Sacré Bleu

She snorted. Perhaps taunting a jar of minerals did not evince the maturity of a creature of her years, but winning felt so good. She might have been a little drunk, too.

She had found, through the millennia, that being the inspiration, passion, and abject lesson in suffering for so many imaginative, whining narcissists made for long periods of suffering and neglect visited back upon her. She loved all of her artists, but after a time, after she’d endured enough sulking, paranoia, withdrawal of affection, moody self-aggrandizement, berating, violence disguised as sex, and beatings, the only way to clear her head was to occasionally murder some sons-a-bitches, with great vigor and violence, and over the years she had performed this catharsis to varying degrees of satisfaction, but nothing had been quite so exhilarating as slaughtering the Colorman. Ultimately. Forever. What a sweet, screaming death-gasm it was, and the only time that destruction had ever felt more arousing than creation. Much of that joy owed to lovely, sweet Lucien, whom she could feel was in the hall outside her flat.

“Where are your eyebrows?” she said when she opened the door. She was naked except for her thigh-high black stockings, but her hair was up in a chignon, affixed with chopsticks, a style she had only recently adopted.

Lucien forgot what he was going to say, so he said, “Where are your clothes?”

“I was dusting,” she said. Then she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Oh, Lucien, my only! My ever! You saved me.”

“The Colorman came back, then?”

“Yes!” She kissed him quickly, then let him breathe. “But he is no more.”

“When I saw the cave paintings at Pech Merle, I thought he might return. They had been sealed in the dark for thousands of years, but when the arc light hit them, I could feel the Sacré Bleu, the power in it.”

“Of course you could. They were the source.”

“I realized they meant that you were still not free of him, so I destroyed them. I think I’m guilty of a crime against history, or art, or something.”

“For saving your beloved? Nonsense.”

Footfalls sounded on the steps below. A heavy person trying to be stealthy. The concierge, no doubt.

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“Perhaps we should go inside,” said Lucien, although he was reluctant to let go of her at this point.

She dragged him into the flat, kicked the door shut, then pushed him back onto the divan. “Oh, mon amour,” she said, straddling him.

“Juliette!” He took her by the shoulders and pushed her back to her feet. “Wait.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. She sat on the other end of the divan and clutched a silk cushion over her breasts as she commenced a tragic pout.

“You said he was dead. You said he was gone forever.”

“So?”

“Well he wasn’t, was he?”

“It felt as if he was. More than it had before. Longer than before.”

“Before? How long have you been trying to kill him?”

“On purpose? Not that long, really. Since the fifteenth century. Of course he’d been mortally wounded many times before then, but that’s when I started planning. I couldn’t be obvious about it, because ultimately we would have to make the color, and he would control me then. At first it was accidents, then I hired some assassins, but he always came back. I knew he was protected, given power from the Sacré Bleu. That was when it first occurred to me that it wasn’t just the raw color but certain paintings. The first time I tried to destroy what I thought was all the paintings was in Florence, in 1497. I persuaded poor Botticelli to burn many of his best paintings in Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Not all, fortunately, since now I know that it wasn’t those paintings that protected the Colorman anyway. The cave paintings at Pech Merle were the source of his power, of his becoming the Colorman. They always had been. I know that now. Silly, I suppose, not to have thought of it.”

“But how do you know he won’t come back again?”

She pointed her toe to the jar on the coffee table. “That’s him.”

“He was only a gob of burning goo when we left him in the Catacombs.”

“I’m going to put a spoonful of him in the Seine every day. He’s gone though. I know that because I can feel you.”

“You stay on your side of the couch, at least until we sort this out.”

She held a finger in the air to mark the moment, then rose and coquetted across the parlor, where she stopped at the writing desk and opened a leather box, then looked over her shoulder at him and batted her eyelashes.

Lucien really thought he should be angry, or disappointed, but here she was, his ideal, conjured from his very imagination, his Venus, and she loved him and wanted him and was teasing him. “Hey, how did you know it wasn’t a stranger in the hall when you opened the door, nude?”