The Devil in Montmartre (5 page)

The merry crowd would pelt the poor performer with sarcastic invective the way their forbears showered a pilloried criminal with rotten vegetables, dung, piss, and offal. This was jolly good fun, especially when the scorned and rejected artist fled the premises and wandered off into the darkness crying tears of despair and harboring suicidal thoughts. This theater of the cruel and absurd appealed to Toulouse-Lautrec.

Salis guarded the entrance, where he greeted his customers sarcastically, saving his most singular insults for celebrities and regulars. “Hey Lautrec, what have you done with our sweet, little Virginie? I hear the cops are dragging the Seine for her body.”

Lautrec laughed while noting, with some concern, that this was the second time someone had alluded to Virginie Ménard’s disappearance. Inured to the impresario’s caustic wit, Lautrec hobbled over to his favorite spot at the foot of a table, where he ordered absinthe and began recording the scene in pastels on brown paper. He was soon joined by Émile Bernard. The young man seemed agitated.

“Where have you been hiding, Émile? I haven’t seen you,” Lautrec checked his watch, “for at least
six whole hours
. Pull up a chair, old man, and have a drink.”

Bernard sat and stared wildly at Lautrec. “I’ve been running round looking for Mademoiselle Ménard. I talked to her concierge, to Cormon, to Zidler, and to her best friend, Delphine; nobody’s seen her for days.”

Lautrec took a deep breath and smiled. “You worry too much. They all turn up, sooner or later.”

“This isn’t funny, Henri. People are worried, and you’re taking it awfully cool. After all, she was your model and your—”

Lautrec put up his hand and shook his head. “If you were about to say ‘lover’ that was true once, but no longer. Mademoiselle has since moved on to greener pastures. That is to say, she has abandoned me for those who can better afford her charms and talents. But if you and others are concerned as to her whereabouts, why not go to the police?”

“If she doesn’t turn up soon, I believe that’s what I’ll do.”

Lautrec shrugged. “Do as you please,” he muttered, and then returned to his sketch.

Shortly thereafter, they were interrupted: “Hello Lautrec, Bernard. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Not at all, Sir Henry,” Lautrec replied. Lautrec and Bernard had become acquainted with Sir Henry Collingwood at Cormon’s
Atelier
. Lautrec and Sir Henry had formed a special bond, a consequence of the doctor’s interest in art and the artist’s interest in surgery.

Sir Henry settled in and ordered a drink. He glanced round the room to see if he could recognize anyone, and then lit a cigar. Relaxed, he leaned back, tucked a thumb in his waistcoat pocket and blew a few smoke rings. After a moment he remarked, “I say, Lautrec, I saw you at Péan’s clinic today. A neat little hysterectomy, eh what?”

Lautrec raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t recall seeing you there?”

Sir Henry smiled. “Oh, I can be a furtive fellow, at times. Besides, you were concentrating on the operation and your sketch. I doubt you would have noticed if Gabriel had blown the last trumpet.” Sir Henry and Lautrec laughed. Then the doctor turned his attention to Émile, who seemed pensive and detached. “Why so gloomy, Bernard?”

Émile remained silent. Lautrec answered for him. “He’s worried about a girl gone missing.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Sir Henry said. He placed a hand on Bernard’s shoulder sympathetically and asked, “Do I know her, Émile?”

Bernard turned his sad eyes toward the doctor. “I believe you do, Sir Henry. She’s the pretty little blonde we sketched at the
Atelier
.”

The doctor stared blankly for a moment and then his eyes brightened. “Yes, of course, that was Mademoiselle uh—Mademoiselle Ménard. I saw Lautrec’s portrait of her at Joyant’s gallery. Well, let’s hope she turns up soon. By the way, here’s an odd coincidence. I’m treating another admirer of Mademoiselle Ménard and the portrait, an American artist, Marcia Brownlow. Do either of you know her?”

“I do,” said Lautrec. “She and her rich companion were at the Moulin Rouge a few evenings ago. I thought they were going to make an offer for my painting, but I’ve heard nothing since.”

“Oh, I see. I’m afraid Miss Brownlow is quite ill. Her friend, Miss Endicott, is making arrangements to return to America as soon as Miss Brownlow can travel, and I will accompany them to a sanatorium.”

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, I don’t see what this has to do with Virginie. If you’ll excuse me.” With that curt declaration, Bernard got up and left the cabaret.

Sir Henry watched Émile go out the door, then turned to Lautrec. “Poor fellow. I diagnose a case of Virginie on the brain. I suppose he’s sweet on her.”

Lautrec muttered, “Perhaps.” He turned his attention to a slender man walking toward the piano. “You see the man who’s about to play?”

Sir Henry screwed a monocle into his eye and gazed across the smoke-filled hall. “Yes; who is he?”

“His name’s Satie; not bad, really. The crowd listens when he plays.”

Lautrec abandoned Le Chat Noir in the early morning hours. He ventured into the rabbit’s warren of dark, narrow streets snaking up the hill. His button-hook tapping the cobblestones, the artist limped painfully up a murky, echoing brick cavern roofed over by a cloudy, moonless sky. Cats crouching in cubbyholes hissed and yowled as he passed. Gaslamps glowed, their feeble yellow flames lighting his way toward his favorite whorehouse. There the artist would drink, sketch, and joke with the girls, afterward engaging in a game of rumpy-pumpy until the sun rose, shining its light on the alabaster dome of Sacré-Cœur.

Puffing with fatigue from the steep walk, Lautrec rested under a lamp and reached into his coat pocket for his cigarette case. Unable to locate the case, he muttered, “Damn,” then patted and rummaged round in his other pockets until he found a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.

Continuing up a flight of steps, the always perceptive artist failed to notice someone tailing him, a silent observer lurking in the shadows. As Lautrec approached the brothel, a powerful stench assaulted his nostrils. Staring ahead he noticed a familiar form, the oval iron tank of a sewage wagon parked beside a cesspit. The night soil collectors were pumping human waste, some of which had slopped over onto the pavement where it commingled with piles of horse dung and unswept rubbish. Lautrec cautiously skirted the work area and proceeded to the
maison
, where he rang for the madam.

The proprietress, a feather-bedecked trull with flaming red hair, recognized the little gentleman and greeted him with a grin. But her smile soon turned to a comical grimace as she got a whiff of the street. Lifting a perfumed handkerchief to her nose, she urged, “Quickly, Monsieur, come in before my house fills with miasma.” Lautrec crossed the threshold, chuckling at the madam’s unscientific objection to the stench.

The stalker watched from an unlit passageway between two houses across the street. As Lautrec entered the brothel, the stealthy observer made a mental note of the time and address.

Nine years earlier, during the hot months of August and September, Paris experienced the Great Stink, a foul, putrid odor that pervaded the entire city. Many Parisians feared the “miasma,” which they believed was the source of typhoid and cholera. The bacteriologists, led by Pasteur, pointed to the microscopic source of the stench as the cause of epidemic diseases. There was a fuss in the press and the harried government formed a commission to study the matter, raising a debate about the sewer system and the methods of waste disposal. In the end, with cooler weather the stink disappeared, the feared epidemic never materialized, and the city’s methods of dealing with human excreta remained, for the most part, unchanged. In the early morning hours, hundreds of foul-smelling sewer wagons rumbled through the streets of Paris, cleaning out cesspools and cesspits and emptying waste receptacles in thousands of cellars.

This night, the two night soil collectors finished pumping, closed the pipe, mounted their wagon and moved on. Dressed in their typical workers’ blouse and cap, incessantly puffing on clay pipes to mask the stench of their trade, the collectors bantered and cracked jokes to break the monotony. The older man managed the reins and the brake; their powerful gray horse strained against its leather traces, pulling the heavy load uphill. The young man connected the hose and worked the pneumatic pump at each stop.

They were nearing the end of their run on the Rue Tourlaque. Soon, they would journey through the city to a central collection point on the Seine embankment, where the waste would be emptied into tanker barges for transport to a suburban sewage farm. The senior man, Papa Lebæuf, a burly fellow of fifty with a grizzled beard flowing halfway down his chest, halted the wagon. “All right Jacques, last call for this morning.”

“Thank God,” the younger man said as he sprang from his perch onto the pavement. A wiry fellow with thick, brawny arms and powerful hands, Jacques un-reeled the rubber hose, connected the nozzle to a pipe, and returned to the wagon to work the pump. After a moment he growled, “Damn! It’s stuck; something must be clogging the pipe.”

“Bloody hell!” cried Lebæuf. “That’s just our luck; trouble on the last damned job on our route. Well, I guess you better pull up the manhole cover and we’ll take a look.” He grabbed a long pole with a hook and held a lantern while Jacques tied a handkerchief over his face and opened the cesspool.

As Lebæuf approached the open hole with his lantern, Jacques warned:

“Hey, Papa, stand back with that lantern. There might be a gas leak.”

“I know, dammit. I’ve been cleaning out shit-holes since before you were born.” He handed the pole to Jacques and stood back, shining the light into the cesspool.

Jacques grabbed the implement and poked round the masonry-lined receptacle. “God, what a stink,” he muttered. Then: “Hey, Papa, I’ve got something. It looks like some bastard dumped a hunk of meat wrapped in a cloth.”

Lebæuf snorted in disgust. “I’d like to make the damned fool clean out every shit-hole on this hill. Well, no use bitching about it. Go ahead and fish it out.”

Jacques hauled up the smelly object and flung it onto the pavement where it landed with a thud. Papa turned the light on it. When they saw what it was their eyes widened. The younger man looked away, gagged, and retched.

Papa Lebæuf was proud of his strong stomach, but the bloody thing they fished out of a Montmartre cesspool that morning would haunt his dreams for the remainder of his life.

5

OCTOBER 15

THE INVESTIGATION

D
awn crept over Paris. The Île de la Cité emerged from the shadows; the sun, an orange disc in a slate sky, shone its pale rays through a cloud bar onto the grimy gothic towers of Notre Dame. Nearby, on the south bank of the Seine, in an office building on the Quai des Orfèvres, Paul Féraud, Chief Inspector of the Sûreté, began his day with coffee, bread, and a mysterious police report.

Mote-sprinkled light streamed through half-opened blinds; an oil lamp burned feebly on Féraud’s cluttered mahogany desk. The streets below were quiet; a good time for the chief to work and to think through a problem. He took advantage of this early hour to review new reports of unusual suspected homicides, his specialty. A thirty-year veteran, Féraud had risen through the ranks, learning his profession in the hard school of experience.