Sacre Bleu (50 page)

“Émile,” said the Professeur. “Professeur Émile Bastard.”

“Oh,” said the Colorman, taking the Professeur’s hand. “The Colorman.”

“Charmed,” said the Professeur. “You are a wise man, no doubt, having sought out the best baker in Paris.”

“The painter?”

“I mean Lucien,” said the Professeur.

“I have to go,” said the Colorman. He hurried out the door without looking back. His donkey had been tied up outside, a large wooden case strapped to his back. The Colorman untied him and led him across the square.

They watched through the bakery window until he disappeared on the stairs down the butte to Pigalle, then the Professeur looked at Lucien.

“So that was him?”

“Yes.”

“What is he doing here?”

“Juliette killed him a week ago.”

“Not very thoroughly, evidently.”

“I have much to tell you,” said Lucien.

“And I you,” said the Professeur.

“We’ll go across the square to Madame Jacob’s, have coffee,” said Lucien. “I’ll get Régine to watch the front.” He peeked his head through the curtain. “Régine, could you watch the counter please, I need to speak with the Professeur.”

The baguette hit Lucien square in the forehead and wrapped around his head, crunching in his ear.

“Perhaps
The Circus,
with all the figures off balance, ready to tumble down on each other in the next second, would be his portal back into life.”
The Circus
—Georges Seurat, 1891

“Ouch! What—”

“Maman is right,” said Régine, regarding the crust. “Perfect. Just double-checking.”

G
EORGES
S
EURAT STOOD BEFORE HIS PARTIALLY COMPLETED PAINTING
The Circus,
holding a small round brush loaded with red, trying to ascertain where, exactly, the next small red dot would go. Four identical brushes loaded with different colors poked through the fingers of his left hand, as if he had snatched some great, gangly insect out of the air and its multicolored legs were shot with rigor mortis or surprise. He was making a picture of a bareback rider standing atop a palomino, trying to convey the dynamic movement of the scene while meticulously forming the figures out of one dot of color placed next to a complementing color, laid down in harmony and contrast so that when one stood back, the scene formed for the first time in the mind of the viewer. It was a solid theory, and applying it in his major paintings,
The Bathers
and
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,
had brought him great success and had made him the unofficial leader of the Neo-Impressionists, but the process was the problem. It was too meticulous. It was too static. It took too damn long to do a painting. In ten years he had completed only seven major paintings; his last one,
The Models,
a scene from an artist’s studio, with models undressing, had been panned by critics and rejected by the public as being a picture of daily life with all the life taken out of it. The nude models appeared as cold and sexless as marble pillars. And meanwhile, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec were splashing their dancers and singers, acrobats and clowns across the public’s consciousness with vivid, fluid vigor and movement. Seurat had invented and perfected a technique, pointillism, based on solid color theory, but now he felt imprisoned by it. Sometimes, it turned out, art was
what
you had to say, not
how
you said it.

At only thirty-one, Seurat felt used up, or at least weary of standing still, tired of the intellectual art of theory; he wanted to grasp the visceral, the sensual—grab the movement of life before it got away. Perhaps
The Circus,
with all the figures off balance, ready to tumble down on each other in the next second, would be his portal back into life.

As he placed a precise and tiny dot of red in the clown’s hair, there was a knock at the door. Life interrupting art. He wanted to be angry, but in fact he was grateful. Perhaps it would be a delivery of supplies, or better, Signac or Bernard dropping by to see the progress on his painting. So much easier to discuss theory than to apply it.

He opened the door and nearly dropped the brushes, still splayed out of his left hand. It was a young woman, stunning in a satin dress the color of cinnamon, fair skinned with dark, nearly black hair, eyes as blue as sapphires.

“Pardon me, monsieur, but I understood that this is the studio of the painter Seurat. I am a model in need of work.”

Seurat stood for an embarrassing moment just looking at her, sketching her in his mind’s eye, then she smiled and jolted him out of his imagination. “I’m sorry, mademoiselle, but I have all my studies for the painting I am working on. Perhaps when I begin another—”

“Please, Monsieur Seurat, I am told that you are the greatest painter in Paris, and I am desperate for the work. I will pose nude. I don’t mind. I won’t get cold or tired.”

Seurat forgot completely what he meant to say next. “But, mademoiselle—”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, monsieur,” she said, extending her hand. “My name is Dot.”

“Come in,” said Seurat.

W
HEN
L
UCIEN AND THE
P
ROFESSEUR ARRIVED AT
M
ADAME
J
ACOB’S
CRÉMERIE
,
Toulouse-Lautrec was already seated at one of only three tall café tables, eating Camembert spread on bread, drinking espresso with a touch of cream floated over it. Seated with him, still in her overdone theatrical makeup, was a very thin, very tired Jane Avril. Lucien had never seen her in person but recognized her immediately from Henri’s drawings and posters.

“Lucien, Professeur, have you met the great, the wonderful, the beautiful Jane Avril? Jane, my friends—”

“Enchanté,”
said the singer. She slid off her stool, steadied herself on the table, then presented an elegantly gloved hand each to Lucien and the Professeur, over which each bowed. She turned back to Henri, lifted his bowler hat, and placed a kiss on his temple. “And now, puppet, since you have someone to look after you, I am going home.” She raised an eyebrow to Lucien. “He wouldn’t let me go home unless I took him with me. Then what would I do with him?”

Lucien saw her to the door and offered to help her find a cab, but she elected to stumble down the long stairway to Pigalle, saying the brisk morning air might sober her up enough to sleep.

When Lucien joined them at the table, Henri threw a bread crust down on his plate. “I am a traitor, Lucien. I’m ashamed you’ve found me here eating some stranger’s bread. I don’t blame you if you abandon me. Everyone does. Carmen. Jane. Everybody.”

Lucien signaled to Madame Jacob, who stood among her cheeses, to bring coffee for him and the Professeur and shrugged. He’d seen her at the bakery only an hour ago, so the pleasantries of the day had already been exchanged.

“First, Henri, you
are
eating my bread. Madame Jacob has been serving Lessard bread for fifty years, so you’re not a traitor. And Mademoiselle Avril did not abandon you, she simply went home, exhausted, no doubt, after watching you drink all night, and if things had gone differently, and she’d taken you home and taken you to bed, you’d either be passed out or singing annoying sailor songs. Yours is a false melancholy, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec.”

“Well,” said Henri, picking up his bread again. “In that case, I feel better. How are you, Professeur? Anything interesting in Spain?”

“There has been a new cave discovered in the south, at Altamira. The drawings on the walls may be the oldest that have ever been found.”

“How can you tell?” asked Lucien.

“Well, the interesting thing about that is my colleague and I have formulated a relative date, only relative, because of the color used in the drawings. It seems there is no blue in any of the drawings that remain.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lucien.

“You see, mineral-based pigments for blue, azurite, copper oxide, and lapis lazuli, were not used until after three thousand
B.C.,
when the Egyptians began to use them. Before that, the blue pigments used in Europe were all organic, like woad, which is made from crushing and fermenting the leaves of the woad shrub. Over the years, the organic pigments deteriorated, molded, were eaten by insects, so only the mineral pigments like clays, chalks, charcoals remain. If there’s no blue pigment in the drawing, we can assume that it is at least five thousand years old.”

“The Picts of Scotland used woad to paint themselves, didn’t they?” asked Henri.

The Professeur seemed surprised at the painter’s interjection. “Why yes, yes they did. How did you know that?”

“One of the few truths of history the priests at my school actually taught us.”

“That’s not true at all,” said Lucien. Juliette had just told them about the Picts.

The Professeur drained his espresso and signaled to Madame for another. He seemed very excited now. “That is not all I saw in Spain. I may have some disturbing news about your Colorman. You see, when I was in Madrid, I went to the Prado and looked at their entire collection. It took days. But it was in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch that I saw the figure, amid hundreds of others in
The Garden of Earthly Delights,
a depiction of hell. It was a knotted, apelike figure, with spindly limbs, and he was torturing a young woman with a knife. And his hands and feet were stained with blue.”

“But, Professeur,” said Toulouse-Lautrec, “I saw the Boschs at the Uffizi in Florence when I went there with my mother as a boy. I remember that they are all filled with twisted, tortured figures. They gave me nightmares.”

“True, but there was a plaque depicted in the painting, hung around the figure’s neck, and on it was writing in Sumerian cuneiform. As you know, in addition to my other studies, I am an amateur necrolinguist—”

“It means he likes to lick the dead,” explained Henri.

“It means he studies dead languages,” corrected Lucien.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” said the Professeur.

“My education is shit,” said Henri. “Lying priests.”

“Anyway,” said the Professeur. “I was able to make out the cuneiform and translate it. The plaque read
‘Colorman.’
As long as three hundred years ago, there was someone acting as your Colorman. I think it must have been some kind of warning from Bosch.”

“It wasn’t
a
Colorman, it was the same Colorman,” said Lucien.

“I don’t understand,” said the Professeur. “Then he would be—”

Lucien held up a hand to stop the Professeur. “I told you, we have much to tell you. There’s a reason that I said that Juliette killed a man whom you saw walking by not an hour ago.”

Lucien and Henri told the Professeur of the Colorman, the Picts, all that Juliette had told them, all that they had experienced, and when they had finished, finally, and admitted that it was now on them, two painters, to vanquish the Colorman and free the muse, the Professeur said, “By Foucault’s dangling pendulum, I have to rethink it all. Science and reason are a sham, the Age of Reason is a ruse, it’s been magic and ritual all along. If this is true, can we even trust Descartes? How do we even know that we exist, that we are alive?”

“A question that often plagues me,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “If you’d like to accompany me to rue des Moulins, I know some girls there who, if they cannot convince you that you are alive, will at least help soothe your anxiety about being deceased.”