Sacre Bleu (59 page)

While Berthe Morisot was an accomplished painter, one of the original group of the Impressionists, and she did marry Manet’s brother Eugène, there is no evidence that Manet had anything but the most proper relationship with her, and that affair is entirely of my invention. Neither is there any evidence that Manet had an affair with the model Victorine Meurent, who posed for his most famous paintings. There is a terrific confrontation scene between Madame Manet and Victorine in the short story “Olympia’s Look” from Susan Vreeland’s collection
Life Studies,
which I would recommend, as I would her excellent novels portraying the lives of artists, if you’re interested in more accurate biographical fiction.

Whistler and Manet did know each other, were friends in fact, and while both showed at the famous
Salon des Refusés,
described in chapter 5, Whistler didn’t attend the Salon in person; he sent his painting,
The White Girl,
later retitled
Symphony in White Number 1.
Whistler was in Biarritz at the time, recovering from lead poisoning from painting
The White Girl,
and really was nearly drowned while making a painting called
The Blue Wave,
when he was swept out to sea by a rogue wave and was saved by fishermen.

Whistler did have a redheaded Irish mistress named Joanna Hiffernan, whom he hid from his stern mother when she visited London. He really did throw his brother-in-law through a restaurant window when he criticized Jo, and Whistler was said to have gone quite mad for a time when he was with Jo. Joanna really did run off with Whistler’s friend Courbet and posed for some of the most notorious and lewd pictures that anyone had ever painted at the time. Courbet would, indeed, die in exile and poverty in Switzerland, of alcoholism. Whistler did, for a time, only paint at night, and it was his libel lawsuit against the critic John Ruskin, who equated one of the nocturnes with “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,” that eventually destroyed the famous critic. It was not the damages, which were only a farthing (one quarter penny), but the expense and effort of defending the suit that put him over the edge. Ruskin died a few weeks after the trial was completed.

There was no Boulangerie Lessard on Montmartre, nor a Père Lessard, baker, but there was a real baker, named Muyen, who had a shop on rue Voltaire near the École des Beaux-Arts, who did, indeed, hang the work of the Impressionists and bought their paintings to keep them alive. When Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War, Muyen made country
pâtés
from rat meat to feed his customers. He even raffled off one of Pissarro’s paintings as I wrote in chapter 3, and the girl who won the painting was supposed to have actually asked if she could have a sticky bun instead.

Speaking of Pissarro, when one reads any accounts of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist periods in art, he will find no more glowing reviews than those for Pissarro. Less well-known, even today, than the other Impressionists, and less successful in his time, he was teacher, friend, and mentor to nearly every one. He painted alongside Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and probably a dozen others. The oldest of the group, he remained open always to learning new techniques and was the only one of the original Impressionists who would follow Seurat into pointillism and the techniques of optical painting, even though Seurat was young enough to be his son.

T
HE ENTIRE TIME FRAME OF
S
ACRÉ BLEU
WAS CONSTRUCTED AROUND THAT
July afternoon in 1890 when Vincent shot himself because of a fact I stumbled across very early in my research. Vincent van Gogh
did
shoot himself in that field in Auvers where three roads converge—shot himself in the chest—then walked a mile cross-country to Dr. Gachet’s house seeking treatment. Vincent and Theo are buried beside each other within sight of that field in Auvers. I have stood in that spot, and walked from there to the doctor’s house, which is a museum now, and I thought,
What kind of painter does that? Who tries to kill himself by shooting himself in the chest, then walks a mile to seek medical attention?
It made no sense at all. Even when you read Vincent’s letters, look at his last paintings—
The Church at Auvers, Wheat Field with Crows, Portrait of Adeline Ravoux
(the innkeeper’s daughter from chapter 1),
Portrait of Doctor Gachet
—you realize that this is a fellow at the height of his powers, and apparently getting better. His death was both a mystery and a tragedy, a resignation, and yet, there’s the evidence of a great passion for excellence that only the artist himself could define, and pursuing that passion seems to have been the basis of much of his self-torment. What is the standard when you are doing something that’s never been done? What kind of muse inspires that? Exactly.

W
HEN YOU START TO WRITE ABOUT ART AND
P
ARIS IN THE 1890S, THE POSSIBILITIES
absolutely explode. During the time frame of Lucien’s story, between 1863 and 1891, nearly everyone who was anyone was in Paris, and not just Paris, but on Montmartre. Mark Twain, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Jules Verne, Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, John Singer Sargent, and on, and on, and on. It would take a hundred books to tell the stories of the painters alone, so deciding what and whom to leave out became a bigger challenge than writing a novel about the color blue.

Where, you ask, is Degas? Gustave Caillebotte? Mary Cassatt? Alfred Sisley? Why so little on Cézanne? Truth be told, in the case of Cézanne, it was geography—he didn’t like Paris, and for most of the time frame of the story, he was in Aix, in Provence, or in one of the villages outside Paris, painting with Pissarro. Cassatt was a passionate collector and an accomplished painter, but like Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès, and the other women Impressionists, she was confined to the world allowed to a woman at the time, which is reflected in her paintings of children and home life; convention did not allow her to travel in the
demimonde
in which
Sacré Bleu
takes place. Caillebotte was also an accomplished painter, but as a member of a banking family, it was his collecting and patronage, which kept Renoir, Monet, and Cézanne alive to paint on, that became his greatest contribution to the group. He also (like Frédéric Bazille) died young, and I sensed he was never really part of the Montmartre community. As for Degas, well, Degas was unpleasant. I started my engagement with art knowing absolutely nothing about the artists, just looking at the pictures in museums—the biographies of the artists didn’t much matter to me. I like Degas’ paintings and sculptures, I have since I studied photography in college, but now, as a storyteller, considering him as a potential character, it seemed as if he was a miserable, unlikable guy, and I didn’t want to have to portray that. So he doesn’t get a part in my book. See, if you hadn’t been a jerk, you’d have had a speaking part, Degas, but no. And as much as I’d have liked to explore the whole Art Nouveau movement that started in Paris in the 1890s, and with which Toulouse-Lautrec was involved, well, that’s another story.

As far as the history and mystical properties of ultramarine pigment, some details are based in truth, most are just constructed for the story. The pigment
was,
for a long time, more valuable than gold, and during that time, to commission a painting that used it was a sign of status for the patron and his family. The two Michelangelo paintings Lucien and Juliette see in London,
The Entombment
and what is called
The Manchester Madonna,
are unfinished, the blue parts remain unpainted, and both hang in the National Gallery in London to this day, but it’s likely that they remain unfinished because the painter was unable to obtain the ultramarine he needed and moved on to other commissions, or the patron refused to pay the high price of the color. The physics of light and color were as close to factual as I could convey within my understanding, but to be honest, I’m still a bit fuzzy on the whole refraction, absorption, and scattering aspects of how color is produced and perceived, so it’s not your fault if you’re a bit confused as well.

Penultimately, a word on the Impressionists.

There is a tendency, I’ve found, among academics and art enthusiasts, to dismiss the Impressionists, with their fields of flowers and their pink-cheeked girls, as insignificant, pablum for the masses, and once you’ve seen your thousandth tote bag sporting Monet’s lilies, it’s understandable. Among museums, the Impressionists represent a cash cow, because any show that features them will pack the museum for weeks, even months, while it runs, and so they are often regarded with a restrained resentment, if not for the painters, for the masses who come to see their work. Out of the context of their own time, the Impressionists just seem to be producing “pretty pictures.” Yet, Impressionism represented a quantum leap in painting and ultimately art in general. They came from all walks of life, from all economic strata, and as above, had wildly different ideas about both society and art, but what they all had in common, the single element that united them beyond a rebellion against tradition, was their love of painting. Whether it was the invention of photography, the middle class that rose up because of the Industrial Revolution, or simply because paint became available in tin tubes, thus freeing the painter to leave the studio and paint the world, time and events conspired for the Impressionists—their technique as well as their philosophy of capturing the moment—to rise. The conditions, the context were there, but the engine of the revolution, I think, can be traced to a group of people who chose, over their own economic and social interests, to pursue an idea. There’s courage in those paintings of placid ponds and pink-faced little girls, a courage that went forth to inspire the next generation, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, Gauguin, and so on into Matisse and Picasso, and thus modern art through the twentieth century. Amid my dark little fairy tale of the color blue, I hope that came through.

Samuel Johnson said, “A man will turn over half a library to make a book,” but there are damn few books an author will uncover during research that actually make for decent further reading. Here are a few:

If you’re interested in the rise of Impressionism, try
The Private Lives of the Impressionists
by Sue Roe, HarperCollins, 2006. For more on Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, the Taschen biography
Toulouse-Lautrec
by Gilles Néret, edited by Ingo F. Walther, is a terrific collection of paintings and photographs in the context of a very readable biography. For further reading on colors and their source,
Color
by Victoria Finlay, Random House, 2002, is the story of one woman’s adventure in traveling the world to the sources of the great natural pigments, in the process imparting interesting history and anecdote to bring the science and geography of color to life. Likewise, Philip Ball’s
Bright Earth,
University of Chicago Press, 2001, is also an exploration of the history and science of color, written in lyrical prose that explores the role of color as it applies to art history as well.

M
Y THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE WHO HELPED IN THE RESEARCH
and production of
Sacré Bleu:
Charlee Rodgers for arranging travel and logistics in Paris, London, and Italy, where it turns out they keep a lot of the art discussed in this book. My friend and agent, Nicholas Ellison, for his advice on Paris and France in general, as well as handling the dirty business of the book business. Maxime Lachaud, for help with French idiom, and for calling the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum in Albi for me when I needed to know what to call stuff. My editor, Jennifer Brehl, for, as usual, her clean hands and patience in putting this blue beast together. Also, my thanks to Chelsea Lindman, Sarah Dickman, Lynn Grady, Ben Bruton, Liate Stehlik, Emily Krump, and Michael Morrison. I have no idea what any of them do, but I’m pretty sure it has a lot to do with my books.

S
AN
F
RANCISCO,
A
PRIL
2011

C
HRISTOPHER
M
OORE
is the author of twelve previous novels, including
Lamb
,
A Dirty Job
, and
Fool
. He invites readers to e-mail him at [email protected]. You can follow him on Twitter @theauthorguy or on Facebook at facebook.com/theauthorguy. Hey, there’s even a dedicated comedy/art blog and chapter guide at SacreBleu.me; check it out.