“He was two parts talent, three parts affectation, and five parts noise.” Aristide Bruant (poster)—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892
OH LOOK, IT IS THE GREAT PAINTER TOULOUSE-LAUTREC ACCOMPANIED by some dog-shit unknown bastard!” cried Aristide Bruant as they entered the half-lit cabaret. He was a stout, stern-faced man, in a grand, broad-brimmed hat, high-heeled sewer-cleaner boots, a black cape, and a brilliant red scarf. He was two parts talent, three parts affectation, and five parts noise. Le Mirliton was his cabaret, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was his favorite painter, which is why Henri and Lucien were dragging the blue nude into the bar in the middle of the day.
“When you break a tooth on the gravel in your blackberry tart,” Lucien called back, “it will be a present from that same dog-shit unknown bastard!”
“Oh ho!” shouted Bruant, as if speaking to a full house of revelers instead of the four drunken butchers falling asleep over their beers in the dinge of the corner and a bored barmaid. “It appears that I have failed to recognize Lucien Lessard, the dog-shit baker and sometime dog-shit painter.”
Bruant wasn’t being particularly unkind to Lucien. Everything at Le Mirliton was served with a side order of abuse. It was Bruant’s claim to fame. Businessmen and barristers came from all the best neighborhoods of Paris to sit on the rough benches, rub elbows on greasy tables with the working poor, and be outwardly blamed for society’s ills by the anarchist champion and balladeer of the downtrodden, Aristide Bruant. It was all the rage.
Bruant strode across the open floor of the cabaret, snatching up his guitar, which had been resting on a table, as he went.
Lucien set down his end of the painting, faced Bruant, and said, “Strum one chord on that thing, you bellowing cow, and I will beat you to death with it and dismember your corpse with the strings.” Lucien Lessard may have been tutored by some of the greatest painters in France, but he hadn’t ignored the lessons from the butte’s finest crafter of threats, either.
Bruant grinned, held the guitar up by his face, and mimed strumming. “I’m taking requests…”
Lucien grinned back. “Two beers with silence.”
“Very good,” said Bruant. Without missing a step, he turned as if choreographed, docked the guitar on an empty table, and headed back to the bar.
Two minutes later Bruant was sitting with them at a booth, and the three of them were looking at the blue nude, which was propped up against a nearby table.
“Let me hang it,” said Bruant. “A lot of important people will see it in here, Lucien. I’ll put her up high, over the bar, so no one will get any ideas about touching her. They might not buy it, because their wives won’t let it in the house, but they’ll see it and they’ll know your name.”
“You have to show the painting, Lucien,” Henri said to Lucien. “We can put together a show later—maybe Theo van Gogh will sponsor it, but that will take time. I can’t organize it. I need to go to Brussels, and to show with the Twenty Group, and I have promised to print new posters for the Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge.”
“And he owes me a cartoon for Le Mirliton,” said Bruant. He irregularly published an arts magazine with the same name as his cabaret, and all of Montmartre’s young artists and writers contributed to it.
“All right, then,” said Lucien. “But I don’t know what to ask for it.”
“It shouldn’t be for sale,” said Henri.
“I would agree,” said Bruant. “That’s the power of the coquette, isn’t it? Make them want it, but don’t let them have it. Just tease.”
“But I need a sale.” And therein lay the artist’s dilemma: to paint for filthy lucre was a compromise of principles, but to be an artist who didn’t sell was to be anonymous as an artist.
“If she’ll sell now, she’ll sell later,” said Henri. “The bakery makes enough money for you to live.”
“Fine, fine,” Lucien said, throwing his hands up. “Hang her. But if someone makes an offer, I want to know about it.”
“Excellent,” said Bruant, hopping up from his seat. “I’ll go borrow a ladder. You can supervise the hanging.”
When the singer had gone, Henri lit a cheroot with a wooden match and leaned into the cloud of smoke he’d just expelled over the table.
“Before he returns, Lucien, I need to tell you something—warn you.”
“Don’t be so ominous, Henri. It doesn’t suit you.”
“It’s just that, Juliette—while I will help you find her, if you wish—I need to warn you—you may not want to find her.”
“Of course I want to find her, Henri. I’m a wreck without her.”
“I think you’re romanticizing your time with her. You were a wreck when you were with her, too.”
“I was painting.”
“That’s not the point.”
“That’s always the point.”
“She was definitely living with the Colorman.”
“Are you saying she was secretly his mistress? That can’t be. Who lets his mistress spend so much time with another man?”
“I’m saying they have an arrangement.”
“He’s her pimp, then? Is that what you’re saying? Are you saying that the woman I love is a whore?”
“You make it sound so sordid. Some of my best friends are whores.”
“That’s not the point. She is not a whore, he is not her pimp. You think everyone is a pimp. That’s why you always lose the game.”
Henri liked to play a game he called Guess the Pimp in the ballroom of the Moulin de la Galette. He and a group of friends (sometimes Lucien included) would sit at the edge of the crowded dance hall and try to guess which men in the booths were pimps tending to their girls and which were simply workingmen or rascals trying to make time with a pretty thing. They would place their bets, then one of the Moulin’s doormen would come by and confirm or disprove their suspicions. Henri almost always lost.
“Not her pimp,” said Henri. “I don’t know what he is to her, but what I need you to ask yourself is, what if you found Juliette and she didn’t know you?”
“What?”
“Lucien, you know after I followed her to the Colorman’s apartment, I spoke to him.”
“I know this, Henri. You thought he was lying about knowing Vincent.”
“I’m sure he was lying about Vincent, but what I didn’t tell you is I asked about Carmen.”
“Carmen? Why?”
“When I saw him outside of the Dead Rat, the day you ran into Juliette, I remembered seeing Carmen with him.”
“No!”
“You know I couldn’t remember much of my time with Carmen.”
“Absinthe,” said Lucien. “That’s why we sent you to your mother’s. It was for your own good.”
“Damn it, Lucien, it wasn’t the absinthe. You heard Dr. Gachet. Renoir, Monet, all of them have had these moments of memory lapse, of hallucinations, going back years. Renoir remembers the Colorman but nothing about him. You’ve had them, and you haven’t been drinking absinthe, have you? It’s the color. Something in the color. And it doesn’t just affect the painter. I found Carmen, Lucien. I found her and she had no idea who I was. She blamed it on a fever. She almost died after I left.”
Lucien felt his face go numb at the revelation, both over what he had done to Henri and what it might mean to him and Juliette. He, Maurice Guibert, and Émile Bernard had physically dragged Henri out of his studio, bathed him, dressed him, then Guibert and Bernard had taken Henri to his mother’s castle and stayed there with him until he sobered up.
“You were killing yourself, Henri.”
“I was painting.”
“We were trying to be good friends to—”
“She doesn’t know me, Lucien,” Lautrec blurted out. “She doesn’t remember ever having met me.” He ground his cheroot out on the floor (as Bruant not only allowed but required), then removed his pince-nez and pretended to wipe the fog from the lenses on his cravat. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. Juliette may not even know you.”
“She will. We’ll go to the Batignolles now. We’ll save her—break whatever kind of hold the Colorman has over her. She’ll understand about my mother braining her with a crêpe pan. You’ll see.”
Henri shook his head. “You think I haven’t gone back? You were unconscious for a week, Lucien, and we were certain she was the cause. Of course I went back to where she lived. They are gone.”
“I thought you were drunk in a brothel the whole time I was out.”
“Well, yes, I was drunk, but I wasn’t always in a brothel. I took a taxi to their apartment—but I did take two whores with me in case of an emergency. The concierge said that when she checked on them one morning, the Colorman and the girl were just gone. Not a word.”
“We’ll find her,” said Lucien, realizing even as he said it that they’d both been this way before.
“Like we found her when she left two and a half years ago? Like I found Carmen after I came back from Mother’s?”
“But we did find them.”
“We found them because of the Colorman.”
“Then we’ll find the Colorman again.”
“We are painters,” said Henri. “We don’t know how to find things.”
“Speak for yourself. I’ll find her.”
Henri sighed and drained his beer, then looked to the bar. Bruant hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone to fetch the ladder. The butchers still dozed in the corner. The barmaid had her head propped on her hands and was on her way to dozing off as well. “Fine, then. Let’s move your painting behind the bar. Then we’ll go see your friend Professeur Bastard.”
“Le Professeur? But he’s a lunatic.”
“I don’t think he is,” said Henri. “I think he is just eccentric.”
“Well his father was a lunatic,” said Lucien, draining the last of his beer as well.
“So is my father and so was your father.”
“Well, yes, he was eccentric.”
“Then shall we go see if Le Professeur has found the secret of our Colorman’s paints?”
“SHOULDN’T WE BE GOING TO THE ACADÉMIE?” ASKED LUCIEN AS THEY MADE their way down the back of the butte and through the Maquis. It was well past midday now and there was all manner of industry, from goat milking to rag picking to rat racing, going on in the shantytown. (Yes, real rat racing. The old Professeur had never been able to train his rats to perform Ben-Hur, but when he died, the junior Bastard gave the track and the race-trained rodents to some local boys, who started a betting operation. They were grown men now and had staged twenty races a day for nearly fifteen years. In doing so they had also managed to prove that even in the most squalid slum, full of bandits, beggars, whores, con men, lechers, drunkards, layabouts, and egregious weasels, it was possible to attract an even more unsavory element. Le Professeur Deux, pioneering the budding demi-science of sociology, had done a study.)
“He told me he would be home today,” said Henri, who snatched up his walking stick and tapped on Le Professeur’s weathered plank door with the brass pommel. There was the sound of steam being vented, as if several espresso machines were all winding down at once, and the Professeur Émile Bastard opened the door and stepped awkwardly out of the doorway, nearly bumping his head on one of the open ceiling rafters.
“Gentlemen. Welcome. Come in, please. I’ve been expecting you. Lucien, so good to see you.”
“And you,” said Lucien.
Toulouse-Lautrec limped in but looked over his shoulder at Lucien and whispered, “I stand corrected. He is a lunatic.”
Lucien nodded in agreement as he shook hands with Professeur Bastard. The Professeur was a very tall man—his thin, aquiline aspect put one in mind of a tweedy wading bird of some sort, an academically inclined egret, perhaps—but today he stood at least a foot taller than his normal height. He had to duck under each ceiling joist as he led them into the parlor in halting, careful steps. Bastard was wearing some kind of stilts under his trousers, fitted with shoes to appear to be his own feet. They crunched hazelnut shells strewn across the floor as he walked.
“Gentlemen, please sit down.” Bastard gestured to two chairs, then reached into his trouser pocket and activated some sort of switch. Again there was the sound of gases venting, and Bastard lowered into a sitting position in a series of pneumatic jerks.
Lucien and Henri did not sit, they just stared. While Le Professeur was sitting, he wasn’t sitting on anything. He was simply maintaining a sitting position in midair, like one of those annoying street performers one encountered around Paris who were always walking in the wind, or climbing imaginary stairs, or getting trapped in invisible boxes from which they could only be extracted by the donation of a ten-centime piece or a gendarme with a billy club.
“Sit, sit, sit,” said Le Professeur.
“But, monsieur?” said Lautrec, waving at the Professeur in the manner of a magician presenting a freshly bisected assistant. “You are—”
“I am quite comfortable,” said Bastard. He reached into his pocket, clicked some sort of switch, and with a hiss and a click, he stood to attention, his head barely missing a ceiling beam. He lifted his trouser cuffs to reveal, extending from his shoes, a leg-shaped frame of brass rods, with pistons suspended in the center. “What do you think?”
“You are certainly tall,” said Henri.
“I built them for you,” said the Professeur. “They are entirely too tall for me. They’ll still have to be fitted to you, but I think you’ll find they function quite efficiently.”
“For what?” asked Henri.
“For effortless ambulation, of course. I call them Loco-ambulators, or steam stilts.”
There was another hiss of steam being released and Lucien thought he smelled something burning.
“Help me out of them, I’ll show you.”
With the Professeur’s instruction, they first lowered him to the floor, so he was sitting splay legged, then helped him unfasten leather straps and buckles until he was able to wriggle out of his trousers, leaving the steam stilts on the floor and the Professeur to pace in his underwear and socks as he lectured.
“I had noticed, when you visited before, that walking came to you with great difficulty and pain. Given your royal lineage, I deduced that this problem was one caused perhaps by your parents having been too closely related by blood.”
“And I fell off a horse and broke my legs when I was a boy,” said Henri, somewhat amused by the Professeur’s pompousness, despite that he was wearing a tailcoat and no pants. (The tailcoat had concealed a small condensation chamber that was part of the steam stilts and rested across the small of the back.)
“Just so,” said the Professeur, charging on, lifting the steam stilts to their feet as he spoke, so they stood there, a gleaming bronze skeleton (sans torso) with its trousers around its ankles. “I thought to relieve you of some of the effort, since you live on Montmartre, and climbing stairs and hills obviously caused you pain. At first I thought, wheels, but soon I realized that not only would wheels be conspicuous in company, they were useless on stairs. I designed the first set of walkers with Tesla motors, but the battery that would be required to run the machine would have been so heavy as to preclude your actually accompanying your legs.”
“So my legs might have gone out drinking without me?”
“Possibly,” snapped the Professeur. “Then it was clear that combustion was the only way to release enough energy to power you and still have the machine compact enough to be concealed. Steam was the answer. I designed the steam stilts so that by merely making the movement you normally make by walking, your legs would activate a series of switches and valves that extend and contract these pistons. You put out no more effort than if you were moving your legs underwater.”
“I see,” said Henri. “Now I must ask you, before you go any farther, and this is important: Do you have any brandy or cognac in the house?”
“Is something burning?” asked Lucien.
“Ah, the boilers are in the shoes,” said the Professeur. “They burn powdered coal at a low smolder, but unfortunately there is some wasted heat. If you stand in one place for long, there is a danger of charring the rug.”
Henri had begun to chuckle and was trying to conceal his amusement.
“At first, I wasn’t sure how to shield your feet from the heat, then I thought, Of course, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec wouldn’t mind being a bit taller. We’ll simply extend the rods of the calves so that you are suspended above the heat of the boilers, and voilà! You are six feet tall.”
“But everyone knows I have short legs. Would you have me leave Paris so I could use your walker?”
“Men trust their perceptions, not their memories. Your trousers will conceal the mechanism. You would only have to slip away a few times an evening to add fuel to the shoes. Perhaps more if there is dancing.”
Henri was giggling now, barely able to contain himself. “So I’m to shovel coal into my shoes hoping no one notices, while the smoke and steam—what of the vapor?”
“There’s little more smoke than a cigar, and the steam would be barely visible by gas lamp. It vents out the back of your trousers, under the tail of your coat.”
“Marvelous!” said Henri. “I use a similar port for my own vapors. I want to try them, immediately. Well, as soon as we’ve heard the results of your analysis of the colors.”
“Ah, yes,” said the Professeur, “the colors. Let me get my papers.”
He went into the back room, which Lucien thought might have once been the bedroom, yet there was no sign visible through the doorway that there was a bed in there, only worktables and scientific instruments.
Lucien leaned over to Henri and whispered, “Are you really going to try those legs of his?”
“Absolutely,” Henri whispered back. “But no special trousers to conceal them. I’m wearing them on the outside. Did you hear that, Lucien? Dancing. On my mechanical, steam-farting legs. I shall be the toast of Pigalle.”
“Oh balls,” Lucien said.
“What?”
“I think your miraculous new feet are on fire.”
And indeed, flames were shooting out of the tops of the Loco-ambulators’ shoes and licking the brass legs.
“I’ll get water,” said Lucien, jumping up and running to the kitchen.
“Bring back liquor,” said Henri.
Five minutes later the flames were out and the three sat, sadly looking at the charred remains of the steam stilts, which now stood just outside the door, in the dust, like the charred skeleton of a cannonball catcher, his torso carried off to parts unknown by the last shot.
“Perhaps a clockwork design,” said the Professeur wistfully.
“As long as the pendulum is enormous,” said Henri with a grin. “I have a reputation to maintain.”
“So, Professeur,” said Lucien. “About the colors.”
“Yes,” said Henri, “is there some kind of drug in them?”
The Professeur shuffled his papers until they seemed suitably disorganized.
“As you know, there have been theories since Newton that every material has its own unique qualities of light refraction, but beyond the visual analysis, there is no way to quantify that uniqueness.”
“Which means?” asked Henri.
“To our eye, different red things will appear red,” said Lucien.
“Exactly,” said the Professeur.
“Is it obvious for me to point out that it does not require a scientist to point out that that is obvious?” asked Henri.
“Exactly,” said the Professeur. “Which is why I used a new process discovered by a Russian scientist called liquid chromatography, where substances are suspended in a liquid and then either placed on paper or in thin tubes, and the level to which each substance migrates is unique. So in a color made of different colored minerals, say an orange composed of red ochre and yellow ochre, the two minerals will migrate to different levels, and if the red were made from another mineral, or an insect compound, like cochineal beetles, it too would find a different level in the liquid.”
“And what about compounds that weren’t part of the color, like a drug, perhaps?”
“Yes, that too,” said the Professeur. “But liquid chromatography is a new process, and no one has done any indexing of the behavior of the elements, so I did a simple comparison. I went to Gustave Sennelier’s shop near the École des Beaux-Arts. He makes all of his paint from pure, dry pigments, mixed to the order of each artist’s preferences. Since we knew what went into each of his paints, I was able to compare the ingredients of each of his colors with those of your Colorman.”
“And?” asked Lucien.
“Each of Sennelier’s colors is composed of the same elements as those of your Colorman, mostly purely mined minerals, except the blue.”
“I knew it,” said Henri. “What is in the blue? Wormwood? Arsenic?”
“I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t help,” said Lucien.
“We compared every blue pigment that Sennelier had, as well as mineral samples I got from the geology department at the Académie. I also tested any element that appears blue under different light, or can be changed to blue by oxidation, like copper. I can tell you it’s not azurite, and it’s not lapis lazuli, the most common elements used to make blue. It’s not indigo and it’s not woad, nor any other plant or animal pigment that I could find. It’s an unknown.”
“That must be it, then,” said Lucien. “There is some kind of drug in the blue compound. Can you test that?”
“Well, there wasn’t much in that small tube Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec gave me, but I suppose we could give it to some rats and see if they behave differently.”
“Dr. Gachet said that even a very tiny amount might affect the mind—what might be absorbed through the skin or inhaled as you are painting. Henri and I certainly didn’t eat any paint.”
“I see. And you would have both been exposed to the compound over a longer period of time?”
Lucien looked at Henri, trying to measure the reality of it. If, indeed, both Juliette and Carmen had somehow been complicit in exposing them to the Colorman’s blue, then it would have been over a period of years. But he didn’t paint Juliette before, in the time before she went away. Or maybe he just didn’t remember painting her.
“Henri, do you remember, when I was with Juliette before, did I paint her?”
“I never saw a painting, and you didn’t speak of it, but now I wonder. You don’t know?”
“Gentlemen,” interrupted the Professeur, “you believe something in this pigment affected your memory? Correct?”
“Yes,” said Lucien. “And perhaps it caused us to have false memories.”
“I see.” The Professeur shuffled through his notes for a moment, then stopped, stood, and quickstepped to a bookshelf in the corner of the room, where he snatched up a leather-bound volume and quickly flipped through the pages until he seemed to find what he was looking for. “Aha!”
“Aha, what?” asked Henri.
“This Austrian doctor writes of a process he uses on his patients to access what he calls ‘suppressed memories.’ Have you ever heard of hypnosis?”
“Mesmerism?” said Henri. “That’s a carnival trick they use to make people behave like chickens. A service that, I can attest from experience, can be attained at the rue des Moulins brothel by slipping an extra three francs to the madame.”
“Really?” said the Professeur.
“Four francs if you require an egg to be laid.”
The Professeur seemed perplexed by Henri’s revelation and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling as if the great gears of his mind were being strained by the mathematics of the scenario. “Seems rather dear for an egg,” he said finally.
“Forget the egg,” said Lucien. “Are you saying that you can help us remember?”
“Well, I can certainly try,” said the Professeur. “I have hypnotized subjects.”
“Professeur Bastard,” said Henri, “I’m not sure I understand. You are a chemist, a geologist, you dabble in engineering, build machines, and now psychology; what exactly is your field of study?”
“Truth, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, does not confine itself to a cage.”
There came a whirring sound from under the Professeur’s chair and the rat-sized brass nut-counting machine scurried out into the room and skittered from shell to shell and gaily chimed its findings.
“Ah, it’s two o’clock,” said the Professeur.