“How are you, Édouard?” asked Berthe, a sweet smile there, just barely. “I mean, beyond the obvious.”
Manet laughed until he coughed. “Well, beyond that, I couldn’t be better.”
“I’ve brought you something.” She reached into her bag, a drawstring affair fashioned of black satin covered in Spanish lace, and retrieved a small canvas; a short-handled, fine sable brush; and a tube of paint. She laid them on his chest, and he swip
ed at them feebly, as if he didn’t have the strength to even lift the tiny brush. Instead he caught her hand.
“You were the best of them, Berthe,” he said. “You are still the best of them. If you were a man, your paintings would already be in the Louvre. You know that?”
She patted his hand, then placed the brush in his fingers. She propped up the little canvas on his chest and squeezed some of the blue color out onto it. “So you’ve told me. You don’t remember painting the nude, do you?”
He looked at her, distressed, as if his mind was already slipping away. He held the brush like it was a foul, foreign thing.
“Sketch me, Édouard,” she said. “You are the painter Manet. Now paint.”
And even as he protested, his hand began to move, the brush traced lines over the canvas. “But I’m dying.”
“That’s no excuse, love, you’re still and shall ever be the painter Manet. Now paint.”
He fell to sketching her, from the jawline up, the soft brush and creamy blue barely making a noise in the room as her face appeared on the canvas. She made it no easier on him, her smile broadening as he worked so he had to revise the sketch.
“Poor Suzanne,” said Berthe. “Victorine haunts her.”
“The passion she’s jealous of was for the work, not the woman,” he said.
“I know,” said Berthe. She did know. She’d been there. She had been Victorine Meurent in those times, modeled for those paintings. As Victorine she had seduced, enchanted, inspired, and ultimately killed him, for it was Victorine who had given him the syphilis. But he had never loved Victorine. It was as Berthe Morisot that she had inspired his love and his greatest painting. The painting that only she, Manet, and the Colorman had ever seen. The painting that had been stored in underground Paris for over twenty years.
“Do you remember now?” she asked, the blue starting to take effect.
“Yes. Oh yes.”
She took his hand and led him to the forest at Fontainebleau, where they rented a cabin with a sunroom and she posed on a daybed during the day while he painted, where they made love with the sun on their skin. She led him to a little inn at Honfleur, where the Seine met the sea, and there they drank wine in a café on the mirror-calm harbor, painted side by side, and walked the beach at sunset. She led him to a sunny villa in Provence, near Aix, and she smiled at him from under the brim of a white straw hat, her dark eyes shining like gemstones while he painted.
Only one other time had Bleu been both the model and the painter, both the inspiration and the creator, and not a woman, then. Berthe’s artistic talent had nothing to do with Bleu, and was profound, and out of time. Women didn’t paint, and if they did, they weren’t recognized for it. But Berthe had been accepted among the Impressionists from the start—had painted alongside them all. In the evening, when they retreated to the cabarets and cafés to discuss art, ideas, and theory, she would go home, sit with the other women, where it was proper, despite the fact that she was, as Manet had said, the best of them. Bleu had seen through Berthe’s painter’s eye, and seen Berthe through Manet’s eye, in his paintings. He adored Berthe, before Bleu possessed her and after she had left. He had gone to great lengths to arrange the circumstances for Berthe’s marriage to his younger brother, Eugène, just so he might be near her—all very proper and aboveboard. She the lady, he the gentleman of society. It was only when Berthe was inhabited by Bleu that Manet’s passion was able to manifest in art and love. Bleu, as Berthe, had taken the painter to places he would have never gone, even as she led him now.
They stayed in the South for a month together, painting and laughing and lounging in the blue shade of olive trees, until Suzanne returned to Édouard’s bedside with the tea.
“He’s gone,” Berthe said. “He was sketching, and then suddenly he gasped and he was gone. It was so sudden, I didn’t even have time to call for you.”
Suzanne stumbled and Berthe caught the tea tray and steered it away to the bureau, then was back at Suzanne’s side.
Berthe gently pried the canvas from Manet’s hand, smearing the oil sketch as she did, just enough so that it might have been an image of any woman.
“He called your name,” Berthe said. “He said he wanted to sketch you, and he began drawing with the brush, then he gasped and called your name, ‘Suzanne.’”
“SYPHILIS HAS BEEN GOOD TO US,” SAID THE COLORMAN.
“Very good,” Bleu said.
“Not satisfying, though,” he said.
“Speak for yourself.”
“It’s slow; sometimes you don’t want to wait and a pistol is better.”
“A pistol doesn’t always work for us, as you proved with Vincent,” said Bleu. Then it occurred to her that it might have worked perfectly. What if the Colorman had hidden the painting Vincent had made with the Sacré Bleu, the same way he had hidden the Manet nude? What if he’d shot Vincent to keep her from knowing the painting’s location? What if he had found some new trick to play on her while she was in a trance or in character and couldn’t watch him? He was sneaky to start out, and he’d had a lot of time to get sneakier. He might have been caching paintings away for years, and she would have never known.
“You need to get ready now,” said the Colorman. He closed the drapes and unfolded an oilcloth over their dining table.