Sacre Bleu (10 page)

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.”

É
DOUARD
M
ANET FELT AS IF ALL OF
P
ARIS 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.”

“Renoir,” said the thin fellow with a shrug.

“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.”

The other two nodded. “Bazille just failed his medical exams,” said Renoir.

Bazille glared at his friend. “Why would you tell him that?”

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

“She’s real,” said Monet. “That’s the genius of it.”

“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.

“What do you call it?” asked Bazille.

“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.

“The Salon is out of touch,” said Bazille.

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

“They accepted one of my paintings this year,” said Renoir.

And everyone turned to him, even the woman in lace.

“What is wrong with you?” said Bazille.

Renoir shrugged. “It hasn’t sold.”

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

Manet smiled. “Congratulations, Monsieur Renoir. May I shake your hand?”

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.

“M
ONSIEUR
M
ANET 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?”

“It is not for me to say,” said Monet. “An artist and his model—”

“You’re a painter, aren’t you? You’re all painters, aren’t you?”

“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.

“I think that fellow is waving to you,” said Renoir.

“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.

Monet said, “Did you see her face?”

“No,” said Renoir. “Just that black lace, like she’s in mourning.”

“Perhaps she has scars,” said Bazille.

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

“Do you think she’s a prostitute?” asked Renoir.

“Could be,” said Bazille. “No proper lady would talk that way.”

“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.”