Sacré Bleu

She leaned into him and kissed his cheek. “But it’s very nice of you to try to make me feel better. I don’t know why, but you have a good heart under all those layers of stupidity.”

“What is going on here?” Mère Lessard’s voice came from the top of the stairs.

Régine pinched Lucien’s arm and turned to her mother. “I was just sweeping up and Lucien was telling me how you took opium and shagged Papa to death in his art studio.”

Lucien cringed, then bolted through the curtain to the front.

“Hmmpf. He should be so lucky,” said Mère Lessard.

Evidently, mothers and daughters had a different relationship than mothers and sons, or else Régine would have been trying to remove a rolling pin from her derrière right then.

Well, I tried, thought Lucien.

THAT EVENING, HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC DINED AT THE LAPIN AGILE with his friend Oscar, an Irish writer who was in from London. He had not seen Lucien or Juliette since the night after they’d killed the Colorman. In fact, since burning the masterpieces, he couldn’t bear to spend time with any of his artist friends, and even the girls in the brothels could not distract him from the wretchedness he had heaped on himself, so he had crawled alone into a very deep bottle and stayed there until Oscar arrived at his apartment on the butte and insisted they do the rounds of the cafés and cabarets.

Oscar, a tall, dark-haired dandy and raconteur, preferred the cafés to the cabarets, so he could spout his practiced witticisms for all to hear, despite his dreadful French. But this would not be the week that Oscar would extend to Paris the reputation he already enjoyed in the English-speaking world as a most vainglorious tosser, for over the first meal Henri could remember eating in a week, he slurred a fantastic story that captivated the Irishman and left him nearly speechless in both languages.

“Surely, you’re doing me badly,” said Oscar in French. “No one eats such a book.”

“Your French is shit, Oscar,” said Henri around a bite of bloody steak. “And it is true.”

“My French is liquid and fat,” Oscar said, meaning to say that his French was fluent and expansive. “Of course it’s not true. I don’t care a fly. But it makes a delicious book. May I take notes?”

“More wine!” Henri shouted to the bartender. “Yes. Write, write, write, Oscar, it’s what men do when they can’t make real art.”

“Here it is,” said Oscar. “This little man never died because of the paintings.”

“Yes,” said Henri.

And so, for another hour, as he became more drunk and more incoherent, and Oscar Wilde became more drunk, and more incoherent in French, Henri spun the tale of the Colorman and how he had defeated death by using the paintings of masters. By the end of the evening, or what would have been the end for a sane person, the two stumbled out of the Lapin Agile, Oscar bracing himself on Henri’s head, and Henri bracing himself on his walking stick, and they paused at the split-rail fence on rue des Saules, realizing with some despair that no taxi was going to come by and they would have to navigate the stairs down the butte to Pigalle to catch a cab or continue their bar crawl, when a woman called out.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec?”

They looked to the bare vineyard across the street from the restaurant, and on the bench where once Lucien and Juliette had looked out over Paris, sat a lone figure in the dark.

Hanging on Oscar’s lapels for balance, Henri dragged the playwright across the street and leaned in close to the woman’s face, which he could now make out by the moonlight and the light spilling from the windows of the Lapin Agile.

“Bonsoir, mademoiselle,” he said. He grasped the edge of his pince-nez, and while swinging from Oscar’s lapel, he did a semicircular inspection of the woman’s face. “And what brings you to Montmartre this evening?”

“I’m here to see you,” she said. “The concierge at your building said I would find you here.”

Henri swung in close again, and yes, he could see the light in her eyes, the recognition, the smile that he had missed so. This was his Carmen. He let go of Oscar’s lapel and fell backward into her lap.

“Oscar Wilde, may I present Carmen Gaudin, my laundress. I’m afraid you will have to continue the adventure on your own.”

“Enchanté, mademoiselle,” said Oscar with a slight bow over Carmen’s hand, which Henri tried to lick as it passed his face.

“I will leave you two to your sugary times,” the Irishman said, thinking he had said something far more clever and gallant. He stumbled down the butte’s stairs to Pigalle and happened into the Moulin Rouge, where he met and became quite fascinated with a young Moroccan man who worked there as a dancer and an acrobat, who taught the Irishman how to light the sugar cube over a glass of absinthe to release the green fairy, among other tricks.

The next morning Oscar awoke to find in his breast pocket a sheaf of notes, written in his own hand, which he had no recollection of having written and which were almost entirely incoherent, except for the repeated concept of a painting whose magical powers kept an old and twisted man eternally vibrant. A concept he would use as a theme for his next novel, which he would call The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Back on the bench, across from the Lapin Agile, Carmen ran her hand over Henri’s beard and said, “Oh, my sweet count, I have missed you so. Let us go to your flat, or even your studio.”

“But my dear,” said Henri, on the razor’s edge between joy and passing out, “I fear I may not be able to perform.”

“I don’t care, you can paint, can’t you?”

“Of course, if I can draw breath I can paint.”