COUNT HENRI-MARIE-RAYMOND DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC-MONFA BURST into the room, drew his weapon, and shouted, “Madame, I demand you unhand this man, in the name of France, Le Boulangerie du Montmartre, and Jeanne d’Arc!”
Juliette quickly covered herself with her robe; Lucien looked up from his canvas and held his brush at port arms.
“Really, Henri, ‘Jeanne d’Arc’?”
“Well, we don’t have a king anymore.”
Juliette said, “Why is he waving that cordial glass at me?”
“Oh balls,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. Instead of his sword cane he had grabbed his flask cane, which concealed a flask of cognac and a cordial glass (a gentleman does not drink directly from his walking stick) for visits to his mother, and he was, indeed, brandishing a crystal cordial glass at the naked girl.
“Because a snifter would not fit into my cane,” he said finally, as if that explained everything.
“I thought you were at your mother’s in Malromé.”
“I was. But I have returned to rescue you!”
“Well that’s very thoughtful of you.”
“You’ve grown a beard.”
Lucien rubbed his cheek. “Well, I’ve stopped shaving.”
“And you’ve stopped eating as well?” Lucien had been thin before, but now he looked as if he hadn’t eaten the entire month that Henri had been gone. Lucien’s sister had said so much in a letter she’d sent to Malromé:
Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, he has stopped making the bread. He won’t listen to my mother or me. And he physically threatened my husband, Gilles, when he tried to intervene. He locks himself in the studio every morning with that woman, and he drags himself out in the evening and leaves through the alley, without so much as a bonjour for his family. He rants about his duty as an artist and won’t be reasoned with. Maybe he will listen to another artist. M. Renoir is in Aix, visiting Cézanne. M. Pissarro is in Auvers, and M. Monet never seems to leave Giverny. Please, help, I do not know the other artists of the butte, and Mother says they are all useless scalawags anyway and wouldn’t be able to help. I disagree, as I have found you to be a very kind and useful scalawag, and overall a very charming little man. I implore you to come help me save my brother from this horrible woman.
Regards,
Régine Robelard
“You remember Juliette, from before?” said Lucien.
“You mean before when she ruined your life and reduced you to a miserable wretch? Before that?”
“Before that,” said Lucien.
“Yes.” Henri tipped his hat with the cordial glass, now feeling quite silly for holding it. “Enchanté, mademoiselle.”
“Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec,” said Juliette, still in pose, dropping the silk robe to offer her hand.
“Oh my,” said Henri. He looked over his shoulder at Lucien, then back at Juliette, who smiled, calmly, almost beatifically, not as if she wasn’t aware that she was naked, but as if she were bestowing a gift upon the world. He forgot for a moment that he had come here to rescue his friend from her villainy. Her lovely, lovely villainy.
Henri bowed quickly over her hand, then wheeled on a heel. “I must see your painting.”
“No, it’s not ready.” Lucien caught him by the shoulders to keep him from moving behind the canvas.
“Nonsense, I’m an artist as well, and your studio mate; I have special privileges.”
“Not on this one, Henri, please.”
“I have to see what you’ve done with this—this—” He was waving toward Juliette while trying to get a look at the canvas. “The form, the luminosity of the skin—”
“Lucien, he’s talking about me like I’m a thing,” said Juliette.
Lucien crouched and sighted over his friend’s shoulder. “Look at the subtlety of the shadows, soft blue, barely three levels of value between the highlights and the shadows. You’d never see that except with indirect sunlight. With the surrounding buildings diffusing it, the light is like this most of the day. It’s only for an hour either side of noon that the highlights become too harsh.”
“Lucien, now you’re talking about me like I’m a thing.”
“Nonsense, ma chère, I’m talking about the light.”
“But you’re pointing at me.”
“We should put a skylight in the studio on rue Caulaincourt,” Henri said.
“There’s an apartment upstairs, Henri. I fear the effect wouldn’t be the same.”
“Good point. Is this the pose? You should do her from the back when you finish this one. She’s a finer ass than Velázquez’s Venus in London. Have you seen it? Exquisite! Have her looking over her shoulder at you in a mirror.”
“Still here,” Juliette said.
“Put a naked cherub on the couch with her to hold the mirror,” said Henri. “I can model if you need.”
The idea of Henri as a hirsute cherub seemed to jolt Lucien out of his enchantment with the light on Juliette’s skin, and he steered the count to the door. “Henri, it’s good to see you, but you have to go. Let’s meet at the Chat Noir this evening for a drink. I need to work now.”
“But I feel as if my rescue has been, well, somehow less than satisfactory.”
“No, I’ve never felt so thoroughly rescued, Henri. Thank you.”
“Well, this evening, then. Good day, mademoiselle,” he called to Juliette as Lucien pushed him out the door.
“À bientôt,” the girl said.
Lucien closed the door behind him and Henri stood there in the little weed-choked courtyard, holding a crystal cordial glass with a heavy brass knob on its base, wondering exactly what had just happened. He was sure that Lucien was in grave danger; otherwise, why had he hurried back from Malromé? Why had he come to the bakery? Why, in fact, was he even awake at this ungodly, midmorning hour?
He shrugged, and since he was holding the cordial glass anyway, he worked the long cylinder of the silver flask from his cane and poured himself a cognac to steel his nerves for the next stage of the rescue.
Inside the studio, Juliette resumed her pose and said, “Have you ever seen the Velázquez Venus, Lucien?”
“No, I’ve never been to London.”
“Perhaps we should go see it,” she said.
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC WAITED ACROSS THE SQUARE IN MADAME JACOB’S CRÉMERIE, watching the alley next to Lessard’s boulangerie. The girl appeared at dusk, just as Lucien’s sister said she would. He quickly chomped on a bit of bread spread with Camembert that he had left, drained his wine, placed some coins on the table, and climbed down from the stool.
“Merci, madame,” he called to the old woman. “Good evening.”
“Good evening, Monsieur Henri.”
Henri watched as the girl made her way across the square and down rue du Calvaire toward the bottom of the butte. Henri had never had cause to follow anyone before, but his father was an avid hunter, and despite Henri being a sickly child, he had grown up stalking animals. He knew that it was folly to follow too closely, so he let his prey get two blocks ahead before he limped along behind. Fortunately, her trail was all downhill, and he was able to keep up with her easily, although she didn’t dawdle or stop at any stalls or markets as did most of the other shopgirls crowding the sidewalks on their way home from work.
She actually passed his studio on rue Caulaincourt, and Henri was tempted to stop in and refresh himself with a cognac before continuing, or more likely, not continuing, and finish his evening out at the Moulin Rouge, but he fought the urge and followed her around Montmartre Cemetery and into the Seventeenth Arrondissement, to the neighborhood known as the Batignolles. This was one of Haussmann’s new neighborhoods, with wide boulevards and standardized buildings, six stories tall, with mansard roofs and balconies on the second and top floors. Clean, modern, and devoid of much of the squalor that had marked old Paris, and for that matter, Montmartre.
When they had gone perhaps twenty blocks southwest, most of it with Henri huffing and puffing to keep up, the girl turned abruptly off rue Legendre to a side street that Henri did not know. He hurried to the corner, as fast as his aching legs would carry him, so as not to lose her, and nearly ran into a young girl in a maid’s uniform who was running the other way. Henri excused himself, then removed his hat and peeked around the corner. Juliette was not ten feet away. Beyond her stood the little Colorman.
“Was that our maid?” asked Juliette.
“Accident,” said the Colorman. “Couldn’t be helped.”
“Did you scare this one, too?”
“Penis,” he explained.
“Well there’s really no excuse for that, is there?”
“Accident.”
“You can’t just accidentally penis someone. She better have made supper and drawn me a bath before you frightened her off. I’m exhausted and I’m taking Lucien to London tomorrow, where I’m going to bonk him in every corner of Kensington.”
“How do you bonk someone in the Kensington?”
She growled something in a language that Henri didn’t understand, unlocked the gate, and led the Colorman up the stairs. Henri stepped around the corner and watched the gate swing shut.
So that was it. She was connected to Vincent’s little Colorman. But how? Father, perhaps? Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would find out. Now he had to be back on the butte at the Chat Noir to meet Lucien. He limped to avenue de Clichy and a cabstand, then rode back up the hill in the back of a carriage.
He waited for Lucien at Le Chat Noir until nearly ten, then, when the baker did not show, made his way to the Moulin Rouge, where he drank and sketched the dancers until someone, he thought it may have been the clown La Goulue, poured him into a taxi and sent him home.
THE NEXT MORNING, AT WHAT HE CONSIDERED A SAVAGE HOUR, HENRI crouched in an alley off avenue de Clichy, with a portable easel, paint box, and folding stool, waiting for the girl to pass. Every few minutes, a boy he had hired would bring him an espresso from the café around the corner, he would splash a bit of cognac into the cup, then he would shoo the boy away and resume his watch. He was three espressos and a cigar into the mission when he spotted Juliette as she rounded the corner, wearing a simple black dress and parasol and a hat decorated with iridescent black feathers with a smoke chiffon scarf as its band, which trailed behind her as she walked. Even from a block away her blue eyes were striking, framed by all the black silk and white skin, and he was put in mind of Renoir’s vibrant, blue-eyed beauties, all of the color, but none of the softness, at least not here, on the street. In Lucien’s studio yesterday, well, there her edges had softened.
He ducked into the alley and extinguished his cigar on the bricks, then flattened himself against the wall. As a boy, he had sat in hunting blinds with his father, on their estate outside of Albi, and although he’d spent most of his time in the blind sketching the trees, the animals, and the other hunters, the count had taught him that stillness and patience could be as vital to a hunt as the stealth and agility of the stalk. “If you are still enough,” his father would say, “you become part of your surroundings, invisible to your prey.”
“Bonjour, Monsieur Henri,” Juliette called as she walked by.
Well fuck the count—great, eccentric, inbred lunatic that he is, anyway, thought Henri.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Juliette,” he called back. “Tell Lucien I waited for him last evening.”
“I will. Forgive him, he had an exhausting day. I’m sure he’s sorry he missed you.”
He watched as she was carried away by the stream of people on the avenue, then signaled to the coffee boy, on whom he loaded up the easel, the stool, and the paint box.
“Come, Captain, we are on to Austerlitz!”
The boy rattled along behind him, dragging the legs of the easel and barely able to keep himself from tripping over the stool and the paint box. “But, monsieur, I am not a captain and I am not allowed to go to Austerlitz. I have school.”
“It’s just an expression, young man. All you need to know is you shall receive twenty-five centimes for your efforts, providing you don’t dash my poor paint box to splinters on the cobbles.”
After a few blocks Henri led the boy down the street where he’d followed Juliette the night before, then paid the boy to set up his easel on the sidewalk opposite her building. It occurred to him, then, that if he were going to pretend to paint, for perhaps hours, that he was going to have to actually paint. Should the Colorman appear after watching him out the window for hours, he’d actually have to have some color on the canvas.
He had only one small canvas in the holder in his paint box. A bit of a dilemma. He hadn’t painted en plein air very often, but the master of the method, Monet, said that no decent painter should ever work outdoors on a single painting for more than an hour at a time, lest he be trying to paint light that is no longer there. Even now, the master was probably in Giverny or Rouen with a dozen canvases set up on a dozen easels, moving from one to the next as the light changed, painting exactly the same subject, from the same angle. If someone thought he was painting haystacks or a cathedral, Monet would have thought them quite the dimwit. “I’m painting moments. Unrepeatable, singular moments of light,” he would say.
Fortunately for Henri, this little street looked as if it held one single, intolerably dull moment. Although just two blocks off the bustling avenue de Clichy, it might have been a street in a ghost town. There wasn’t even the obligatory bent-backed oldster sweeping his or her front step, which he was certain was an ordinance in Paris. A whore, a shitting dog, or an oldster sweeping the steps—one or all was required by law. He’d run out of cognac before he ran out of canvas, unless something exciting happened, like a cat decided to jump onto a windowsill.
He sighed to himself, set up his stool, poured a bit of linseed oil into one of the little palette cups, some turpentine into the other, then squeezed out a small dollop of burnt umber onto the wooden palette, thinned it with the turpentine, and began to sketch the Colorman’s front door in oil with a thin bristle brush.
Having decided that the theme of this picture would be a deserted street, he was almost disappointed to hear footsteps from the courtyard of the Colorman’s building. The building’s concierge, a wizened widow, appeared at the first-floor window, then ducked behind a curtain as the gate latch clanked. Every apartment building in Paris had a concierge who, by some sort of natural selection, was both extraordinarily nosy yet loath to be accused of it.
The Colorman backed his way through the wrought-iron gate, pulling behind him the wooden case nearly as large as himself.
Henri could feel the hair stand up on the back of his neck and he wished he hadn’t become so engrossed in his painting that he’d completely forgotten to drink, because he could have used another cognac to still his nerves. Now he leaned into his canvas and pretended to be meticulously working on an edge when, in fact, he very seldom worked up close to the canvas and preferred long-handled brushes.
“Monsieur!” said the Colorman, crossing the street, his great case bumping his heels as he moved. “Remember me from avenue de Clichy? Monsieur, can I interest you in some color? I can tell from your excellent hat that you are a man of taste. I have only the finest earths and mineral pigments, none of that false Prussian shit.”
Henri looked up from his painting as if he’d been awakened from a dream. “Ah, monsieur, I did not see you. I tell you honestly, I do not know the state of my paint box today. Perhaps I will have need of your wares.” Henri pulled his paint box out from under the easel, unsnapped the latches, and opened it. As he’d planned, it was a sad cemetery of crushed and depleted paint tubes, twisted sacrifices to beauty.
“Ha!” said the Colorman. “You need everything.”
“Yes, yes, one of everything,” said Henri. “And a large tube each of lead white, ivory black, and ultramarine.”
The Colorman had opened his own case on the street, but he stopped. “I don’t have a large tube of ultramarine, monsieur. Only a very small tube.” His eyes were set so far back under his brow that Henri had to bend down to see what emotion was there because the Colorman’s voice sounded full of regret. Not what Henri expected.
“No matter, monsieur,” Henri said. “I will take what you have, a small tube is fine. If I need more blue I can always—”
“None of that Prussian shit!” barked the Colorman.
“I was going to say that I can always use stand oil and glaze what little I have over white.”
The Colorman cocked his head. “No one does that anymore. That’s the old way. You new fucks putting paint on with a trowel, that’s the way now.”
Henri smiled. He thought of Vincent’s calculatedly violent palette-knife paintings, paint so thick it would take half a year to dry, even in the arid South. Then his thought of Vincent went dark as he remembered the letter. The Colorman had been in Arles.
“Well,” Henri said, “better the old ways than use that Prussian shit.”
“Ha! Yes,” said the Colorman. “Or that synthetic French ultramarine. I don’t care what they say, it’s not the same as the blue from lapis lazuli. It is not the sacred blue. You will see. You will never find a finer color, monsieur.”
At that moment, seeing the color in the case, the pentimento that had been rising in Henri’s mind became a clear, vivid image. He had seen them together, one time outside of his studio, Carmen and the Colorman. How had he forgotten? “Actually, I have used your color before. Perhaps you remember?”
The Colorman looked up from his case. “I would remember selling to a dwarf, I think.”
Henri wanted right then to bash the twisted little creature’s brains in with his walking stick, but he calmed himself enough to just snap, “Monsieur, I am not a dwarf. I am fully seven centimeters taller than the requisite for a dwarf, and I resent your implication.”
“So sorry, monsieur. My mistake. Still, I would remember selling to you.”
“Your color was obtained through a girl who modeled for me, a Mademoiselle Carmen Gaudin. Perhaps you remember her.”
“Is she a housemaid? My maid quit yesterday.”
“Your standards were perhaps too demanding for her?”
“Penis,” explained the Colorman with a shrug.
“Ah, I understand,” said Henri. “Mine refuses to do windows. No, Mademoiselle Gaudin was a laundress by trade. A redhead, perhaps you remember?”
The Colorman lifted his derby and scratched his head as if trying to conjure a memory. “Sure, maybe. The redheaded laundress. Yes, I wondered where she got the money for color.”
Actually, at the time, Henri had wondered that as well, since she’d brought him the paint as gifts. “For our pictures,” she said.
“Do you know where she is now?” asked Henri. “She used to work at the laundry near Place Pigalle, but they haven’t seen her.”
“That one was called Carmen, right?”
“Yes, Carmen Gaudin.”
“She got very sick. I think maybe she died.”
Henri felt a blow to the heart. He hadn’t intended to ask about her at all. He thought he was through with her. But there was a loss, in that instant, at hearing the Colorman’s words.
The Colorman put his hat back on. “She had a sister who lived in the Third, not far from Les Halles, I think. Maybe she went there to die, huh?”
“Perhaps. How much for the color?” said Henri. He took the paint tubes and laid them across the bottom of his paint box, then paid the little man what he asked.
The Colorman pocketed the bills. “I should be making more blue soon, if you run out. I’ll come around to your studio.”
“Thank you, but I prefer not to be disturbed at my studio. I will come to you, now that I know where you live,” Henri said.
“I move a lot,” said the Colorman.
“Really, have you ever been to Auvers-sur-Oise?” Aha! Henri thought. I have you now.
“Auvers?” The hat came off, more head scratching, looking at the upper floors of the buildings for an answer. “No, monsieur, why do you ask?”
“A friend of mine wrote me a letter from there, saying he had purchased some fine oil paints from someone who looked like you. He was a Dutchman, dead now, sadly.”
“I don’t know any Dutchman. I don’t do business with fucking Dutchmen. Fuck Dutchmen and their Dutch light. No. I have to go.” The Colorman snapped his case shut, then hefted it onto his back and started to make his way down the street.
“Adieu,” Henri called after him.
“Fucking Dutchmen,” grumbled the Colorman as he wrestled his case around the corner.
Carmen had moved in with her sister in the Third Arrondissement? If he took a taxi, Henri could be there in thirty minutes. No one had to know.
But first, he needed to find out about the color.