ÉMILE BASTARD LIVED IN A SMALL HOUSE HIS FATHER HAD LEFT HIM IN the Maquis, just below the Moulin de la Galette, above the cemetery, on the northwestern slope of Montmartre. Since his father’s death, he had installed a wooden floor and plumbing, and removed the tracks and cages for the rodent reenactment of Ben-Hur, but the abode was no less eccentric than it had been under Le Professeur I. The miniature hippodrome had given way to tables and shelves filled with all manner of scientific bricolage, from tiny steam engines, to measuring instruments, to laboratory glass, bottles of chemicals, mineral samples, batteries and Tesla motors, human skulls, unborn animals in jars, dinosaur bones, and clockwork machines that could perform all sorts of diverse and often useless tasks, including a windup insect that could scurry around the floor and count dropped nutshells, then report the number as a series of chimes on a tiny bell.
Like his father before him, Émile Bastard was a scientist and an academician, who taught at the Académie des Sciences and did field research in several disciplines. He was considered a bit of a Renaissance man by the Académie, and an eccentric and harmless loon by the people of Montmartre. Like his father before him, they called him Le Professeur.
Le Professeur was at his writing desk, organizing some notes he’d taken on a recent cave-exploring expedition, when he was startled by a knock at his door, which almost never happened. He opened the door to find a very short but well-dressed man, in a derby hat, with a leather satchel slung from a strap on his shoulder. It was a warm day and the little man had his coat draped over his arm, his sleeves turned back to the elbow.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Bastard, I am Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, artist.” He held out his card. “I am here in the interest of our mutual friend, Monsieur Lucien Lessard.”
Le Professeur took Henri’s card and stepped aside for Toulouse-Lautrec to enter. “Come in, please. Please, sit.” He gestured to a divan on which was perched the partially reconstructed skeleton of a sloth. “You can just push the sloth to the side. A project I’m working on.”
Le Professeur pulled the chair from his desk and sat across from the divan. He was as tall as Henri was short, and very thin—when wearing a tailcoat, he put people in mind of a praying mantis with muttonchop whiskers.
Henri cringed as a hazelnut shell crunched under his shoe.
“Sorry,” said Bastard. “I have a machine that counts the shells.”
“But why do you have the shells all over the floor?”
“I just told you, I have a machine that counts them. Would you like to see a demonstration?”
“Perhaps another time, thank you,” said Henri. He removed his hat and laid it over the skull of the sloth, who had a disturbingly melancholy look on his face, probably because he was only partially assembled. “The matter of Lucien Lessard.”
“Yes, how is the boy?”
“You’ve known him a long time?”
“Over twenty years. I met him when he was very little, during the Prussian War. My father had sent him alone to catch rats in the old gypsum mine by the cemetery. When I found out I went to retrieve him. I caught poor Lucien as he was running out of the mine, terrified. A brilliant academic, my father, but he did not always use the best judgment in dealing with children. He treated them like small adults. No offense.”
Henri waved off the comment. “I’m concerned about Lucien. It’s difficult to explain, but I feel he may be under the influence of some sort of drug.” At that, he opened the satchel and retrieved a handful of paint tubes. “I believe that these tubes of color may contain some sort of hallucinogen that is affecting Lucien’s health and sanity.”
“I see,” said the Professeur, who took the tubes from Henri, uncapped them one at a time, and sniffed each in turn. “Smells like linseed oil is the medium.”
“Professeur, can you test them at the Académie, perhaps, find out if there is anything harmful in them?”
“I will, but first, tell me what kind of behavior has caused your concern. Normal oil color contains substances that can be toxic, cause the symptoms of madness.”
“He’s locked himself in the studio behind the bakery with a beautiful girl and he almost never comes out. His sister is most concerned. She says he’s stopped baking the bread and he doesn’t even seem to eat anymore. She says all he does is screw and paint.”
The Professeur smiled. Lucien had spoken to him of his friend the count and his proclivity for dance halls and brothels. “Respectfully, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, is that so different from your own life?”
“Please, Monsieur le Professeur, I have done some experiments with absinthe, and I can attest that it has dangerous hallucinogenic powers, in particular the ability to make homely women appear attractive.”
“Well, it’s eighty percent alcohol and the wormwood in it is poisonous; I suspect what you are seeing are glimpses of your own death.”
“Yes, but with exquisite bosoms. How do you explain those?”
“That is a question,” said the Professeur, who, in contrast to all rationality, loved looking for answers to even the most absurd questions.
“Anyway,” continued Henri, “I suspect there is something in this color that does the same thing, and our friend Lucien is under the influence of it. I believe I, too, have been under the influence of this very same drug in the past.”
“But not currently?”
“No, now I’m simply a libertine and a whoremonger. In my past there was obsession and love, which are the spells under which I believe our Lucien has fallen.”
“And who do you think is drugging him?”
“I believe it is a conspiracy of the girl and her partner in crime, a dealer of color.”
“And their motive?”
“To seduce Lucien.”
“And you said that she is beautiful?”
“Exquisite. Radiant. Irritatingly so.”
“Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, I understand why someone might conspire to seduce you. You have a title and are heir, I presume, to a significant fortune, but Lucien is the poor son of a baker, and while he is a talented painter, as you know, there is no guarantee that he will ever find success or financial reward. So, again, what would be the motive?”
Henri stood and began to pace in front of the divan, crunching hazelnut shells with every other step. “I don’t know. But I can tell you this: When something like this happened to me, Lucien and some other friends removed me from the situation and the obsession passed. But I lost time. Significant amounts of time. Memories. I have months at a time that I cannot remember. I have paintings that I don’t remember having painted, and I remember painting others that I do not have. I have no other explanation. Perhaps if you can find something in the paint that explains the loss of time, we will find a way to stop it.”
“Stop your friend from painting and making love to a beautiful woman?”
“When you say it that way it doesn’t sound like such a good thing.”
“No, it is. Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, you are a good friend to Lucien. Better than you know. Did Lucien’s sister tell you how their father died?”
“No, and Lucien only speaks of his father’s love for painting.”
“His sister thinks it was a similar love for painting that killed him. I will test the paint. It will take a few days, but I will find out the elements from which it is formulated, but even if I find something, if Lucien doesn’t want to be rescued, you will be in a difficult position removing him from the danger.”
“I have a plan,” said Henri. “I know two doormen from the Moulin Rouge, stout fellows who know their way around a billy club. If you find something, we’ll burst into the studio, knock Lucien out, drag him off of her, and tie him up in my studio until he comes to his senses.”
“You’re a better friend than I even thought,” said the Professeur. “Shall I call on you at your studio when I have my results?”
“The address is on the card, but I’m often out, so if you’ll just send word,” said Henri. “Lucien has spoken of you in terms he reserves for his artist heroes, and even his mother has kind words for you, which is a bit of a miracle in itself, so I know I can trust you to keep this confidence between us. I have reason to suspect that the Colorman is dangerous.”
Just then there was a whirr of motors and something scuttled out from under the divan. Henri screamed and jumped up onto the couch. A brass insect about the size of a squirrel was running around on the floor, from nutshell to nutshell, clicking at each one, then moving on with a whirr.
“Ah, it must be noon,” said the Professeur.
“Time for a cognac,” said Henri breathlessly. “Join me, Professeur?”
EVEN THE THOUGHT OF CARMEN CLOUDED HIS JUDGMENT; HE SHOULD HAVE recognized that. Otherwise, why would he think he could find a single redheaded laundress whom no one had heard from in three years, and in an arrondissement where nearly a hundred thousand people lived! He had a lithograph he should be doing for the Moulin Rouge, a poster of Jane Avril, and if a true and gallant friend, he would be trying to make another attempt to rescue Lucien, but the vision of Carmen pulled him to the Third. Was it the vision? She was pretty but not beautiful, but she had a quality of rawness, of reality, that touched him, and he had never painted better. Was that it? Was it the girl or the painting?
“Are you in pain, little one?” she would say, the only woman other than his mother he allowed to call him such a thing. “Shall I rub your legs for you?”
He didn’t even know if she was still alive. What if, as the Colorman said, she had perished—perhaps from grief, when he’d gone away? Abandoned her.
Jumping from laundry to laundry, with the taxi waiting for him at each, he found himself deep in the Marais, the Jewish neighborhood on the Right Bank of the Seine. By no means a ghetto, this area had been renovated by Baron Haussmann like most of Paris’s neighborhoods and the architecture was the same, uniform, six-story buildings with mansard roofs, so the only indication of any economic or ethnic disparity was the preponderance of goldsmiths, the signs in Hebrew in the bakery windows, and the ubiquitous Hasids out and about in their long coats, even in the August heat. There was a furtiveness to the movement of the people in the Marais these days, as anti-Semitism was rising as a political force in the city, and a Jew wandering in the wrong circles might find himself berated by some drunken gentleman for some imagined offense, or the center of some paranoid conspiracy theory. Much to his chagrin, Henri’s friend the artist Adolphe Willette, otherwise a man of great humor, had run for mayor of Montmartre on the anti-Semite platform and, fortunately, had been soundly defeated.
“Willette, you dolt,” Henri had told him, “I would love to support you, but being of noble birth myself, if I were to discriminate based on the accident of birth I’d have to eschew the company of all you horseshit commoners, and then who would I drink with?”
It was sometimes difficult to reconcile a man’s talents with his personality. Even the great Degas, who, as an artist, was a hero to Henri, and probably the best draftsman of all the Impressionists, had turned out, in person, to be a complete prick. Henri had even lived for a while in the same apartment building as Degas, but instead of being able to glean some bit of wisdom from the master, all he got was disdain. At first, a simple dismissive harrumph in the courtyard as they passed, but later, when Henri encountered Degas at an exhibition where they were both showing, Degas, acting as if he didn’t see Henri standing nearby, said, “These redheads of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, they all look like syphilitic whores.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Henri said over his shoulder, but he was hurt. Insulted by his hero, he limped away to a corner of the gallery where people were not so surly. Degas inspired him, and he’d been open in his admiration, showing Degas’ influence in his own art, and that made the rejection all the more painful. Henri was preparing to shrug off his friends and go get outrageously, scandalously drunk in some working-class dance hall when he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see a thin, white-goateed man in his fifties looking at him from under the brim of a rough linen hat: Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
“Monsieur, take heart. Degas hates everyone. He may be the best sculptor alive, now that his eyesight is too far gone to paint, but I will tell you a secret. His dancers are things to him. Objects. He has no love for them. Your dancers, monsieur, they live. They live on canvas because you love them, no?”
Henri didn’t know what to say. He was stunned, having gone somehow from a grinding self-loathing at the hands of Degas to an electric numbness at Renoir’s extraordinary kindness. He felt faint and had to steady himself on his walking stick.
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, merci beaucoup, Monsieur Renoir, I think you know…”
Renoir patted his arm to quiet him. “Watch. In a moment I will go tease him about his hatred of the Jews until he storms out like a spoiled child. It will be fun. Degas is always separate from his subjects. He separates himself by choice. Always has. He doesn’t know what it is to laugh with a fat girl, but we do, don’t we?”
A bit of a satyr’s grin under the hat brim, a sparkle of joy in his eye. “Don’t let Degas’ ugliness bring you down. Camille Pissarro, my friend, he is a Jew. You know him?”
“We have met,” said Henri. “We both show at Theo van Gogh’s. I share a studio with Lucien Lessard, who is close with him.”
“Yes, Lucien. A student of mine. Always drawing pictures of dogs humping. I think there was something wrong with that boy. Maybe all that time in the bakery—perhaps he had a yeast infection. Anyway, Pissarro, he looks like a rabbi with his big beard and his hook nose, but a pirate rabbi, always in those high boots of his. Ha, a pirate rabbi!” Renoir laughed at his own joke. “When he comes to Paris now, he has to hide out in a hotel room because he looks so Jewish, people will spit on him on the streets. What pettiness! Pissarro! Master of us all. But what they don’t know, that I know, is that from his hotel room window, he is doing the best painting of his life. You do that, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec. Take Degas’ petty treatment and make great paintings from it.”
Henri felt that he might begin to weep if he stood there any longer. He thanked Renoir again, bowed deeply, and excused himself to leave for an engagement he had only just then made up, but Renoir grabbed his arm.
“Love them all,” said Renoir. “That is the secret, young man. Love them all.” The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. “Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.”
“Love them all,” Henri repeated with a smile. “Yes, monsieur. I will do that.”
And he had tried, still tried to show that in his work, but often his separation from his subjects wasn’t driven, like Degas, by disdain for humanity, but by his own self-doubt. He loved them for their humanness, their perfect imperfection, because that was what they all shared, what he shared. But only one had he really loved, perhaps the only one as imperfect as he. He found her in the third laundry he visited in the Marais.
The proprietor of the laundry was a scruffy, haggard man who looked as if he might have been hanged and revived at some point. He was badgering a delivery boy when Henri came through the door.
“Pardon, monsieur, but I am the painter Toulouse-Lautrec. I am looking for a woman who modeled for me several years ago, and I have lost track of her. Does a Mademoiselle Carmen Gaudin work here?”
“Who is asking?”
“Forgive me, I didn’t realize you were both deaf and a buffoon. I am, as I was ten seconds ago, the Count Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, and I am looking for Carmen Gaudin.” Henri was finding the detective work did not agree with his constitution as it involved talking to people who were odd or stupid, without the benefit of the calming effect of alcohol.
“I don’t care if you have a fancy name and a title, there’s no Carmen here,” said the scruffy man. “Now fuck off, dwarf.”
“Very well,” said Henri. Usually his title would ease this sort of resistance. “Then I will have to take my business elsewhere, where I will be forced to hire an assassin of launderers.” Times like these, Henri wished he had the bearing of his father, who, although a loon, carried himself with great pomp and gave no second thought to pounding a counter with his walking stick and calling down nine hundred years of aristocratic authority upon the head of any service person unwise enough to displease him. Henri, on the other hand, dropped his empty threat and limped away.
As he reached the door, a woman’s voice called from behind him. He turned to see her coming through the curtain from the back room.
“I am Carmen Gaudin,” she said.
“Carmen!” Just the sight of her wholly unnaturally red hair, pinned up in a haphazard chignon, with two great scimitar bangs swooping down and framing her face, made his heart race, and he walked, light with excitement, back to the counter.
“Carmen, ma chère, how are you?”
She looked confused. “Excuse me, monsieur, but do I know you?”
Henri could see that her confusion was real, and, apparently, contagious, because now he was confused. “Of course you know me. All the paintings. Our evenings? It’s Henri, chérie. Three years ago?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Now go away,” said the scruffy man. “She has work to do.”
Carmen’s gaze went from demure and confused to furious, and she directed it at her boss. “You wait!” To Henri, she said, “Monsieur, perhaps if we stepped outside for a moment.”
He wanted to kiss her. Hold her. Take her home and cook dinner for her. That quality of being both strong and fragile at the same time was still there, and it appealed to a part of him that he normally kept hidden. Take her home, eat with her, and sip wine, laugh softly at sad things, make love to her and fall asleep in her arms: that’s what he wanted to do. Then wake up and put all that melancholy sweetness on canvas.
“Please, mademoiselle,” he said, holding the door for her. “After you.”
On the sidewalk she quickstepped to the doorway of an apartment building next door, out of sight of the laundry, then turned to him.
“Monsieur, three years ago I was very sick. I was living on Montmartre, working in Place Pigalle, but I don’t remember any of it. I forgot things. The doctor said the fever hurt my brain. My sister brought me to her house and nursed me back to health, but I remember almost nothing I did in the time before that. Maybe we met then, but I am sorry, I do not know you. You say I modeled for you? You are a painter?”
Henri felt his face go numb, as if he’d been slapped, but the stinging lingered. She really didn’t know him. “We were very close, mademoiselle.”
“Friends?” she asked. “Were we friends, monsieur?”
“More than friends, Carmen. We spent many evenings, many nights together.”
Her hand went to her mouth, as if she were horrified. “Lovers? We weren’t lovers.”
Henri searched her face for some hint of deception, some glimmer of recognition, of shame, of joy, but he found nothing.
“No, mademoiselle,” he said, the words as painful to him as having a tooth pulled. “We worked together. We were more than friends. An artist’s model is more than a friend.”
She seemed relieved. “And I was your model?”
“The best I’ve worked with. I could show you the paintings.” But even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t. He could show her a few of the paintings. But he had only three. Yet he remembered, or thought he remembered, painting a dozen. He could see the nude he painted of her, and remember how reluctant she had been to pose for it, but he couldn’t remember selling the painting, and he certainly didn’t have it now. “Perhaps you could come to my studio. Perhaps I could do some sketches of you, and perhaps your memory will return when you see the paintings.”
She shook her head, looking at her feet as she did. “No, monsieur. I could never model. I can’t believe I ever modeled. I am so plain.”
“You are beautiful,” he said. He meant it. He saw it. He had put it on canvas.
The proprietor of the laundry stepped out on the street then. “Carmen! You want a job or you want to run off with a dwarf, it is no matter to me, but if you want a job, go back to work, now.”
She turned from him. “I have to go, monsieur. I thank you for your offer, but that time is forgotten. Perhaps it is best.”
“But…” He watched her hurry by the boss into the laundry. The boss snarled at Henri as he closed the door.
Toulouse-Lautrec climbed into the taxi, which had been waiting.
“Another laundry, monsieur?” asked the driver.
“No, take me to the brothel at rue d’Amboise in the Second. And easy around the corners. I don’t want to spill my drink.”