Sacré Bleu

“Exactly,” said the Professeur. “Which is why I used a new process discovered by a Russian scientist called liquid chromatography, where substances are suspended in a liquid and then either placed on paper or in thin tubes, and the level to which each substance migrates is unique. So in a color made of different colored minerals, say an orange composed of red ochre and yellow ochre, the two minerals will migrate to different levels, and if the red were made from another mineral, or an insect compound, like cochineal beetles, it too would find a different level in the liquid.?

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“And what about compounds that weren’t part of the color, like a drug, perhaps?”

“Yes, that too,” said the Professeur. “But liquid chromatography is a new process, and no one has done any indexing of the behavior of the elements, so I did a simple comparison. I went to Gustave Sennelier’s shop near the École des Beaux-Arts. He makes all of his paint from pure, dry pigments, mixed to the order of each artist’s preferences. Since we knew what went into each of his paints, I was able to compare the ingredients of each of his colors with those of your Colorman.”

“And?” asked Lucien.

“Each of Sennelier’s colors is composed of the same elements as those of your Colorman, mostly purely mined minerals, except the blue.”

“I knew it,” said Henri. “What is in the blue? Wormwood? Arsenic?”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t help,” said Lucien.

“We compared every blue pigment that Sennelier had, as well as mineral samples I got from the geology department at the Académie. I also tested any element that appears blue under different light, or can be changed to blue by oxidation, like copper. I can tell you it’s not azurite, and it’s not lapis lazuli, the most common elements used to make blue. It’s not indigo and it’s not woad, nor any other plant or animal pigment that I could find. It’s an unknown.”

“That must be it, then,” said Lucien. “There is some kind of drug in the blue compound. Can you test that?”

“Well, there wasn’t much in that small tube Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec gave me, but I suppose we could give it to some rats and see if they behave differently.”

“Dr. Gachet said that even a very tiny amount might affect the mind—what might be absorbed through the skin or inhaled as you are painting. Henri and I certainly didn’t eat any paint.”

“I see. And you would have both been exposed to the compound over a longer period of time?”

Lucien looked at Henri, trying to measure the reality of it. If, indeed, both Juliette and Carmen had somehow been complicit in exposing them to the Colorman’s blue, then it would have been over a period of years. But he didn’t paint Juliette before, in the time before she went away. Or maybe he just didn’t remember painting her.

“Henri, do you remember, when I was with Juliette before, did I paint her?”

“I never saw a painting, and you didn’t speak of it, but now I wonder. You don’t know?”

“Gentlemen,” interrupted the Professeur, “you believe something in this pigment affected your memory? Correct?”

“Yes,” said Lucien. “And perhaps it caused us to have false memories.”

“I see.” The Professeur shuffled through his notes for a moment, then stopped, stood, and quickstepped to a bookshelf in the corner of the room, where he snatched up a leather-bound volume and quickly flipped through the pages until he seemed to find what he was looking for. “Aha!”

“Aha, what?” asked Henri.

“This Austrian doctor writes of a process he uses on his patients to access what he calls ‘suppressed memories.’ Have you ever heard of hypnosis?”

“Mesmerism?” said Henri. “That’s a carnival trick they use to make people behave like chickens. A service that, I can attest from experience, can be attained at the rue des Moulins brothel by slipping an extra three francs to the madame.”

“Really?” said the Professeur.

“Four francs if you require an egg to be laid.”

The Professeur seemed perplexed by Henri’s revelation and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling as if the great gears of his mind were being strained by the mathematics of the scenario. “Seems rather dear for an egg,” he said finally.

“Forget the egg,” said Lucien. “Are you saying that you can help us remember?”

“Well, I can certainly try,” said the Professeur. “I have hypnotized subjects.”

“Professeur Bastard,” said Henri, “I’m not sure I understand. You are a chemist, a geologist, you dabble in engineering, build machines, and now psychology; what exactly is your field of study?”

“Truth, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec, does not confine itself to a cage.”