Sacré Bleu

“She got very sick. I think maybe she died.”

Henri felt a blow to the heart. He hadn’t intended to ask about her at all. He thought he was through with her. But there was a loss, in that instant, at hearing the Colorman’s words.

The Colorman put his hat back on. “She had a sister who lived in the Third, not far from Les Halles, I think. Maybe she went there to die, huh?”

“Perhaps. How much for the color?” said Henri. He took the paint tubes and laid them across the bottom of his paint box, then paid the little man what he asked.

The Colorman pocketed the bills. “I should be making more blue soon, if you run out. I’ll come around to your studio.”

“Thank you, but I prefer not to be disturbed at my studio. I will come to you, now that I know where you live,” Henri said.

“I move a lot,” said the Colorman.

“Really, have you ever been to Auvers-sur-Oise?” Aha! Henri thought. I have you now.

“Auvers?” The hat came off, more head scratching, looking at the upper floors of the buildings for an answer. “No, monsieur, why do you ask?”

“A friend of mine wrote me a letter from there, saying he had purchased some fine oil paints from someone who looked like you. He was a Dutchman, dead now, sadly.”

“I don’t know any Dutchman. I don’t do business with fucking Dutchmen. Fuck Dutchmen and their Dutch light. No. I have to go.” The Colorman snapped his case shut, then hefted it onto his back and started to make his way down the street.

“Adieu,” Henri called after him.

“Fucking Dutchmen,” grumbled the Colorman as he wrestled his case around the corner.

Carmen had moved in with her sister in the Third Arrondissement? If he took a taxi, Henri could be there in thirty minutes. No one had to know.

But first, he needed to find out about the color.

Eleven

CAMERA OBSCURA—

London, 1890

WHILE HENRI HAD SPENT THE DAY STALKING THE MYSTERY OF THE Colorman, Lucien had spent a week in London looking at art and bonking Juliette in every corner of Kensington.

“If you bolt on the hotel bill after only one night they don’t even bother with the police,” Juliette had said.

“But shouldn’t we change neighborhoods?” Lucien had stayed in very few hotels in his life, and he had never run out on the bill.

“I like Hyde Park,” Juliette said. “Now come to bed.”

There had been a lot of firsts on his first trip to London, not the least of which was the realization that France and England had been at war since, well, since they had been separate countries, really. Outside of the National Gallery, at Trafalgar Square, he looked at the great pillar built to Admiral Nelson, in honor of his victory over Napoleon’s navy (and the Spanish) at Trafalgar. The painter Courbet had been exiled for rallying to destroy Napoleon’s version of the column outside the Louvre (supposedly at the urging of his Irish mistress, Jo).

“Courbet was a tosser,” Juliette said. “Let’s go look at pictures.”

Lucien didn’t ask how she’d known he was thinking about Courbet, or when she started using the English term “tosser”; he’d given up on that sort of thing and had just given himself over to her will. In a few minutes they were through the rotunda and Juliette led the way, breezing by masterpieces like they were leprous beggars, until they stood in front of Velázquez’s Venus.

“Put a naked cherub on the couch with her to hold the mirror,” said Henri. “I can model if you need.” Venus at Her Mirror—Diego Velázquez, 1647

She lay on a chaise lounge with her back to them, her skin a smooth, peach-kissed white, and although Henri had been right, her bottom was not quite so fine as Juliette’s, she was a beauty to be sure, and because she was looking at you looking at her, in a mirror held by a cherub, there was just the slightest feeling of naughtiness, the voyeur exposed. But she didn’t regard you, size you up and dismiss you the way Manet’s Olympia did. She didn’t tease you the way Goya’s Maja did. She was just watching you watch her do what she did, which was display the most sublime backside in art. But for all the real dimension, tone, and even light in her skin, on her back and legs, her face in the mirror was dark, out of focus, as if she watched you from a different place, through a window, not really a mirror.

“He must have used a camera obsc

ura,” Lucien said. The camera obscura: an actual camera that existed before film. The lens flipped the image and projected it onto a sheet of ground glass, often with a grid etched into it, so the artist essentially painted what had already been reduced to two dimensions in a real, living version of a photograph.

“Why would you say that?” Juliette asked.