Sacre Bleu (19 page)

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.

T
OULOUSE
-L
AUTREC WAITED ACROSS THE SQUARE IN
M
ADAME
J
ACOB’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.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, AT WHAT HE CONSIDERED A SAVAGE HOUR
, H
ENRI
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.