Sacré Bleu

“Accident,” said the Colorman. “Couldn’t be helped.”

“Oh, what is that?” She crinkled her nose and held her arms out from her sides as if they were foreign, foul things and she could actually escape them if she showed enough disgust. “I smell of shit? Why do I smell of shit?”

“I found you under a cow.”

“Under a cow? What was she doing under a cow?”

“She’s a little slow.”

“You mean I’m an imbecile?”

“Not anymore,” said the Colorman cheerily, holding out the apple, wishing that it would work on Bleu the way it had worked on the slow girl. But no.

“You painted the village idiot blue and bonked her before you pulled me up?”

“Being burned up makes you cranky.”

The filthy, naked blue girl stomped into the muddy river with a growl. When she got to waist level she began to scrub herself and a blue stain floated on the water around her. “Why don’t they ever burn you? You’re involved. You’re part of it. You’re the one making the fucking color.” She punctuated every sentence by splashing a great swan of muddy-blue water at the Colorman.

They had been working around the cathedral glassmakers for two hundred years now, moving from camp to camp with them, from Venice to London, as they built their furnaces and made the glass for the windows at each cathedral site. The Colorman provided the pigment to make a unique hue of blue, the Sacré Bleu, and she seduced the glassmakers. Unfortunately, the furnaces were usually built out in the open, or near a forest where wood could be easily harvested, and the glass, too, was stored either in the open or in makeshift tents, forcing them to make the blue in the open as well, where people could stumble upon them in the process. It was a disturbing process to watch. Medieval people reacted badly to the sight.

“You’re the blue one,” said the Colorman.

“You could have rescued me.”

“I just did.”

“Before the burning.”

“I was busy. Couldn’t be helped. I rescued you that time in Paris. At Notre-Dame.”

“Once! Out of how many times? Peasants have no imagination. No other solutions.” She splashed her point home. “Crops fail? Burn the blue girl. Fever in the village? Burn the blue girl. Badgers ate the miller? Burn the blue girl.”

“When did badgers eat the miller?”

“They didn’t. I’m just using that as an example. But if they did, you know the villagers would burn the bloody blue girl as a remedy. ‘Witch’ this and ‘witch’ that? It’s not like it’s easy seducing a glassmaker into thinking you’re the Virgin bloody Mary and then screwing him into inspiration. I’m telling you, Poopstick, this guilt strategy the Church is working is not good for art.”

“Maybe we s

hould find a new camp of glassmakers,” said the Colorman.

She ducked under the water, scrubbed her hair as long as she could hold her breath, then surfaced with a shudder. “Oh, you think? I don’t guess we can stay here, can we, since everyone knows me as the village idiot? Not much I can do except eat dirt in the square and bonk the sodding priest, is there?”

“You can change.”

“No, I refuse to be burned more than once in the same village; find me a clean frock and we’ll go.”

And so they did.

For eight hundred years, it was thought that the formula for making the blue glass in the windows of the cathedral Notre-Dame de Chartres was lost, when it had simply moved on. For Bleu, the burnings had more or less taken the charm out of Gothic cathedrals.

THE SAYING GOES, “THE MIND OF PARIS IS ON THE LEFT BANK, THE MONEY IS on the Right,” and the mind of the Left Bank was the Latin Quarter, so called because the common language spoken by the university students was Latin and had been for eight hundred years.

“I don’t like the Latin Quarter,” Juliette said. She took a carrot from the Colorman’s bag and crunched off the tip. Étienne made a move to bite the carrot greens and she nudged his nose away with her elbow. “All the students are annoying, with their brooding and their spotty faces. And the good painters are all over on Montmartre or in the Batignolles.”

“Then go find a new painter and live with him,” said the Colorman.

It was her fault he’d had to take an apartment in the Latin Quarter, where he had cached secrets and power she didn’t know about. He wanted to tell her that it was her fault for not getting the Dutchman’s painting, and it was her fault for leaving the baker’s painting behind, and if she hadn’t done that, they might have gotten a nice place in the First Arrondissement, with better shops, Les Halles market, and the Louvre nearby, but she was in that mood she got in sometimes, the mood where heat and memories of playing the Mother of God annoyed her so that she would stab you in the eye with a walking stick, and he didn’t want to press her.