Sacre Bleu (58 page)

“What do you mean
you know I love her?
She was Carmen. You love her, too.”

“But I have chosen to ignore that.”

“You slept with her when she was possessed by a muse who is, as you put it, ‘inordinately fond of syphilis,’ particularly as a way of dispatching painters.”

Henri looked at the cobbles, then bounced his walking stick off its tip and caught it in front of his face as if snatching an idea from the very air.

“I think I should like to paint a clown fucking a bear. To round out my
oeuvre.
You know, they say that Turner left thousands of erotic watercolors and that twat critic Ruskin burned them upon his death to save his reputation. Critics. I’m glad Whistler ruined Ruskin with that lawsuit over his night paintings. Served him right. Can you imagine? Turner erotica? I’m going to buy Whistler a drink the next time he’s in Paris.”

“So, you’re choosing to ignore the whole Juliette-Carmen-syphilis connection?”

“Exactement.”

“Well then,” said Lucien. “What kind of bear?”

“Brown, I think.”

W
HEN THEY CAME TO THE STUDIO,
J
ULIETTE WAS WAITING BY THE DOOR,
wearing a dark dress, appropriate to winter.

“Bonjour,
Henri!” She bent and they exchanged kisses on the cheeks.

“Bonjour,
mademoiselle. Lucien tells me that you’re leaving.”

“Oui,
I am sorry to say.”

“Where will you go?”

“Spain, I think,” she said, shooting a glance at Lucien. “There is a young painter there who needs to start using more blue in his work. Barcelona, I think.”

“Ah, well, it will be warm there. You will both be missed.”

“As will you,
mon cher.
Shall we go in and say good-bye properly?”

Henri tipped his hat. “Over a cognac, you mean?”

“But of course,” she said.

New York, October 2012—The Museum of Modern Art

I
T WAS A WEEKDAY AND THE MUSEUM WAS NOT BUSY, WHICH WAS UNUSUAL
anytime. A striking, fair-skinned brunette, her hair pinned up with chopsticks, in an elegant suit of ultramarine blue wool and impractically tall shoes, stood in front of
Starry Night,
staring into the white and yellow swirls painted through a night sky of Sacré Bleu. She had staked out a territory directly in front of the painting, about a meter away, making the other museum patrons look around her, or just peek at the painting as they passed by, most thinking she was a self-absorbed model, as there were a lot of those wandering around this neighborhood, and her skirt seemed confidently well fitted about the bottom. She rubbed at a pendant on chain around her neck as she examined the painting.

“This is mine, you know?” she said. “I wouldn’t try to take it. I’m not going to take it, but it’s mine.”

The young man, who sat on a bench nearby, sighed, slightly amused. He was about thirty, and had dark eyes, and a shock of dark brown hair fell across his forehead.

She said, “He painted it at night and had Theo store it in the dark. That’s why Poopstick couldn’t find it.”

“As you’ve told me,” said Lucien. “Don’t you have someone you have to be?”

She did. There was a boy in the Bronx who painted subway cars with spray cans, who loved a Latina girl with vibrant blue eyes. She would go to him, enchant him, inspire him, and leave the Juliette doll in an apartment with Lucien to wait. And when the boy finished his work, she and Lucien would go to a tunnel or depot where no one was around, and Lucien would light the fires and chant the strange words, sending her into a trance, then he would scrape the Sacré Bleu from her body, as he had done now for more than a century, as the painting on the train faded away.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “Shall we?”

As they walked, she continued to worry the pendant, which looked like a scrap of distressed leather.

“I wish you’d get rid of that thing.”

“It’s a memento. He gave it to me.”

“It’s a dried-up old ear.”

“Oh, Lucien, I would carry your ear if you gave it to me. Please don’t be jealous.”

“Never,
chérie.
Never,” he said. He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.

Hand in hand, the handsome young couple, the painter and the muse, walked out of the Museum of Modern Art into a soft autumn New York day.

Finis

I
KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING:
“W
ELL THANKS LOADS,
C
HRIS
, now you’ve ruined art for everyone.”

You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. I simply set out to write a novel about the color blue; I can’t remember why now. When you start with a concept that vague, you have to narrow your scope fairly quickly or it will get out of hand, so very early in my research great bits of history had to go by the wayside so I’d have room to make stuff up.

So what I’d be asking right now, if I were you, is what, among this big blue lie, is true? What really happened?

First, I drew the characters’ personalities mostly from accounts written by people who knew them, many of the accounts of the Impressionists coming from Jean Renoir’s biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Renoir, My Father.
Jean Renoir had been wounded in World War I and had come home to Paris to recover in his father’s apartment, where the artist recalled his life to his son in an interestingly sanitized version. Jean Renoir talks in his book about “this little girl, Margot,” whom his father had such an affection for, and who died, and how he must find out more about her. Margot was no little girl, as one can see from the paintings in which she appears—his major paintings from the 1870s to the 1880s,
Moulin de la Galette
and
Déjeuner des Canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party),
as well as other portraits, although Margot (Marguerite Legrand) isn’t actually the girl in the painting
The Swing.
I chose that figure for the character because of the vivid ultramarine bows on her dress. It was clear from the accounts of his friends that Renoir was in love with Margot, and when she died (Dr. Gachet did come from Auvers to treat her), the painter became despondent and went off wandering for a couple of years, only to return to Paris to marry Aline Charigot, who was “his ideal.” It’s no accident that Renoir’s girls all seem to have a similar look to their faces. He chose them by his ideal. He is quoted in his son’s book: “You need only find your ideal, then marry her, and you can love them all.” After which he says, “But never trust a man who is not moved by the sight of a pretty breast.”

My portrayal of Les Professeurs is inspired by another character written about in Renoir’s biography. Renoir writes of a retired academic who lived in the Maquis, wore a medal given to him by the state, and tried to train rats and mice to perform the chariot-racing scenes from the novel
Ben-Hur.
The novel was not published until 1880, and Renoir’s account refers to the 1890s, when Renoir had moved back to Montmartre with his wife and family, but I have placed Le Professeur’s rat races in 1870 to coincide with the Franco-Prussian War.

Letters were less helpful than you might think for revealing the artists’ personalities. Most letters of the period are formal and seem at odds with the accounts of the artists who wrote them. Cézanne’s letters reveal a thoughtful, educated man, almost painfully polite, while all accounts of him from his fellow painters speak to his need to portray himself as the country bumpkin, uncouth, uncultured, with no manners, slurping his soup and wearing his garish red belt to mark that he was a Provençal. One suspects he played the role to the expectation of the Parisians. While the letters between Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo reveal the deep, analytical approach Vincent took to painting, a very calculated method to what seems to be madness on the canvas, they do reveal much of the pain that Vincent was experiencing and trying to work through while painting away from Paris.

There’s absolutely nothing in the letters of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec to indicate the debauched lifestyle he was leading in Paris. He was the earnest and dutiful son or grandson, always writing home with news of how hard he was working, how his health was progressing, and when he might next visit. Yet, in Paris he was the very model of the
bon vivant:
there are photos of him clowning, dressed as a geisha, a choirboy, a samurai, displaying his paintings in his studio with a completely nude prostitute named Mireille (who really was his favorite, and probably because she was, indeed, shorter than he). He
did
live in brothels for weeks at a time, and he was an installation in the dance halls and cabarets of Montmartre and Pigalle, including the infamous Moulin Rouge. The account of his challenging someone to a duel over the offender’s criticism of Vincent van Gogh’s painting is true and was recounted by several friends who were present. He
did
study with Vincent at Cormon’s studio, along with Émile Bernard, and they all idolized the Impressionists. Jean Renoir’s biography of his father speaks of Toulouse-Lautrec with great affection. It was Jean Renoir’s nanny and his father’s model, Gabrielle, who always referred to Lautrec as “the little gentleman.”

What doesn’t appear in any context I could find is the depressed, heartbroken victim portrayed in John Huston’s 1952 film
Moulin Rouge.
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
did
drink to excess and would die at thirty-six from complications from alcoholism, but it appears that he drank not because he was depressed or self-pitying, but because he really liked being drunk. I suppose it’s a minor miracle that he didn’t die of syphilis, given his social regimen.

Speaking of which, Manet, Seurat, Theo van Gogh, and Gauguin all really did die of syphilis as described, although none of their wives appeared to have contracted the disease and all lived into old age. It was Johanna van Gogh, Theo’s wife, who promoted, defended, and stridently protected Vincent’s paintings and she is probably responsible for us having ever heard of the painter, although it appears that she and Vincent did not get along well while he was alive.

While most of the scenes in
Sacré Bleu
are from my imagination, including all between Lucien and Henri, many scenes were inspired by real events. Monet really did go to Gare Saint-Lazare, announce himself as “the painter Monet,” and convince the station manager to direct all of the engines to fire up and release the steam so he could paint it. And he really did paint his wife, Camille, on her deathbed to capture the particular shade of blue she was turning. Even today, if you go to Giverny and the laboratory of light that Monet built there, you will see the dark carp, hiding under the water lilies, almost invisible but for the light line that is his dorsal fin. Monet and his student friends Renoir and Bazille
did
go to the Salon des Refusés and saw Manet’s
Déjeuner sur l’herbe,
and while Manet himself never counted himself as one of the Impressionists, they acknowledge him as “their source.” Monet and his friends went to great lengths after Manet’s death to get the French state to buy
Déjeuner sur l’herbe
and
Olympia
and install them in the Louvre.