Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Page 9

  The little man tapped the blade into the jar, then turned and placed the blade right where the woman’s face would be and pressed down. The woman moaned, and Lucien’s breath caught again, this time with a bit of a yip.

  The little man wheeled toward Lucien with his blade up, his eyes like black glass, in the darkness. “Who’s there?”

  “Merde!” Lucien said for the second time ever, although it came out in a very long, siren wail behind him as he bolted into the darkness, his hands held before him, and he kept trailing that audible “merde” until he saw the light of day and escape—the sweet green light on the thorn-bushes outside—and he was nearly there, almost there, when a long arm reached down by the mouth of the mine and snatched him up.

  Part II

  The Blue Nude

  In each picture is a whole lifetime imprisoned, a whole lifetime of fears, doubts, hopes and joys.

  —WASSILY KANDINSKY, CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

  So, for instance, if you know that it is dangerous for you to have colors near you, why don’t you clear them away for a time, and make drawings? I think that at such moments you would do better not to work with colors.

  —THEO VAN GOGH, LETTER TO VINCENT, JANUARY 3, 1890

  Seven

  FORM, LINE, LIGHT, SHADOW

  Merde!” SAID LUCIEN.

  In the creation of any work of art, there is some point, no matter how much training and experience is brought to bear on the work at hand, when the artist is taken with a feeling of both exhilaration and terror, the Oh shit. What the hell have I gotten myself into! moment of flailing panic, akin to the feeling of falling from a great height. Lucien’s “merde” moment came when Juliette dropped the sheet she was using as a cover and said, “How do you want me?”

  And although every experience in his life had somehow added up to this moment, this very moment, and he was uniquely suited and chosen to be in this moment, he could think of nothing whatever to say.

  Well, he could think of something to say: On the divan, against the wall, on the floor, bent over, wrapped around, upside-down, downside-up, fast, slow, gentle, rough, deep, hard, loud, quiet, kicking over the lamps, wild, while Paris burns, again and again until there is no more breath in our bodies, that’s how I want you.

  But he didn’t say that. He didn’t need to. She knew.

  “To pose,” she said.

  “I’m thinking,” he said.

  Form. Line. Light. Shadow. He worked the words in his mind like clay. Form. Line. Light. Shadow.

  When he first walked into Cormon’s studio at age nineteen and took his seat at an easel among the other young men, the master had told them, “See form, see line, see light, see shadow. See relationships of lines. The model is a collection of these elements, not a body.”

  At the master’s signal, a young woman in a robe who had been sitting quietly next to the stove in the back of the room climbed up on the platform and dropped her robe. There was collective intake of breath; the newcomers, like Lucien, stopped breathing altogether for a second. She wasn’t a beauty. In fact, in her shopgirl clothes, he might not have given her a second look, but she was there, nude, in a fully lit room, and he was nineteen and lived in a city where a woman was not allowed to ride on the top level of the omnibus streetcars lest someone catch a glimpse of her ankle as she climbed the steps and thus compromise her modesty. True, he had taken an apartment only a block away from a licensed brothel, and the girls danced bare breasted in the back rooms of the cabarets, and every gentleman had a mistress from the demimonde, who was kept in some apartment across the city, hidden behind a wink and the selective vision of his wife. But hidden.

  That first class he saw form, line, light, and shadow, just long enough to get a bit of the drawing down, but then he’d be yanked out of his work by nipples! No, not by the nipples, but by general nipples—of concept—the model’s nipples, and his concentration would collapse in a cascade of images and urges that had nothing whatever to do with art. For the first week, as the poor girl posed, Lucien battled the urge to stand up and yell, “For the love of God, she’s naked over there, aren’t any of you thinking about bonking her?” Of course they were, they were men, and except for the gay ones, they were only getting any art done at all if they managed to put that feeling to bed.

  The second week, the model was an old man, who tottered up to the stage, sans robe, his sagging sack nearly dragging the ground, his withered haunches quivering under the weight of his years. Strangely enough, the figure was easily interpreted as form, line, light, and shadow from then on for Lucien. And when they were, once again, working with a female model, he only needed to conjure up the image of the old man to put him back on the straight and narrow path to form, line, light, and shadow.

  Sure, you allowed yourself a brief moment when the model first disrobed—Oh, yes, she’d do. And it turned out that nearly every one of them would do, even if the imaginary circumstances in which she would do had to be constructed. Well, yes, desert island, drunk, one hour until you’re hanged, sure, she’d do. But he had never encountered anything like Juliette, not as a painter, anyway, because he had encountered her as a man, had had numerous tumbles with her, in fact, as new lovers they’d been ecstatic with discovery, in his little apartment, in the dark, not going out for days at a time in the weeks before she broke his heart.

  This was different. She was standing there in a beam of sunlight from the skylight, veritably glowing, as perfect and feminine as any statue in the Louvre, as ideal as any beauty obtained, any goddess imagined, by man. Oh, she’d do. If I was being gnawed by wolves, before I’d bother to stop to shoo them off, she’d do.

  “What are you doing, Lucien?” she said. “Open your eyes.”

  “I’m trying to picture your desiccated scrotum,” said the painter.

  “I don’t think anyone has ever said that to me before.”

  “Dangling, dangling, almost there.”

  “Where is your paint box? I don’t even see your paints.”

  Lucien opened his eyes, and although he hadn’t gotten into a mindset of light and shadow quite yet, his erection had at least subsided. Perhaps he could work now. Better than those early days in Cormon’s when he was scolded. “Lessard, why have you drawn a nut sack on this model? You are drawing Venus, not a circus freak.”

  “You said she was shape and line.”

  “Are you serious? I am here only to teach serious painters.”

  And then Toulouse-Lautrec would step up behind the master, adjust his pince-nez as if fine-tuning the focus, and say, “That is a serious nut sack on that Venus.”

  “Indeed,” their friend Émile Bernard would say, stroking his mossy beard, “that is a nut sack of a most serious aspect.”

  And around they’d pass the opinion, nodding and scrutinizing, until Cormon would either eject them all from class or storm out of the studio himself, leaving the poor model to break pose and inspect her nether parts, just in case.

  Then Toulouse-Lautrec would say, “Monsieur Lessard, you are only to think about the scrotum to distract yourself, not actually draw it. I feel that the maestro will be even less open to discussing modern compositional theory now. To atone, you must now buy us all drinks.”

  “I’m not going to be painting today,” Lucien said to Juliette. “It may take several days just to do the drawing.” He waved a sanguine crayon at the wide canvas he’d set up on two chairs from the bakery café, it being too large for any easel he owned.

  “It is a very large canvas,” Juliette said. She lay down on the fainting lounge and propped herself up on her elbow. “I hope you are planning on taking a long time to paint this if you want me to grow into it. I’ll need pastries.”

  Lucien glanced up at her, saw the mischievous smile. He liked that she was implying that she would stay around, that there was a future for them together, after she’d bolted before. He was tempted to make some ridiculous promise about taking care of her, knowing full well that the only way
he could honestly make that promise was to put down his paintbrush forever and bake bread.

  “Monsieur Monet told me once that great paintings are only achieved when the painter has great ambition. That’s why, he said, Manet’s Luncheon in the Grass and Olympia were great paintings.”

  “Great big paintings,” she giggled.

  They were large canvases. And Monet had attempted his own luncheon on the grass, a great, twenty-foot-long canvas that he dragged, rolled up, all over France with a pretty model named Camille Doncieux whom he’d met in the Batignolles and his friend Frédéric Bazille to pose for all the male figures. “But don’t let your ambition become too large too early, Lucien,” Monet had told him. “In case you have to sneak out on your hotel bill in the middle of the night with the canvas. Camille nearly broke her neck helping me carry that canvas through the streets of Honfleur in the dark.”

  “How about like this?” Juliette said. She leaned back into the cushions, her hands behind her head, a knowing smile. “You can use Goya’s Maja pose. That’s what Manet started with.”

  “For the love of God, she’s naked over there, aren’t any of you thinking about bonking her?” The Nude Maja—Francisco Goya, 1797

  “Oh no, ma chère,” Lucien said. “Manet didn’t go to Madrid to see Goya’s Maja until after he painted Olympia. He didn’t know what she looked like.” Lucien had grown up on lectures on the famous paintings from Père Lessard; their stories were the fairy tales of his childhood.

  “Not him, silly. The model knew.”

  “You can use Goya’s Maja pose. That’s what Manet started with.” Olympia—Édouard Manet, 1863

  What a completely disturbing thought. Olympia did look remarkably like Goya’s Nude Maja, regarding the viewer, daring him, and Manet clearly admired Goya, using Goya’s Maja on the Balcony as inspiration for his own painting of the Morisot family, The Balcony, and Goya’s war paintings from Napoleon’s invasion of Spain for his Execution of Maximilian, but those works were later, after Manet had gone to Spain and seen the Goyas. It couldn’t have been the model, Victorine. She was, well, she was like many models of the time, an uneducated, undowered girl who lived in the demimonde, the half world between prostitution and destitution. The model was like the brush, the paint, the linseed oil, the canvas. She was an instrument of the artist, not a contributor to the art.

  “You know a lot about painting for a girl who works in a hat shop,” Lucien said.

  “So, now you’ll paint me with only one brush?”

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “You know a lot about painting for a baker,” she said, the sparkle of a dare in her eyes.

  Bitch. “Hold that pose. No, bring your right arm down to your side.”

  “Do it for me,” she pouted. “I don’t know how.”

  “Just move, Juliette. Now, don’t move.”

  And he began to sketch her image nearly life-size on the canvas. First roughing out her figure, then going back, filling in contours. He lost himself in the drawing, seeing only form, line, light, and shadow, and time slipped into those dimensions until she moved.

  “What? No!” Lucien dropped his crayon on the seat of one of the chairs he was using for an easel.

  She stood up, stretched, yawned, fluffed her breasts up a bit, which transported Lucien out of the land of line and shape, back to a small, sunlit room with a beautiful, naked girl whom he desperately wanted to make love to, and perhaps marry, but definitely and immediately bonk.

  “I’m hungry and you’re not even painting.”

  She started to gather her clothes from a chair by the door.

  “I have to have the whole motif sketched out, Juliette. I’m not going to paint you in the storeroom of a bakery. The setting needs to be more grand.”

  She stepped into her pantaloons and his heart sank.

  “Does the Maja have a grand setting? Does Olympia have a grand setting, Lucien? Hmmm?”

  And the chemise went over her head and her shoulders and the world became a dark and sad place for Lucien Lessard.

  “Are you angry? Why are you angry?”

  “I’m not angry. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m lonely.”

  “Lonely? I’m right here.”

  “Are you?”

  “I am.”

  He stepped up to her, took her in his arms, and kissed her. And off came the chemise, off came the pantaloons, then his shirt, then the rest, and they were on each other, on the fainting lounge, completely lost in one another. There may have been pounding on the door at one point, but they didn’t hear it and didn’t care. Where they were, no one else mattered. When, at last, she looked down from the lounge, at him, lying on his back on the floor, the light from the skylight had gone orange, and the sweat sheen on their bodies looked like slick fire.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Maybe I’ll be able to start painting tomorrow.”

  “First thing in the morning then?”

  “No, ten, maybe eleven. I have to make the bread.”

  “I’m going.” She slid from the lounge and again gathered her clothes while he watched.

  “Where are you living now?”

  “A little place in the Batignolles. I share with some other shopgirls.”

  “Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”

  “The owner of my shop is understanding. He enjoys art.”

  “Stay. Have dinner with me. Stay at my apartment. It’s closer than yours.”

  “Tomorrow. I need to go. The day is gone.”

  She was dressed now. He would have given a fortune, if he’d had it, to watch her pull her stockings up again. He sat up.

  “Tomorrow,” she said again. She put her hand on his shoulder and kept him from rising, then kissed him on the forehead. “I’ll go out through the alley.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said as she closed the door.

  “WELL?” SAID THE COLORMAN.

  She put her parasol in a stand by the door and untied the wide ribbon that held on her hat, then set it gently on the hall tree. The apartment’s parlor was small but not shabby. A Louis XVI coffee table in gold leaf and marble sat before a mauve velvet divan. The Colorman sat in a carved walnut chair from the same period and looked like a malignant, twisted burl infecting the elegant wooden form.

  “He didn’t paint,” she said.

  “I need a painting. Since we lost the Dutchman’s picture, we need the color.”

  “That was a waste. He’ll paint. He just hasn’t started yet.”

  “I mixed colors for him. Greens and violets made with the blue, as well as the pure color. I put them in a nice wooden box.”

  “I’ll give them to him tomorrow.”

  “And make him paint.”

  “I can’t make him paint. I can only make him want to paint.”

  “We can’t have another perfectionist like that fucking Whistler. We need a painting, soon.”

  “He needs to be handled gently. This one is special.”

  “You always say that.”

  “I do? Well, perhaps it’s true.”

  “You smell of sex.”

  “I know,” she said as she sat on the divan and began to unlace her shoes. “I need a bath. Where’s the maid?”

  “Gone. She quit.”

  “Frightened?” She kicked off a shoe and sat back on the divan with a sigh.

  He nodded, looking at the ground, looking very simian and ashamed, as if he were the bad monkey confessing to eating the sacred banana. Again.

  “You didn’t try to fuck her, did you?”

  “No. No. No. Making color. She came in.”

  “And she saw you?”

  “An accident.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped.”

  She grinned at him as she unbuttoned her blouse. “ ‘Couldn’t be helped’—you like it, don’t you?”

  “She had cooked supper already.” Again the shrug. “It’s on the stove. There’s hot water.”


  The girl called Juliette shrugged off her blouse and pulled her chemise over her head. The Colorman scrutinized her breasts as she stood, unbuttoned her skirt, and let it fall.

  “I like this body,” he said, looking her up and down. “The skin so white, almost blue, yes? Hair black and shiny. I like. Where did you find her?”

  “This one? This one is mine.” She walked away in only her pantaloons and black stockings, leaving her clothes behind in a heap. “I guess I’ll be drawing my own bath.”

  “Can I watch?” asked the Colorman. He slid out of his chair.

  She stopped and looked at him over her shoulder. “Why?”

  “Pretty skin. Nothing to read.”

  “You like scaring them, don’t you?”

  “Supper smells good, huh? Veal stew. Maybe she’ll come back. She didn’t seem that scared.”

  She turned abruptly to face him and he skipped to a stop, his face almost bumping into her belly, a near collision of the sacred and profane.

  “You like scaring them more than you like fucking them, don’t you?”

  The shrug. “I’m old.” He looked around the room, as if trying to remember something that was anywhere but where she was. “And scaring them is free.”

  She turned on a heel and with three long dancer’s strides was in the bedroom, where there was a high-backed, enameled tub. “Oh for fuck’s sake. Come on.”

  “Merci, Bleu,” he said. Bleu was what he called her, how he thought of her, because it fit, no matter who she was, no matter what she was. He limped in behind her.

  “Get us a new maid tomorrow, though,” she said. “And don’t scare this one.”

  Interlude in Blue #3: A Frog in Time

  A substance’s color is generated by the absorption of light hitting it and the material’s resonant frequencies. That is, when a material’s molecules resonate with a certain frequency of light, the light rays are absorbed. When they do not resonate, the rays are either reflected or pass right through it. Only the reflected rays reach our eye and determine color. Natural pigments, like lapis lazuli, from which the Sacré Bleu is made, show their color by the absorption of light. Absorption of light literally transforms the orbit of the electrons in the atoms of the pigment. In short, the color doesn’t actually exist, physically, as we experience it, until it is exposed to light waves. Light makes it appear, changes the surface physically.