Sacré Bleu

“South? South? South is not an answer after two and a half years without a word.”

“And west,” she said. “It makes the cathedrals and palaces look like dollhouses.”

“Two and a half years! Nothing but a note saying ‘I’ll return.’”

“And I have,” she said. “I wonder why they didn’t paint it blue. It would be lovely in blue.”

“I looked everywhere for you. No one knew where you had gone. They kept your job open at the hat shop for months, waiting for you.” She had worked as a milliner, sewing women’s fine hats, before she had gone away.

She turned to him now, leaned in close and hid them both behind the parasol, then kissed him, and just when he felt his head start to spin, she broke off the kiss and grinned. He smiled back at her, forgetting for a moment how angry he was. Then it came back to him and his smile waned. She licked his upper lip with the tip of her tongue, then pushed him away and giggled.

“Don’t be angry, my sweet. I had things to do. Family things. Private things. I’m back now, and you are my only and my ever.”

“You said that you were an orphan, that you had no family.”

“That was a lie, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?”

“Perhaps. Lucien, let’s go to your studio. I want you to paint me.”

“You hurt me,” Lucien said. “You broke my heart. The pain was such that I thought I would die. I didn’t paint for months, I didn’t bathe, I burned the bread.”

“Really?” Her eyes lit up the way the children’s did when Régine set out the fresh pastries in the bakery.

“Yes, really. Don’t sound so gleeful about it.”

“Lucien, I want you to paint me.”

“No, I can’t, a friend has just died. I should look after Henri and talk to Pissarro and Seurat. And I have a cartoon I must do for Willette’s La Vache Enragée journal.” The truth was, he had more pain to vent on her, and he didn’t want to leave her side for a moment, but he needed her to suffer. “You can’t just pop back into my life from a street corner and expect—and what were you doing on avenue de Clichy in the middle of the day, anyway? Your job—”

“I want you to paint me nude,” she said.

“Oh,” he said.

“I mean, you can leave your socks on, if you’d like.” She grinned. “But other than that, nude.”

“Oh,” he said. His brain had seized when she’d mentioned painting her nude.

He really wanted to remain angry, but somehow he had come to believe that women were wondrous, mysterious, and magical creatures who should be treated not only with respect but with reverence and even awe. Perhaps it was something that his mother used to say to him. She would say, “Lucien, women are wondrous, mysterious, and magical creatures, who should be treated not only with respect but with reverence, perhaps even awe. Now go sweep the steps.”

“Mysterious and magical,” his sisters would repeat in chorus, nodding, Marie, usually, holding the broom out to him.

Magical and mysterious. Well, that described Juliette.

But his father had told him that women were also cruel and selfish harpies who would as soon tear out a man’s heart and laugh while he suffered as file their nails. “Cruel and selfish,” said his sisters, nodding. Régine would snatch the last piece of pie from his plate.

This was also Juliette.

And his teacher Renoir had indeed told him, “All women are the same; a man needs to simply find his ideal and marry her to have all the women in the world.”

She was that, Juliette, she was all women to him. He had been with girls before, had even been in love, but she had enveloped him, overwhelmed him like a storm wave.

“But even if you have found the one,” Renoir continued, “it doesn’t mean you won’t want to see them all naked. It is a sick man who is unmoved by the sight of a pretty breast.”

“I don’t have colors, I don’t have canvas for a picture that size,” Lucien said.

“What size, cher?” She smiled coyly.