Sacré Bleu

“But I must paint her. It’s why I was out so early to get color. I need to paint her.”

“You need to run, Paul,” said Lucien. “If you paint her, she is going to die. Or you are.”

“Possibly of tedium,” said Henri. “If you inflict your painting theories on her.”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” said Lucien.

THEY SENT GAUGUIN ON HIS WAY WITH ALL THE MONEY THEY HAD LEFT IN their pockets and his promise that he would avoid the girl from his bed and leave Paris as soon as he could secure fare to Tahiti. He might give up on his ideal island girl, but he wasn’t going to give up on the idea of painting island girls altogether.

“What does the note say?” asked Henri.

“It says ‘Lucien, Sketch me.’ It’s signed ‘Juliette.’”

“Rather Alice in Wonderland cryptic. She’s a beautiful girl, Lucien, but her epistolary skills are shit.”

“There’s barely enough color here for a sketch.”

“Perhaps we should save it. When Le Professeur returns he can use it to hypnotize you. Or we can fetch Carmen and hypnotize her as we had planned.”

“No, I’m going to sketch Juliette.”

Henri shrugged. “There’s some cardboard in the top drawer of the print cabinet. We don’t have any small canvases primed.”

Lucien went to the print cabinet and pulled out the wide, flat drawer, and shuffled around the brown cardboard pieces inside until he found a piece about the size of a postcard. “This should do it.”

“Do you have a photograph to work from?”

“I’ll draw from memory. I think that’s what she meant for me to do.”

“There was evidently subtext to her letter that I did not perceive.”

Lucien took a number two brush from a jar of brushes, took a small jar of linseed oil from the top of the print cabinet, and sat down at the table to draw.

“No white?”

“I’m only going to do a line drawing. If I start painting highlights I’ll run out of blue before I have the figure.”

“Drawing Juliette may not be the smartest thing to do, Lucien, you know that?”

“Yes, I know, but I love her.”

“Very well, carry on, then,” said Henri, toasting his friend. “I will catch up on my smoking and drinking while you work.”

On unprimed cardboard there would be no correcting, no rubbing out, no wiping and repainting, no blending, no overpainting. He mixed some of the blue into a drop of linseed oil on the tabletop, imagined Juliette’s exquisite jawline, and the brush fell to cardboard. Her neck, another line, ever so lightly at first, but then reinforced, contoured by brush hairs, and Juliette’s face began to grow up from the cardboard. Lucien’s hand was the conduit from the vision in his mind’s eye, and he began to lay down the lines like an automated loom weaving a tapestry of silk.

His eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled over in his chair, clutching the drawing in one hand, the brush in the other, and he held them as he lay on the floor, twitching.

LUCIEN OPENED HIS EYES TO SEE HENRI EYE TO EYE WITH HIM, HIS CHEEK pressed to the floor. The two were curled up like battling twin fetuses facing off for in utero fisticuffs.

“Well, that looked unpleasant,” Henri said.

“I went away.”

“I gathered. Where?”

“I saw Berthe Morisot naked.”

“The painter? Really? Nude?”