Sacré Bleu

Lucien watched the master laying down the color, the white and pink of the water lilies, the gray-green of the willows reflected on the surface of the water, the muted umber and slate blue of the sky in the water. Monet worked as if there was no thought process involved at all—his mind was simply the conduit to move color from his eye to the canvas, like the court stenographer who might transcribe a whole trial, every word going from his ear to the paper, yet remain unaware of what had transpired in the courtroom. Monet had trained himself to be a machine for the harvest of color. With brush in hand, he was no longer a man, a father, or a husband, but a device of singular purpose; he was, as he had always introduced himself, the painter Monet.

“A particular girl,” said Lucien, “and to find her, I need to ask you about blue.”

“I hope you’re going to stay the week, then,” said Monet. “I’ll have Alice make up the guest room for you.”

“Not blue in general, Oncle. The blue you got from the Colorman.”

Monet stopped painting. There was no doubt in Lucien’s mind that he knew which Colorman.

“You have used his color, then?”

“I have.”

Monet turned on his stool now and pushed back the brim of his broad hat so he could look at Lucien. His long black beard was shot with gray, but his blue eyes burned with a fierce intensity that made Lucien feel as if he’d been stripped naked for some sort of examination. He had to look away.

Monet said, “I told you never to buy color from him.”

“No you didn’t. I didn’t remember ever seeing you with him until yesterday.”

Monet nodded. “That happens with the Colorman. Tell me.”

And so Lucien told Monet about Juliette and painting the blue nude, about Henri and Carmen, about their loss of memory, about the Professeur’s hypnotic trance and the phantom rain on their shoulders, about the death of Vincent van Gogh and the letter to Henri, how Vincent had been afraid of the Colorman and had tried to escape him by going to Arles.

“So he’s gone now, you think?” asked Monet.

“Along with Juliette, and I have to find her. You know, don’t you, Oncle? When you painted Gare Saint-Lazare, six paintings in a half an hour, you knew?”

“Not a half an hour, Lucien, four hours. For me it was four hours, maybe more. You know what time is like when you are painting.”

“I looked at the station clock.”

“The Colorman’s blue can stop time,” said the painter, as if he were declaring something as obvious and accepted as the sky being blue.

Lucien sat down in the grass abruptly, feeling as if his knees would not support him; the nerves in his legs had been suddenly severed. “That’s not possible.”

“I know. Nevertheless, it’s true. You’ve used it, so you know. It’s in the feel of the paint, the behavior of the surface. Critics never see that, never account for that. They always think we are trying to say something with the paint; they don’t know the paint itself speaks to us, by touch, by reflection. You have felt it, no?”

“Oncle Claude, I don’t understand. We thought there was some kind of drug in the color, that we were hallucinating.”

“I understand. And at the time, I thought I had gone mad, but I pushed through. An artist can’t let madness stop him from making art, he simply has to channel it. That’s what I thought I was doing.”

“For how long? How long did you think you were mad?”

“Until about two minutes ago,” said the older painter.

“You never said anything.”

“What was I to say? ‘Oh, Lucien, by the way, I realize the clock has only moved a half an hour, but I managed to paint six paintings of Gare Saint-Lazare, and the smoke was kind enough to hold still while I painted.’”

“I suppose I would have thought you mad,” said Lucien.

“That was the only time I bought paint directly from the Colorman. That day at Gare Saint-Lazare. And he knew what I was trying to do. I remember him saying that if I washed my canvas with his blue, it would make what I was doing easier.”

“You said that was the only time you got color ‘directly’ from

him. You had used his color before?”

“Before and after then. My wife, Camille. It was Camille who brought it to me, and it was she who paid for it. I fear in more than just money.”