Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Page 6

  “But Madame gave you a boy,” said the painter. “So you are saved the heartbreak.”

  “That is yet to be seen,” said Lessard. “You can never underestimate her trickiness.”

  Now, outside the palace, Lessard turned to excuse himself from the little man and the woman in Spanish lace, but they were gone, and in an instant, he had forgotten about them. “Let us go view these machines of genius,” he said to Pissarro.

  A cackling laugh echoed out of the great hall, and a wave of laughter washed through the crowd, even though they couldn’t see what had inspired the reaction.

  “Machines of the rejected,” said Pissarro, for once a note of despair dampening the Caribbean lilt in his accent.

  They moved into the column of people that was squeezing itself into the palace: the upper-class men in top hats, black tailcoats, and tight gray trousers, women in black crinoline or black and maroon silk, their long skirts dusted at the fringe with white from the macadam; the new working class, men in white and blue striped jackets and straw boaters, the women in bright dresses of every color, sporting frilly pastel parasols, the mandala of the Sunday afternoon of leisure, a recent gift of the Industrial Revolution.

  “But you said that the Salon was made up of charlatans.”

  “Yes,” said Pissarro. “Stodgy academicians.”

  “ ‘Slaves to tradition,’ you said.”

  They were shuffling through the galleries now, which were packed with people and oppressively hot. The walls were hung from floor to ceiling with framed canvases of every size, with no regard for subject matter, the paintings having been hung in alphabetical order by the last name of the artist.

  Pissarro paused in front of a landscape with a scandalously unremarkable red cow in it. “The enemies of ideas,” said the painter.

  “If the bastards had not rejected you,” said Lessard, into the momentum of artistic anarchy now, “you would have been forced to remove your paintings yourself.”

  “Well, yes,” said Pissarro, stroking his beard in the direction of the red cow. “But I might have sold a few before I removed them. If a man is to paint, he needs to eat.”

  And there was the rub. While being a painter in Paris was a perfectly legitimate career choice, and there were eighteen thousand painters in the city at the time, the only track for making a living as an artist was the government-sponsored Salon. Only through the Salon could an artist display his art to the public and therefore receive sales and public commissions. To be excluded was to go hungry. But this year the jury of the Salon, which was, indeed, made up of traditional academic painters, had rejected over three thousand paintings, and there had been a public outcry. Emperor Louis-Napoléon decided to placate the public by holding the Salon des Refusés, for the paintings that had been rejected. Pissarro was showing two paintings, both landscapes, neither with a red cow.

  “You’re thinking that your own paintings might have been improved by a red cow,” said a woman’s voice at the painter’s ear. He nearly jumped, then turned to see a woman right beside him, wearing a hat with a veil of Spanish lace that covered her face.

  Lessard must have moved on into another gallery, for he wasn’t there.

  “Then you have seen my landscapes, mademoiselle?”

  “No,” said the woman. “But I have a sense for these things.”

  “How did you know I was a painter, then?”

  “Paint under your nails, cher. And you’re looking at the paint, not the picture.”

  Pissarro was uncomfortable being called cher by this strange, enshrouded, unescorted woman. “Well there was no cow in the scene, so I didn’t paint a cow. I paint what I see.”

  “A realist then? Like Corot and Courbet?”

  “Something like that,” said Pissarro. “I’m more interested in light and color than painting a narrative.”

  “Oh, I’m interested in light and color as well,” said the woman, squeezing the painter’s arm and playfully hugging it to her breast. “Particularly the color blue. A blue cow, perhaps?”

  Pissarro felt sweat beading on his scalp. “Pardon me, mademoiselle, I must find my friend.”

  Pissarro pushed through the crowd, passing hundreds of paintings without even looking—feeling as if he was rushing through a jungle, away from some dark voodoo ritual he had stumbled upon. (Which had happened to him as a boy on Saint Thomas, and even now he could not pass any of Paris’s cathedrals without suspecting that inside, some dark ritual involving bloody chicken feathers and entranced, sweat-slick African women was going on. To a secular Caribbean Jew, Catholicism was like a malevolent, mystical stepchild lying in wait.)

  He caught up to Lessard in the “M” gallery. The baker was standing just outside a semicircle of people gathered around a large canvas. They were pointing and laughing.

  The baker looked up at his friend. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I’ve just been mercilessly flirted with by a strange woman,” said Pissarro.

  “All the little frogs are not at the river this Sunday then?” Little frogs, les grenouilles, was the term for the flirty young girls, mostly shopgirls, seamstresses, or part-time models, who spent their weekends at leisure on the banks of the Seine in (or out of) colorful dresses, in search of a drink, a song, a laugh, a husband, or often just a drunken tumble in the bushes, and generally pursuing another invention new to the working class: fun.

  Pissarro smiled at Lessard’s joke, then let his smile fall as he looked at the painting that was drawing so much attention. It was a nude, a young woman sitting on the bank of a river, with two fully clothed young men, their picnic lunch in disarray on the ground beside them. Some distance in the background, another young woman in white petticoats waded in the river. The nude woman stared out of the canvas, directly at the viewer, a wry smile on her lips, as if to say, “What do you think is going on here?”

  “The painter’s name is Édouard Manet,” said Lessard. “Do you know him?”

  Pissarro couldn’t look away from the canvas. “I know of him. He was a student of Thomas Couture when I was studying with Corot.”

  A woman worked her way to the front of the semicircle, made a great show of looking the painting up and down, then covered her eyes and hurried away, fanning herself as if she might faint at any second.

  “I don’t understand,” said Lessard. “There are hundreds of nudes in the exhibition. They act as if they’ve never seen one before.”

  Pissarro shook his head as he stroked his long beard, graying already, even though he was only thirty-three. He couldn’t look away from the painting. “Those others are goddesses, heroines, myths. This is different. This changes everything.”

  “Because she’s too skinny?” asked the baker, trying to understand why people would laugh at a scene that seemed so unfunny.

  “No, because she’s real,” said Pissarro. “I envy this Manet the work, but not the discomfort he must be feeling.”

  “Looks to me like she’s deciding which of these two she’s going to bonk in the bushes.” Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe—Édouard Manet, 1863

  “Him?” said a familiar woman’s voice at his ear, bosoms again pressed against his arm. “He didn’t have to pose bare-assed on the grass for hours on end.”

  ÉDOUARD MANET FELT AS IF ALL OF PARIS WERE LINING UP TO SPIT IN HIS FACE. “This picture will set the city on its ear,” he’d told his friend Charles Baudelaire a week before. Now he wanted to fire a letter off to the poet (who was away in Strasbourg) to vent the horror he was experiencing at having people laugh at his work.

  Manet was thirty-one, the son of a magistrate, with a good education and family money. He was broad-shouldered, lean-hipped, and had his blond beard trimmed according to the latest fashion. He liked to be seen in the cafés, talking philosophy and art with his friends, the center of attention—a wit, a raconteur, and a bit of a dandy. But today he wanted to fade into the very marble of the walls.

  He took his butter-yellow
leather gloves from his top hat and pretended to be concentrating on pulling them on as he made his way out of the gallery, hoping he might avoid attention, but just as he was sliding around a marble column into the next gallery, he heard his name called and made the mistake of looking over his shoulder.

  “Monsieur Manet! Please.” A very tall, well-dressed young gentleman approached, flanked on one side by a slight fellow with a light goatee in a worn linen suit and on the other by a stout young man with a full, dark beard, wearing a fine black suit, with lace shirt cuffs extending from his sleeves.

  “Excuse me, Monsieur Manet,” said the tall man. “I am Frédéric Bazille, and these are my friends—”

  “The painter Monet,” said the youth with the lace cuffs. He clicked his heels and bowed slightly. “Honored, sir.”

  “Renoir,” said the thin fellow with a shrug.

  “Are you not a painter as well?” asked Manet, noting paint on the cuffs of Renoir’s jacket.

  “Well, yes, but I find it better not to announce it at the outset, in case I need to borrow money.”

  Manet laughed. “The public can judge harshly with or without prior knowledge, Monsieur Renoir. I can attest to that today.”

  Behind them, a woman looking at Manet’s painting giggled, while a young pregnant girl pretended to be faint and needed to be helped away from the tableau by her heroic, falsely offended husband. Manet winced.

  “It is a masterpiece!” said Bazille, trying to distract the older painter from the criticism. “We all agree. We are all students at Monsieur Gleyre’s studio.”

  The other two nodded. “Bazille just failed his medical exams,” said Renoir.

  Bazille glared at his friend. “Why would you tell him that?”

  “So he’ll feel better about people laughing at his picture,” said Renoir. “Which is magnificent, even if the girl is a little skinny.”

  “She’s real,” said Monet. “That’s the genius of it.”

  “I like a girl with a substantial bottom,” said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred.

  “Did you paint it en plein air?” asked Monet. They had all been painting in the open air recently, working indoors only for the figure drawings at Gleyre’s studio or to copy paintings at the Louvre.

  “I did the sketches in the field, but I painted it in my studio,” said Manet.

  “What do you call it?” asked Bazille.

  “I call it The Bath,” said Manet, feeling a little better now about the public’s reaction. These were intelligent young men who knew painting, who understood what he was trying to do, and they liked the picture.

  “Well that’s a stupid title,” said a woman’s voice, suddenly in the midst of them. “She’s not even wet.”

  The young painters stepped back. A woman draped in black Spanish lace had imposed herself into the group.

  “Perhaps we’ve happened onto the scene before the bathing,” said Manet. “The motif is classical, madame. After Raphael’s Judgment of Paris.”

  “I knew the pose looked familiar,” said Bazille. “I’ve seen an etching of that painting in the Louvre.”

  “Well that explains it,” said the woman. “The Louvre’s a little pious, isn’t it? Can’t throw a round of darts in there without scoring three Madonnas and a baby Jesus. And Raphael was a lazy little fop.”

  “He was a great master,” said Manet with the tone of a disappointed schoolmaster. “Although it seems the Salon has missed the classical reference,” he added with a sigh.

  “The Salon is out of touch,” said Bazille.

  “They are pretenders and politicians,” said Monet. “They wouldn’t know good painting if Rembrandt himself showed it to them.”

  “They accepted one of my paintings this year,” said Renoir.

  And everyone turned to him, even the woman in lace.

  “What is wrong with you?” said Bazille.

  Renoir shrugged. “It hasn’t sold.”

  “Apologies,” said Monet. “Renoir is a painter who is only a painter. Polite society is a mystery to him.”

  Manet smiled. “Congratulations, Monsieur Renoir. May I shake your hand?”

  Renoir beamed with the attention of the older artist. “Maybe she’s not too skinny,” he said as he took Manet’s hand.

  “Well she’s not wet,” said the woman. “This is not a picture of bathers. Looks to me like she’s deciding which of these two she’s going to bonk in the bushes.”

  Now everyone turned to the woman, the young men rendered speechless by a mix of embarrassment and titillation. Manet was simply horrified.

  “Unless she’s already done the deed,” continued the woman. “Look, their lunch is tossed all over the place. That expression on her face—she seems to be saying, ‘Absolutely, I fucked them both. In the weeds. On our lunch.’”

  Manet had stopped breathing for a second. In the heat he felt light-headed and leaned on his walking stick to steady himself.

  Renoir was the first to recover the power of speech. “I think her look is enigmatic. Like the Mona Lisa’s.”

  “And what do you think the Mona Lisa was saying?” said the woman. She elbowed Monet in the ribs to punctuate her question, then leaned into him. “Hmmm? Mon petit ours?”

  “I—uh—” He had never been called a “little bear” before and he wasn’t sure how to take it. He looked at Manet, hoping the older painter might rescue him.

  “Perhaps I’ll call it Luncheon on the Grass, then,” said Manet. “Since I’ve clearly forgotten to paint the model wet enough.” He bounced his walking stick off its tip and snatched it out of the air like a magician signaling that the show should begin. “Madame, if you will pardon me, I must be off. Gentlemen, it was a pleasure. If you are free this evening, perhaps you can join me for a drink at Café de Bade on boulevard des Italiens at eight.” He shook each of their hands, bowed to the woman, then turned on his heel and strode out of the gallery, feeling as if he’d just escaped an assassination attempt.

  “MONSIEUR MANET WAS THE ONE ON TOP OF HER IN THE WEEDS,” SAID THE woman in lace, looking over Monet’s shoulder at the painting. “Don’t you think?”

  “It is not for me to say,” said Monet. “An artist and his model—”

  “You’re a painter, aren’t you? You’re all painters, aren’t you?”

  “We are, mademoiselle,” said Bazille. “But we prefer to paint en plein air.”

  “Outside? In the daylight? Oh, how lovely,” she said. “Just so you know, when you take your model into the weeds, put a blanket down. It’s just good manners.”

  The bark of an angry man’s voice echoed across the gallery. The woman looked up, startled.

  Renoir spotted a little man in a brown suit and bowler hat pushing his way through the crowd, shouting in a language he didn’t recognize.

  “I think that fellow is waving to you,” said Renoir.

  “Oh my, it’s my uncle. Such a bore. I must be going.” She lifted her skirts and made a quick turn. “I’ll be seeing you, gentlemen.”

  “But how will we know you?” asked Monet. “We don’t even know your name.”

  “You’ll know me.” And with that, she hurried off, moving through the crowd like a black cloud, the little man limping after her, straining to see her around the skirts, coattails, and parasols that blocked his way.

  Monet said, “Did you see her face?”

  “No,” said Renoir. “Just that black lace, like she’s in mourning.”

  “Perhaps she has scars,” said Bazille.

  “She was wearing blue lip rouge,” said Monet. “I caught a glimpse of it through the lace. I’ve never seen such a thing.”

  “Do you think she’s a prostitute?” asked Renoir.

  “Could be,” said Bazille. “No proper lady would talk that way.”

  “No, I mean Manet’s model.” Renoir was looking at the painting again. “She’s so skinny she probably has to model to supplement her whoring income.”

  “Could b
e,” said Monet, now turning his full attention to the painting. “Can you imagine painting something like that in the open air? Actually capturing the moment on a huge canvas, the people life-size?”

  “Well you’re going to have to get a prostitute to model if you want her to sit nude on the riverbank like that,” said Renoir.

  “And have money to pay her,” said Bazille.

  “Well that’s out of the question,” said Renoir. “I suppose you could get a girl to fall in love with you and she would sit on the grass for free, but unless she’s a proper whore I don’t think she’ll do the naked part.”

  “You’re right, Renoir,” said Monet, keeping his gaze on the painting. “We have to go.”

  “We do?” said Renoir. “We haven’t even looked at your painting.”

  “No, we have to find that woman in the Spanish lace. She’ll do it. I mean, she seemed open to the idea.” A great, joyous grin bisected his beard. “A modern moment in time, caught on an enormous canvas. I shall stop time for a luncheon on the grass!” He turned and strode into the crowd with such purpose that people moved out of his way without his asking.

  “But you have no money for a canvas that size,” said Bazille, following his friends into the next gallery. “No money for paint or brushes.”

  “You do,” said Monet.

  Renoir looked over his shoulder and nodded. “Be sure to ask your father for enough for the whore, too.”

  “I’m not asking my father for money to hire a whore for you to paint,” said Bazille.

  “Yes you are,” said Monet.

  “Her name is Jo Hiffernan,” said Whistler. “An Irish hellcat—skin like milk. Quick-witted for a woman, and a soul as deep as a well.” Symphony in White #1—James McNeill Whistler, 1863

  AS HE ENTERED THE “W” SALON, MANET WAS IMMEDIATELY STRUCK BY A VERY tall canvas of a redheaded woman dressed all in white. There was a quality to her gaze, as if she were not only looking at you but into you and knew too much about you, owned you. His bather had the same quality, and seeing it in another painting took the edge from the criticisms he’d been enduring all day. Then he spotted the painter, holding forth in lecture to a small gathering of admirers in front of the painting.