Sacré Bleu

“I’ll show them,” Monet said to his friend. “I’ll paint fog.”

“You’re mad,” Renoir had said.

“You’ll see.”

“You really think you can do it?” asked Renoir.

“How would I know?” said Monet. “No one has ever done it.”

In the station, smoke from the steam engines was beginning to billow against the glass roof and moved in great waves out into the morning sky. Lucien looked from canvas to locomotive, and back to canvas. He had seen Monet lay down color with mad, frenetic precision, faster than any of the other painters, but he couldn’t see how he could capture a subject as ethereal as steam from a locomotive.

When the painter saw that he had the stationmaster’s eye across the platform, he waved his brush, now loaded with tinted ultramarine, as a signal to begin. The stationmaster signaled, in turn, to porters, who signaled to each engineer down the line, and three locomotives, one under the roof and two out in the yard, released great clouds of smoke and steam, their whistles sounding all across the city.

Monet painted. Lucien stood behind him, trying to watch, trying to learn, seeing him build up each canvas, moving from one to the next, laying down blues and greens and browns, the dark lines describing the engines and the structure of the great roof rising up out of pools of pastel color. The whistles sounded again and Lucien looked at the big station clock above the ticket windows. A half-hour had passed.

Monet stood back from three finished paintings and checked the scene again for any detail he might have missed. “Let’s clip these canvases and put them into the case, Lucien,” the painter said. “We should give the stationmaster back his station.” He slid his palette into the grooves of his paint box and lay the

brushes into a tin-lined tray for Lucien to clean, then wiped his hands and strutted toward the stationmaster’s office to thank him.

Lucien opened the case to stow the new paintings. Its inside was fitted with rails that kept the paintings from touching while being transported. It would be a week, maybe two, before they could be touched, months before they would be dry enough to varnish.

The case already held three completed paintings. That couldn’t be right. Lucien slid the top canvas part of the way out on its rails. Yes, it was a newly painted canvas of the station. The turpentine smell was rising from it. He touched the paint near the edge of the canvas, an area that would be obscured by a frame. Fresh, wet paint. Somehow, Monet had painted six paintings in thirty minutes. By the time Lucien had all of the paintings stowed, the easels broken down, and had given the painter’s brushes a perfunctory cleaning with turpentine and linseed oil, Monet was standing over him, grinning.

“You did it,” said Lucien. “You really did it.”

“Yes,” said Monet.

“How did you do it?” asked Lucien.

The painter ignored Lucien’s question and instead picked up the case with the finished paintings. “Shall we go? Renoir will just be finishing his breakfast. I think we should go show him what a madman can do.”

He led Lucien out of the station onto the boulevard, just pausing a moment to pull his hat down in the rain.

“Turner’s ghost should stir at the storm I capture today,” said Monet. Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris—Claude Monet, 1877

THE PROFESSEUR COUNTED LUCIEN OUT OF HIS TRANCE. “THREE, TWO, ONE, and now you are awake.”

“You can’t be remembering it correctly,” said Henri.

Lucien looked around the Professeur’s dingy parlor and blinked as if he’d just come in out of a bright sunlit day. “I think I am,” he said.

“I have seen one of Monet’s Saint-Lazare paintings,” said Lautrec. “I don’t think even the great Monet could paint one of them in half an hour, let alone six. You made some mistake in recalling it.”

“The question is,” said Lucien, “why am I remembering it at all? The Colorman was there, and Margo was there, but the Professeur asked about a memory of the Colorman, not Monet painting the station.”

“Perhaps your mind filled in the details,” said the Professeur. “Our memories sometimes conform to a logical narrative, and details are constructed to make sense, like the passage of time being compressed.”

“But I didn’t construct this. I didn’t remember any of this until now. Something strange did happen with the time, and it has to do with the color. The same blue you put on the watch, Monet used to wash the canvases. It wasn’t my memory that was affected, it was reality.”

“How do you know that?” asked Henri.

Lucien downed the demitasse of brandy that Henri had poured for him and set the cup on the coffee table. “I know because it’s not raining out.”

“I don’t understand,” said the Professeur.

“Look at your shoulders. Touch the top of your head. You two have been in the rain. So have I.”

They weren’t soaked by any means, but there were moist spots on their heads and shoulders, as if they had run through the rain to catch a taxi. Henri checked the tops of his shoes, which were still spotted with beading water droplets.