, looming, as she was, over the crooked little man in a brown suit and bowler hat. He held a stretched canvas wrapped in butcher paper under his arm. He might have been a hunchback, but his hump was in the middle of his spine and strained the buttons on his waistcoat as if the suit had been tailored for a taller, straighter man. Père Lessard sidled down the queue of people, making a great show of trying to look over the crowd while he found a position where he could hear the unlikely couple’s conversation.

  “But two at one time!” said the woman. “I want to see.”

  The little man patted the painting under his arm. “No, I have what I came for,” he said, his voice like the crunch of gravel under a scoundrel’s shoes. “These are not my pictures.”

  “They are my pictures,” said the woman.

  “No. You may not go in there. Who will you say you are? Do you even know?”

  “I don’t need to know. I have the veil.” She bent down now and ran a lace-gloved finger down the little man’s cheek. “Please, cher. There will be so many painters in there.”

  Père Lessard found himself holding his breath, hoping she would raise her veil. There were a thousand pretty women on the walkway, but there was no intrigue in getting a glimpse of their faces. He needed to see her.

  “Too many people,” said the little man. “Tall people. I don’t like people taller than me.”

  “Everyone is taller than you, cher.”

  “Yes, tall people can be annoying, monsieur,” said Lessard. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like him to impose himself into other people’s conversations, even in his own bakery, but this woman... “Pardon me, but I overheard your conversation.”

  The little man looked up and squinted against the bright spring sky; his eyes were set so far back under his brow that Lessard could only see the faintest highlight reflecting off them, like lanterns disappearing into a dark cavern. The woman turned to look at Lessard. Through the Spanish lace veil, the baker caught sight of a blue ribbon
tied at her throat and just the impression of white skin.

  “You are tall, too,” said the little man.

  “Are you a painter?” asked the woman, a smile in her voice. Père Lessard was caught off guard; he was neither tall, nor a painter, so he was going to excuse his rudeness and move on, but even as he shook his head and prepared to speak, the woman said, “Then we have no use for you. Do piss off, if you would be so kind.”

  “I would,” said Lessard, turning on one heel as if he’d been ordered by an army captain to about-face. “I would be so kind,” he said.

  “Lessard!” called a familiar voice out of the crowd. The baker looked up to see Camille Pissarro coming toward him. “Lessard, what are you doing here?”

  Lessard shook Pissarro’s hand. “I’m here to see your paintings.”

  “You can see my paintings anytime, my friend. We heard that Madame Lessard went into labor. Julie has gone up the butte to help.” Pissarro and his wife, Julie, lived with her mother in an apartment at the base of Montmartre. “You should go home.”

  “No, I will just be in the way,” said Lessard.

  Later, he would exclaim to Pissarro, “How was I to know she was going to give me a son? She was making the same daughter-birthing noises she made before—casting insults on my manly parts and so forth. I love my daughters, but two is double the number a man needs to break his heart. And then a third! Well, I thought it only courteous to give her time to discuss my downfall with her mother and sisters before I looked into her little-girl eyes for the first time and lost my heart again.”