Sacré Bleu

Lucien sat back on the little stool he’d been sitting on to work on the lower parts of the canvas. It had been a good day. A very good day. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever having had such a day before.

He put down his brushes and palette and moved to the fainting couch, where he could still feel the warmth of Juliette’s body. La Grenouillère: he had always heard about it, about the wonderful times. He’d seen the paintings Monet and Renoir had made there side by side. It was even more magical than he had imagined. He lay back on the couch and covered his eyes with his arm, letting the day play in his head. He wondered why, in all of his life in Paris, he hadn’t spent a glorious Sunday afternoon among the boaters and the “little frogs” at La Grenouillère. Perhaps, he thought, it was because La Grenouillère had burned to the waterline in 1873, when he was ten, and had never been rebuilt. Yes, that was probably why. And for some reason, that didn’t bother him at all.

Nine

NOCTURNE IN BLACK AND GOLD

London, 1865

A LIGHT FOG WASHED THE BANK AT BATTERSEA BRIDGE. BARGES MOVED like great black ghosts on the Thames, silent but for the clop clop of a team of draft horses on the shore echoing off the houses of Chelsea.

Out on Battersea Bridge, the Colorman looked like a pile of wool haunting the night, wrapped in an overcoat that reached all the way to the ground, the collar up higher than his ears and brushing the wide brim of a black leather hat. Only his eyes showed above a thick wool scarf.

“What kind of loony paints at night, outside, in the cold?” he said. “This bloody island is always cold and damp. I hate it here.” When he spoke steam, diffused by the scarf, came rolling out from under the brim of his hat.

“He’s as mad as we’ve made him,” said the redhead. She pulled her own coat tight around her. “And it was on this island they made you a king, so don’t be such an ungrateful little wanker.”

“Well, fix him. If he paints at night, we’ll lose him.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes you lose.”

She walked down off the bridge into Chelsea and up the river toward the painter, who stood at an easel with a small lantern hung from it so he could see his palette and canvas.

WHAT KIND OF LUNATIC PAINTS AT NIGHT, OUTSIDE, IN THE COLD? WHISTLER WONDERED. He stamped his feet to get the blood flowing in them, then washed some of the ultramarine blue across the center of the canvas with a wide sable brush.

He’d thinned the paint so much that he had to brace the canvas so that it stuck out from the easel horizontally, to keep the color from running, as if he were painting with watercolor. Just as well he was doing his nocturnes outside; the fumes from that much turpentine would have sent his head spinning if he’d tried to paint them in the studio, in winter, with the windows closed. As if being in the studio at all, with her, didn’t send him spinning anyway.

Jo—Joanna, his wild redhead, his blessing, his curse. She was like some siren from an Edgar Allan Poe story, “Ligia,” perhaps. Preternaturally intelligent, frighteningly beautiful in that detached, untouchable way that he so loved touching. But he was so unsettled around her, losing time, lately, going to the studio in the evening to find that he’d finished a painting that day without any recollection of having done it. At least he remembered the work he was doing on these night paintings.

But how could she be the cause of his, well, instability? And why did it subside when he worked at night?

A woman’s voice behind him. “I think throwing your brother-in-law through the window might have marked the moment when it all went tits-up, wouldn’t you say, love?”

Whistler turned so quickly he nearly knocked over his easel. “Jo, how did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t. I was out for a walk. I thought you were probably home with your mum.”

Whistler’s dire, puritanical mother was visiting from the States. She’d come over to check on him when his sister wrote her to say that she was worried about his “well-being of mind,” prompted, no doubt, by Whistler throwing her husband through a café window.

“Well that was stupid,” Jo had told him that night.

“He said that you looked like my attending tart.” He couldn’t believe he had to defend defending her.

At that point she’d pulled her nightgown over her head and slid naked into his lap. “If the shoe fits, love,” she said. “If the shoe fits.”

He lost most every argument to her that way.

Upon finding out his mother had arrived in London, Whistler and Jo quickly removed from the house all evidence of what Mother would have called his “decadent life”—from his collection of Japanese prints, to his bar, to Jo herself, whom he moved into his studio a few blocks away.

As soon as he’d been out of Jo’s company for a few days, he started to feel different, as if a part of him that had been lost had returned, but he also started to have vivid, detailed dreams of working on paintings that didn’t exist, of going places with her he had never been. But now, in the cold, damp London night, rather than feeling obsessed by her, inspired by her, or overwhelmed by her, he was … well … he was afraid of her.

With his palette still in hand, Whistler went to her and kissed her on the cheek. “Sorry, I’ve been experimenting with the points of light on the river, using washes of oil to produce atmosphere.”

“I see,” she said. “Does Mum think you’re mad, then?”

“No, just deeply corrupted.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, snaking her arm around his waist. “You’ve had supper?”