Sacré Bleu

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p; “No, now I’m simply a libertine and a whoremonger. In my past there was obsession and love, which are the spells under which I believe our Lucien has fallen.”

“And who do you think is drugging him?”

“I believe it is a conspiracy of the girl and her partner in crime, a dealer of color.”

“And their motive?”

“To seduce Lucien.”

“And you said that she is beautiful?”

“Exquisite. Radiant. Irritatingly so.”

“Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, I understand why someone might conspire to seduce you. You have a title and are heir, I presume, to a significant fortune, but Lucien is the poor son of a baker, and while he is a talented painter, as you know, there is no guarantee that he will ever find success or financial reward. So, again, what would be the motive?”

Henri stood and began to pace in front of the divan, crunching hazelnut shells with every other step. “I don’t know. But I can tell you this: When something like this happened to me, Lucien and some other friends removed me from the situation and the obsession passed. But I lost time. Significant amounts of time. Memories. I have months at a time that I cannot remember. I have paintings that I don’t remember having painted, and I remember painting others that I do not have. I have no other explanation. Perhaps if you can find something in the paint that explains the loss of time, we will find a way to stop it.”

“Stop your friend from painting and making love to a beautiful woman?”

“When you say it that way it doesn’t sound like such a good thing.”

“No, it is. Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, you are a good friend to Lucien. Better than you know. Did Lucien’s sister tell you how their father died?”

“No, and Lucien only speaks of his father’s love for painting.”

“His sister thinks it was a similar love for painting that killed him. I will test the paint. It will take a few days, but I will find out the elements from which it is formulated, but even if I find something, if Lucien doesn’t want to be rescued, you will be in a difficult position removing him from the danger.”

“I have a plan,” said Henri. “I know two doormen from the Moulin Rouge, stout fellows who know their way around a billy club. If you find something, we’ll burst into the studio, knock Lucien out, drag him off of her, and tie him up in my studio until he comes to his senses.”

“You’re a better friend than I even thought,” said the Professeur. “Shall I call on you at your studio when I have my results?”

“The address is on the card, but I’m often out, so if you’ll just send word,” said Henri. “Lucien has spoken of you in terms he reserves for his artist heroes, and even his mother has kind words for you, which is a bit of a miracle in itself, so I know I can trust you to keep this confidence between us. I have reason to suspect that the Colorman is dangerous.”

Just then there was a whirr of motors and something scuttled out from under the divan. Henri screamed and jumped up onto the couch. A brass insect about the size of a squirrel was running around on the floor, from nutshell to nutshell, clicking at each one, then moving on with a whirr.

“Ah, it must be noon,” said the Professeur.

“Time for a cognac,” said Henri breathlessly. “Join me, Professeur?”

EVEN THE THOUGHT OF CARMEN CLOUDED HIS JUDGMENT; HE SHOULD HAVE recognized that. Otherwise, why would he think he could find a single redheaded laundress whom no one had heard from in three years, and in an arrondissement where nearly a hundred thousand people lived! He had a lithograph he should be doing for the Moulin Rouge, a poster of Jane Avril, and if a true and gallant friend, he would be trying to make another attempt to rescue Lucien, but the vision of Carmen pulled him to the Third. Was it the vision? She was pretty but not beautiful, but she had a quality of rawness, of reality, that touched him, and he had never painted better. Was that it? Was it the girl or the painting?

“Are you in pain, little one?” she would say, the only woman other than his mother he allowed to call him such a thing. “Shall I rub your legs for you?”

He didn’t even know if she was still alive. What if, as the Colorman said, she had perished—perhaps from grief, when he’d gone away? Abandoned her.

Jumping from laundry to laundry, with the taxi waiting for him at each, he found himself deep in the Marais, the Jewish neighborhood on the Right Bank of the Seine. By no means a ghetto, this area had been renovated by Baron Haussmann like most of Paris’s neighborhoods and the architecture was the same, uniform, six-story buildings with mansard roofs, so the only indication of any economic or ethnic disparity was the preponderance of goldsmiths, the signs in Hebrew in the bakery windows, and the ubiquitous Hasids out and about in their long coats, even in the August heat. There was a furtiveness to the movement of the people in the Marais these days, as anti-Semitism was rising as a political force in the city, and a Jew wandering in the wrong circles might find himself berated by some drunken gentleman for some imagined offense, or the center of some paranoid conspiracy theory. Much to his chagrin, Henri’s friend the artist Adolphe Willette, otherwise a man of great humor, had run for mayor of Montmartre on the anti-Semite platform and, fortunately, had been soundly defeated.

“Willette, you dolt,” Henri had told him, “I would love to support you, but being of noble birth myself, if I were to discriminate based on the accident of birth I’d have to eschew the company of all you horseshit commoners, and then who would I drink with?”

It was sometimes difficult to reconcile a man’s talents with his personality. Even the great Degas, who, as an artist, was a hero to Henri, and probably the best draftsman of all the Impressionists, had turned out, in person, to be a complete prick. Henri had even lived for a while in the same apartment building as Degas, but instead of being able to glean some bit of wisdom from the master, all he got was disdain. At first, a simple dismissive harrumph in the courtyard as they passed, but later, when Henri encountered Degas at an exhibition where they were both showing, Degas, acting as if he didn’t see Henri standing nearby, said, “These redheads of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, they all look like syphilitic whores.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Henri said over his shoulder, but he was hurt. Insulted by his hero, he limped away to a corner of the gallery where people were not so surly. Degas inspired him, and he’d been open in his admiration, showing Degas’ influence in his own art, and that made the rejection all the more painful. Henri was preparing to shrug off his friends and go get outrageously, scandalously drunk in some working-class dance hall when he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see a thin, white-goateed man in his fifties looking at him from under the brim of a rough linen hat: Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

“Monsieur, take heart. Degas hates everyone. He may be the best sculptor alive, now that his eyesight is too far gone to paint, but I will tell you a secret. His dancers are things to him. Objects. He has no love for them. Your dancers, monsieur, they live. They live on canvas because you love them, no?”

Henri didn’t know what to say. He was stunned, having gone somehow from a grinding self-loathing at the hands of Degas to an electric numbness at Renoir’s extraordinary kindness. He felt faint and had to steady himself on his walking stick.