Sacré Bleu

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.

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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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?”

“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.”

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.”

“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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.

“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.

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

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

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?”

“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.

“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.

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

“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 be,” 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.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.

The American bowed to the group and turned to greet his friend. He was a gaunt, dark-haired fellow about the same age as Manet, with an outrageous gondola of a mustache riding his lip and a monocle screwed into his eye like the brass porthole of a warship. He looked weaker, more pale than when they had last traded quips at Café Molière a year ago, and he was actually leaning on his walking stick as if lame, rather than wielding it as an accoutrement of fashion.

Whistler often joked about his puritanical mother, who reminded him with weekly letters that he was frittering away his life and the good family name by trying to live as a painter in London.

“Ah, Mother,” said Whistler in English. “She’s an arrangement in gray and black; her disapproval falls like a shadow across the ocean. And yours?”

Manet laughed. “Hiding in shame and praying for one of her sons to take up the law like our father.”

Manet released his friend’s hand and turned his attention to the painting. “The Salon rejected this? She is so bold. So real.” The girl, in a long white gown, stood barefoot on the white fur of a polar bear rug, but beneath that was an Oriental carpet with a woven pattern of bright blue.

“My White Girl. She was turned down by the Salon and the London Academy. 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.”

“Oh, poor Jemmie,” said Manet, “must you fall in love with every woman you paint?”

“Nothing like that. The wench poisoned me and right there is the evidence.” Whistler waved up and down the painting. “I must have scraped the canvas a hundred times—started over. All that lead white soaks right through your skin. I still see rings around every point of light. My doctor says it will take months for my vision to return to normal. I’ve been in Biarritz by the sea, recovering.”

That explained it. Lead poisoning. Manet breathed a little easier. “The limp, then? Also lead poisoning?”

“No, last week I was painting on the beach and I was swept out to sea by a rogue wave—pounded in the surf. I would have drowned if some fishermen hadn’t rescued me.”

She glided between them like a petite storm, black lace trailing behind her. “Should have stayed in London and continued to shag the redhead on the bear rug, then?” she said in English, an Irish accent.

The little color Whistler had drained out of his face. “Beg pardon, mademoiselle—”

“A bear rug’s a sight more comfortable than the riverbank, eh, Édouard?” she said to Manet in French, squeezing his biceps. “At least she didn’t give him syphilis, non?”

Manet felt his mouth moving, but no words were coming out. The two painters, both notorious raconteurs, looked at each other, speechless.

“You two look like you’ve seen a ghost. Oh, there’s my uncle again. Have to go. Ta!”

She hurried off through the crowd. Whistler’s monocle dropped out of his eye and swung from the end of its silk cord. “Who was that woman?”

He really didn’t know who she was. He didn’t even know what she was. He was suddenly feeling ill, and not because of the criticism of his painting. “Jemmie, this White Girl of yours wasn’t the painting you were working on in Biarritz when you had your accident, was it?”

“No, of course not. That was in the studio. The Biarritz painting was called The Blue Wave.”

“So, Whistler, how’s your mother?” Hommage á Delacroix—Henri Fantin-Latour, 1864. (Whistler center, standing; Manet, standing center right; Baudelaire seated to Manet’s left. Fantin-Latour, the painter, seated in the white shirt.)

THE BLUE WAVE HAPPENED TO BE THE TITLE OF THE PAINTING THE COLORMAN carried, wrapped in butcher’s paper, under his arm as he hurried after the girl in Spanish lace.

“Where have you been?” He followed her out of the palace into the bright noon sun.

“Having fun,” she said, not missing a step. “Did you see them all? These young painters! They paint in the open air—in the sunshine. Don’t you know what that means?”

Interlude in Blue #2: Making the Blue

For as long as there have been painters, there have been color men. For years it was thought that the true painter, a master painter, would gather his own pigments, the earths, ochres, insects, snails, plants, and potions that went into making color, and combine them in his studio. But the truth is, the ingredients for colors were often hard to find, difficult to prepare, and rare. To be a master, a painter needs to paint, not waste the light by searching for and preparing pigment. It was the color man who delivered the rainbow into the hands of the artist.

Ultramarine, true blue, the Sacré Bleu, is made from crushed lapis lazuli, a gemstone, and for centuries, it was rarer and more valuable than gold. Lapis lazuli is found in one place in the world, the remote mountains of Afghanistan, a long, dangerous journey from Europe, where the churches and palaces were being decorated with the Blessed Virgin wearing a Sacré Bleu gown.

It was the color men who sought out the lapis and pulled the color from the stone.

First they pounded the lapis with a bronze mortar and pestle, then that powder would be sifted until so fine the grains were not visible to the naked eye. The dull bluish-gray powder was then melted into a mixture of pine rosin, gum mastic, and beeswax. Over a period of three weeks, the putty would be massaged, washed with lye, strained, then dried, until all that was left was pure, powdered ultramarine, which a color man could sell as dry pigment, to be mixed by the artist with plaster for fresco, egg yolk for tempera, or linseed or poppy oil to use as oil paint.

There are other blues, blues from plants, indigo and woad, which fade with time, and inferior blues from minerals like copper and azurite, which can go black with time, but a true blue, a forever blue, ultramarine, was made in this exact way. Every color man knew the recipe, and every color man who traveled Europe from painter to painter with his wares could swear to his clients that this was the process he had used.

Except one.

Five

GENTLEMEN WITH PAINT UNDER THEIR NAILS

Interlude in Blue #2: Making the Blue