Sacré Bleu

“It’s proper,” he said.

Actually, he had fetched the screen from Henri’s studio on rue Caulaincourt in the wee hours, while the bread was baking, so he wouldn’t be able to watch her dress or undress. He thought perhaps he would be able to keep his concentration on the painting that way.

She emerged from behind the screen wearing a white Japanese silk kimono that Henri kept around the studio for his models, or for himself, as on occasion he liked to dress like a geisha girl and have their friend Maurice Guibert take photos of him. But as far as making Juliette look like the diminutive aristocratic painter, the robe failed miserably.

“How do you want me?” Juliette asked, letting the kimono fall open.

Well now she was just trying to be annoying.

Lucien looked only at the canvas, made a point, in fact, of looking only at the canvas, and waved her toward the lounge as if he didn’t have time to bother with showing her how to pose. “Like yesterday will be fine,” he said.

“Oh really, shall I lock the door?”

“The pose,” Lucien said. “Like yesterday, do you remember?”

She dropped the robe and reclined into the same pose she had been in the day before. Exactly the same pose, he figured, looking at the sketch. It was uncanny for a model to find the pose that quickly without direction.

He’d decided to set her in an Oriental harem, after the Algerian paintings of Delacroix. Great flowing silks and golden statues in the background. Maybe a slave fanning her. A eunuch, perhaps? He heard his masters, Pissarro, Renoir, and Monet, lecturing him: “Paint what you see. Capture the moment. Paint what is real.” But the whitewashed storeroom would not do as a setting for this beauty, and he didn’t want to paint the background black and bring up the image from darkness as the Italian masters had, as had Goya with his Maja.

“I’m thinking about painting it in the Florentine style, laying down all the values in grisaille, a gray-green underpainting, then glazing the colors on over it. It will take longer than other methods, but I think it’s the only way I can capture your light. I mean, the light.”

“Could you do the underpainting in another color, say that pretty blue the man sold me?”

Lucien looked again at her, the sun filtering in from the skylight on her naked skin, then at the canvas. “Yes, yes, I can do that.”

And he began to paint.

After he’d been at it an hour, Juliette said, “My arm is going to sleep. Can I move it?” Without waiting for his permission, she started to swing her arm around in a windmill motion.

“Sure, I’ll call the painting Aphrodite Waving Like a Lunatic.”

“No one has done that before, I’ll bet. You would be the first to paint a waving nude. It could start a revolution.”

Now she was nodding as well as swinging her arm around; the unsynchronized motion put him in mind of one of Professeur Bastard’s bizarre machines.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Lucien said.

“Buy me lunch.”

“I can get you something from the bakery.”

“I want you to take me out.”

“But you’re naked.”

“Not permanently.”

“Let me finish your thighs, then we’ll go.”

“Oh, cher, that sounds delicious.”

“Stop moving your legs, please.”

“Sorry.”

It was two hours before he stepped away from the canvas and stretched his back. “That seems like a good place to take a break.”

“What? What? Is there a voice there? I’m faint from hunger.” She threw her arm over her eyes dramatically and pretended to faint, which on the fainting couch looked terribly appropriate and made Lucien wonder if he might not have chosen the wrong pose for her.