Lucien nodded, trying to find some sort of value to the emptiness, to the sheer cold vacuum he felt inside since Juliette had left. His “nothing” didn’t feel as painless as Henri’s and his harlot friends’. He said, “And Carmen?”
“… and snore like puppies.” In the Bed—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893
Henri took off his pince-nez and seemed distracted by cleaning the lenses on his undershirt. “Carmen? No, she was something. We were something. When I remember those times, when we would go off into the country together, we ran through fields, we climbed hills, we made love standing up—me with my back against a tree, holding her up. I can remember the bark digging into my back, and I only cared for her comfort, that I could hold her legs away from the tree, letting the backs of my hands be scraped to blood while she kissed me. She and I, together.”
“I didn’t know,” said Lucien.
“In those times, I was strong. In those times, Lucien, I was tall. Now she doesn’t remember who I am.”
“Your paintings of her are exquisite,” Lucien said. “Your best, I think.”
Henri smiled. “I am the painter Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“Better than nothing,” said Lucien.
Henri slid off the vanity stool and offered his hand to Lucien to help him up. “Let’s get some breakfast and go see Theo van Gogh. He always knows what is going on in the art market and will know if the Blue Nude is being offered somewhere. We’ll find the bitch who took your painting, then we’ll find your Juliette. I promise.”
“I am the painter, Toulouse-Lautrec.” Self-Portrait—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1883
WHEN HE HAD BEEN A SAILOR, PAUL GAUGUIN HAD DREAMED OF FIELDS of yellow corn, red cows grazing in meadows, and rusty peasants sleeping on haystacks. When he was a stockbroker he dreamed of ships becalmed in flat, aquamarine seas, their sails as flaccid and pale as shrouds. Now a painter, he slept alone in his tiny Paris apartment and dreamed of tropical islands where buttery brown girls moved in cool shadows like spirits, and despite the chill autumn night, his sheets were soaked with sweat and entangled him like kelp round the drowned.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and wiped his face with his hands, as if he might be able to rub away the vision. The nightmare wasn’t the girl. He’d dreamed of island girls since he’d returned from Martinique three years ago, but this one was different, a Polynesian, in a crisp white and blue mission dress, white flowers in her long hair. The girl didn’t frighten him at all. She was young and pretty and innocent in the wild unspoiled way of the Pacific, but there was a shadow there, behind her, something small and dark and menacing.
He had dreamed of this particular girl before. She wasn’t some general spectre of lust, although she did come naked into his dreams at times and he would wake with an ache in his loins as well as the trembling of the night terror—the dark figure always lurked there; she was a specific personage, with features that he was sure had been conjured out of his imagination as a symbol. He was sure he had never actually seen the girl, but her face was as distinct and real in his mind as that of his wife, Mette, whom he’d abandoned in her native Copenhagen along with their four children, years ago. He could have drawn her from memory.
He stood and crossed the room by the moonlight through the window. It was late, he could tell. The gaslights out on the street had been extinguished and he couldn’t hear the orchestra or revelers at the Folies Bergère a block away. A drink of water, and perhaps he’d be granted a few hours of dreamless sleep before he made his way up Montmartre to see if Theo van Gogh had sold any of his paintings—if there would be money for tobacco and oil color this week.
He poured himself a glass of water from a porcelain pitcher in the little kitchenette, just a burner and a sink, really, drank it off, then noticed as he set the glass down that he’d left the door into the hallway ajar. He’d grown careless, either because the building’s concierge was a vigilant busybody or because he had nothing left to steal, it didn’t matter. He pulled the door closed and headed back to bed with a bit of a shudder—sweat drying in the autumn air.
One step to the bed and he saw her, at first just her dark face and arms against the white sheet—only the pinpoint sparkles in her eyes in the dark, like distant stars. She threw back the sheet, opened it to him, and her dark body was spread across the bed like a shadow in the moonlight—a familiar shadow that evoked a yearning in his loins and an electric-blue bolt of fear up his spine.
“Monsieur Paul,” said Bleu. “Come to bed.”
“—the dark figure always lurked there—” Nevermore—Paul Gauguin, 1897
THEY ATE CROISSANTS AND SAUSAGES AT THE DEAD RAT AS THE WORLD whirled back into focus for Henri with a vivid, vicious sharpness. He wore a pince-nez with dark lenses that he’d had made for just such hangover mornings and made him look like a small and miserable undertaker.
“Lucien, as much as I enjoy the convenience and company at Le Rat Mort, I believe our favorite restaurant has begun to provoke nausea in me.”
“Perhaps it has less to do with the restaurant and more to do with circumstance. The last few times we’ve been here, you’ve just spent the night in drunken depravity at a brothel.”
Lucien held his demitasse of espresso aloft and toasted his friend, who cringed at the sound of the cups clicking.
“But I like brothels. My friends are there.”
“They aren’t your friends.”
“Yes they are, they like me just as I am.”
“Because you pay them.”
“No, because I’m charming. Besides, I pay all of my friends.”
“No you don’t. You don’t pay me.”
“I’m going to buy breakfast. On my account. Besides, I only pay them for the sex, the friendship is free.”
“Don’t you worry about syphilis?”
“Syphilis is a wives’ tale.”
“It is not. You get a chancre on your manhood, then later you go mad, your limbs drop off, and you die. Manet died of syphilis.”
“Nonsense. Syphilis is a myth. It’s Greek, I think—everyone has heard of the myth of syphilis.”
“That’s the myth of Sisyphus. He spends his whole life pushing a large stone up a hill.”
“With his penis? No wonder he has a chancre on it!”
“No, that’s not the story.”
“So you say. Shall I order more coffee?”
They had taken a booth at the back of the restaurant, away from the windows, due to Henri’s self-inflicted sensitivity to light, but now there was a commotion near the front. A large, ruddy-skinned man with a long hooked nose and a black mustache, wearing a long embroidered Breton jacket, had entered the restaurant and was going from table to table, imparting some news that was distressing the patrons; a few of the ladies held handkerchiefs to their mouths to cover their dismay.
“Gauguin,” said Henri. “Don’t let him see us. He’ll try to get us to join one of his movements.”
“But this would be a perfect time to ask him if Vincent was in contact with a woman in Arles.”
As if he’d heard them, Gauguin looked up, spotted them, and slalomed between the tables toward them.
“Here he comes,” said Henri. “Tell him we’ve decided that we are staunch adherents to the Incohérents movement. We will not be persuaded.”
“You and Willette just made that movement up to annoy him.” Henri and other artists who inhabited Le Chat Noir had formed the Incohérents as a response to the Salon des Artistes Français and all the overly earnest, humorless art movements that had risen since the Impressionists.
“That’s not true,” said Henri. “We made it up to annoy everyone, but yes, Gauguin in particular.”
Gauguin arrived at their booth and slid into the seat next to Lucien without being asked.
“Lautrec, Lessard, did you two hear? Theo van Gogh is dead.”
“Murdered?” asked Lucien.
“A sudden illness,” said Gauguin.
“Now the painter, he s
lept alone in his tiny Paris apartment and dreamed of tropical islands where buttery brown girls moved in cool shadows like spirits.” Self-Portrait—Paul Gauguin, 1888
Twenty-two
THE END OF THE MASTER
IDIDN’T BONK THE JULIETTE,” SAID THE COLORMAN. “I DIDN’T.”
“What’s she doing bent over the back of the couch naked?”
“Dusting?” He shrugged.
“She doesn’t need to be naked to dust.”
The island girl, Bleu, began to gather Juliette’s clothes from the floor and throw them at the Colorman. “Help me get her dressed.” To Juliette she said, “Get dressed.” The living doll straightened up and moved with clockwork awkwardness to retrieve her clothes as well.
“But I was going to make the color.”
“You can make the color with this body,” said Bleu. She didn’t care which body he used to make the color. She would be entranced during the process either way, not completely oblivious, but not completely present, either. There was a dreamlike separateness in it, ecstatic, blissful, removed, and essentially helpless. But unlike the Juliette body, who was just sort of a stringless puppet, if Bleu vacated the island girl’s body now, the girl would find herself in the midst of this strange scene with no memory whatsoever of how she’d gotten there. At best she would be reduced to a drooling lunatic, at worst she might dive through a window in terror. Sacré Bleu might be the essence of beauty, but making it was not a beautiful process.
“Wait,” Bleu said. Juliette paused, stood, and held her silk chemise between her breasts, posed like the statue of a shy Venus, as if she would happily wait a thousand years for the next command.
To the Colorman, Bleu said, “How are you going to make the color? We don’t have a painting.”
Bleu wasn’t about to tell the Colorman about the current state of Lucien’s Blue Nude.
“Remember this?” The Colorman dragged a large canvas from behind the divan where Juliette had been bent over. She really had been dusting, dusting the surface of an oil painting with her chemise.
“Berthe?” said Bleu, a little stunned. She stepped away from the painting and sat down gently on one of the Louis XVI chairs. “I thought you used this painting twenty-five years ago. Where…?”
Making Sacré Bleu required a painting, a stained glass window, an icon, a fresco—some work of art that had been made with the color, but when she was entranced, she didn’t always know which work of art the Colorman had used. But the color had to be made. Without it neither she nor the Colorman could go on. There was always a price, and the paintings were part of it. She had never expected to see this painting again.
“I had it lying around,” said the Colorman. “She is lovely, no?”
“Don’t try to distract me, Poopstick. If you had this lying around, why did you have to shoot Vincent? Why the panic about Lucien’s painting? Why all this drama and desperation?”
“I think maybe she is finer even than your Juliette,” said the Colorman. “The dark eyes—the fair skin—beautiful and clever.”
Berthe Morisot had, perhaps, next to Juliette, been the most beautiful woman Bleu had inhabited, certainly in the modern era, but Manet had painted this so long ago—how and why was it here now? She tried to calm herself, her anger at the Colorman.
“He really did adore her,” she said after a moment.
“It looks like he wanted to walk into the painting and die with her.”
“He did,” said Bleu.
“You were the best of them, Berthe,” he said. Berthe Morisot—Édouard Manet, 1872
Paris, April 1883
MANET WAS DYING. HE WAS SWEATING, SHIVERING WITH FEVER, AND THE stump, where they had severed his left foot a week ago, felt as if it was on fire. His wife, Suzanne, begged him to take the morphine for the pain, but he would not have it. He would not give up the clarity of his last hours on earth, even if the only vivid element left was pain.
The doctor called it locomotor ataxia because a gentleman’s physician does not tell a grieving wife that her husband is dying of late-stage syphilis.
Until the disease descended, he’d been at the height of his abilities. Only two years ago the state had made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, fulfilling a lifelong aspiration, but even now, those paintings that had earned him the honor, Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, attracted scandal whenever they were exhibited. The revolution he had started but had never joined, Impressionism, was coming into its own, with those students who had gathered around him like puppies at the 1863 Salon des Refusés—Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Degas—all becoming lions in their own right, as painters, anyway, if not yet financial successes. They all had come and gone from this room, paid tribute and said their good-byes, although none would admit that was what he was doing. But no more. No one should see the painter Manet like this.
“Suzanne, chérie, no more visitors. Please, give them my regrets and my thanks, but send them away.”
Suzanne sent them away, and amid the tears she cried every day, between the breathless moments of loss that she was already feeling, a few were tears of relief, of triumph, of joy—and immediately she felt ashamed. She had not come, would not come. Victorine, who had posed for those paintings so long ago, the haughty whore-model from the demimonde, had not come. Victorine, whose gaze Suzanne had borne over a thousand evenings as the nude stared down from the canvas, judging. Olympia, hung in the parlor, with the tiny, taut Victorine always watching the stout Suzanne lumber around her own house like an ox, going about the mundane business of caring for her home and her husband. Édouard’s greatest work. Victorine would be immortal, and ever thin, and poor Suzanne a lonely, fat, grieving footnote: the Dutch piano teacher who married her student. Édouard loved her, she knew that, she felt that, but there had been something else, a part of him she had never known, and she could see, every day, when she looked into the eyes of the woman in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, that Victorine had.
The bell rang and Suzanne heard the maid let someone in.
“Madame Morisot Manet,” the maid announced, leading Berthe in from the foyer. Berthe wore a dress of lavender silk, trimmed in white lace, and a hat with a diaphanous white chiffon veil. Berthe, so often dark of demeanor and aspect that Suzanne could not think of her except in black Spanish lace, as if eternally grieving, but today, bless her, she had come calling dressed like a bright spring flower.
“Suzanne,” said Berthe, rolling back her veil and embracing Édouard’s wife, kissing her cheeks. She stepped away but held on to Suzanne’s hands, squeezed them as she said, “How can I help?”
“He’s in so much pain,” said Suzanne. “If I could just get him to take the morphine.”
“I heard that he wasn’t seeing visitors.”
Suzanne smiled. “No, but he will see you. Come.”
Before they entered the bedroom, Suzanne turned to Berthe and whispered, “His color is bad, don’t let him see that you’re distressed.”
Berthe dismissed the thought with a nod. Suzanne opened the door.
“Édouard, look who has come to call. It’s Berthe.”
Manet fought to push himself up in the bed and despite the painful effort, he smiled.
“Berthe!” He said nothing else.
There was a sparkle of joy in his eyes and seeing it brought tears to Suzanne’s. She squeezed his hand and turned away. “Let me fetch us all some tea,” she said, and she hurried out of the room, closed the door, and once in the hall was wracked by a great, heaving, silent sob.
“How are you, Édouard?” asked Berthe, a sweet smile there, just barely. “I mean, beyond the obvious.”
Manet laughed until he coughed. “Well, beyond that, I couldn’t be better.”
“I’ve brought you something.” She reached into her bag, a drawstring affair fashioned of black satin covered in Spanish lace, and retrieved a small canvas; a short-handled, fine sable brush; and a tube of paint. She laid them on his chest, and he swip
ed at them feebly, as if he didn’t have the strength to even lift the tiny brush. Instead he caught her hand.
“You were the best of them, Berthe,” he said. “You are still the best of them. If you were a man, your paintings would already be in the Louvre. You know that?”
She patted his hand, then placed the brush in his fingers. She propped up the little canvas on his chest and squeezed some of the blue color out onto it. “So you’ve told me. You don’t remember painting the nude, do you?”
He looked at her, distressed, as if his mind was already slipping away. He held the brush like it was a foul, foreign thing.
“Sketch me, Édouard,” she said. “You are the painter Manet. Now paint.”
And even as he protested, his hand began to move, the brush traced lines over the canvas. “But I’m dying.”
“That’s no excuse, love, you’re still and shall ever be the painter Manet. Now paint.”
He fell to sketching her, from the jawline up, the soft brush and creamy blue barely making a noise in the room as her face appeared on the canvas. She made it no easier on him, her smile broadening as he worked so he had to revise the sketch.