Sacré Bleu

“To pose,” she said.

“I’m thinking,” he said.

Form. Line. Light. Shadow. He worked the words in his mind like clay. Form. Line. Light. Shadow.

When he first walked into Cormon’s studio at age nineteen and took his seat at an easel among the other young men, the master had told them, “See form, see line, see light, see shadow. See relationships of lines. The model is a collection of these elements, not a body.”

At the master’s signal, a young woman in a robe who had been sitting quietly next to the stove in the back of the room climbed up on the platform and dropped her robe. There was collective intake of breath; the newcomers, like Lucien, stopped breathing altogether for a second. She wasn’t a beauty. In fact, in her shopgirl clothes, he might not have given her a second look, but she was there, nude, in a fully lit room, and he was nineteen and lived in a city where a woman was not allowed to ride on the top level of the omnibus streetcars lest someone catch a glimpse of her ankle as she climbed the steps and thus compromise her modesty. True, he had taken an apartment only a block away from a licensed brothel, and the girls danced bare breasted in the back rooms of the cabarets, and every gentleman had a mistress from the demimonde, who was kept in some apartment across the city, hidden behind a wink and the selective vision of his wife. But hidden.

That first class he saw form, line, light, and shadow, just long enough to get a bit of the drawing down, but then he’d be yanked out of his work by nipples! No, not by the nipples, but by general nipples—of concept—the model’s nipples, and his concentration would collapse in a cascade of images and urges that had nothing whatever to do with art. For the first week, as the poor girl posed, Lucien battled the urge to stand up and yell, “For the love of God, she’s naked over there, aren’t any of you thinking about bonking her?” Of course they were, they were men, and except for the gay ones, they were only getting any art done at all if they managed to put that feeling to bed.

The second week, the model was an old man, who tottered up to the stage, sans robe, his sagging sack nearly dragging the ground, his withered haunches quivering under the weight of his years. Strangely enough, the figure was easily interpreted as form, line, light, and shadow from then on for Lucien. And when they were, once again, working with a female model, he only needed to conjure up the image of the old man to put him back on the straight and narrow path to form, line, light, and shadow.

Sure, you allowed yourself a brief moment when the model first disrobed—Oh, yes, she’d do. And it turned out that nearly every one of them would do, even if the imaginary circumstances in which she would do had to be constructed. Well, yes, desert island, drunk, one hour until you’re hanged, sure, she’d do. But he had never encountered anything like Juliette, not as a painter, anyway, because he had encountered her as a man, had had numerous tumbles with her, in fact, as new lovers they’d been ecstatic with discovery, in his little apartment, in the dark, not going out for days at a time in the weeks before she broke his heart.

This was different. She was standing there in a beam of sunlight from the skylight, veritably glowing, as perfect and feminine as any statue in the Louvre, as ideal as any beauty obtained, any goddess imagined, by man. Oh, she’d do. If I was being gnawed by wolves, before I’d bother to stop to shoo them off, she’d do.

“What are you doing, Lucien?” she said. “Open your eyes.”

“I’m trying to picture your desiccated scrotum,” said the painter.

“I don’t think anyone has ever said that to me before.”

“Dangling, dangling, almost there.”

“Where is your paint box? I don’t even see your paints.”

Lucien opened his eyes, and although he hadn’t gotten into a mindset of light and shadow quite yet, his erection had at least subsided. Perhaps he could work now. Better than those early days in Cormon’s when he was scolded. “Lessard, why have you drawn a nut sack on this model? You are drawing Venus, not a circus freak.”

“You said she was shape and line.”

“Are you serious? I am here only to teach serious painters.”

And then Toulouse-Lautrec would step up behind the master, adjust his pince-nez as if fine-tuning the focus, and say, “That is a serious nut sack on that Venus.”

“Indeed,” their friend Émile Bernard would say, stroking his mossy beard, “that is a nut sack of a most serious aspect.”

And around they’d pass the opinion, nodding and scrutinizing, until Cormon would either eject them all from class or storm out of the studio himself, leaving the poor model to break pose and inspect her nether parts, just in case.

Then Toulouse-Lautrec would say, “Monsieur Lessard, you are only to think about the scrotum to distract yourself, not actually draw it. I feel that the maestro will be even less open to discussing modern compositional theory now. To atone, you must now buy us all drinks.”

“I’m not going to be painting today,” Lucien said to Juliette. “It may take several days just to do the drawing.” He waved a sanguine crayon at the wide canvas he’d set up on two chairs from the bakery café, it being too large for any easel he owned.

“It is a very large canvas,” Juliette said. She lay down on the fainting lounge and propped herself up on her elbow. “I hope you are planning on taking a long time to paint this if you want me to grow into it. I’ll need pastries.”

Lucien glanced up at her, saw the mischievous smile. He liked that she was implying that she would stay around, that there was a future for them together, after she’d bolted before. He was tempted to make some ridiculous promise about taking care of her, knowing full well that the only way

he could honestly make that promise was to put down his paintbrush forever and bake bread.

“Monsieur Monet told me once that great paintings are only achieved when the painter has great ambition. That’s why, he said, Manet’s Luncheon in the Grass and Olympia were great paintings.”

“Great big paintings,” she giggled.

They were large canvases. And Monet had attempted his own luncheon on the grass, a great, twenty-foot-long canvas that he dragged, rolled up, all over France with a pretty model named Camille Doncieux whom he’d met in the Batignolles and his friend Frédéric Bazille to pose for all the male figures. “But don’t let your ambition become too large too early, Lucien,” Monet had told him. “In case you have to sneak out on your hotel bill in the middle of the night with the canvas. Camille nearly broke her neck helping me carry that canvas through the streets of Honfleur in the dark.”

“How about like this?” Juliette said. She leaned back into the cushions, her hands behind her head, a knowing smile. “You can use Goya’s Maja pose. That’s what Manet started with.”

“For the love of God, she’s naked over there, aren’t any of you thinking about bonking her?” The Nude Maja—Francisco Goya, 1797