Sacré Bleu

“And the others?”

Monet rolled his eyes and drew a spiral in the air with the stem of his pipe, as if he were directing the orchestra of his memory. Finally he said, “Could be everyone, could be none of them, Lucien. You know painters. If the Louvre should offer to buy this Blue Nude of yours, declare it a national treasure, would you look for some way to give credit to this magical paint?”

“No, I suppose not, but Pissarro—”

“Lucien, look.” With his pipe, Monet directed Lucien’s gaze to the wall of paintings, touching each in the air as if it were a musical note on a staff. “In my lily ponds, there is a big gray carp. I think he must have come in from the Seine when we first built them. He is the same color as the mud at the bottom of the pond, the same color as the shadow of the willows. Sometimes all you can see of him is a light gray line that is the edge of his dorsal fin. Every time I paint the garden, I paint the light on the surface of the pond, the reflections, the lilies floating above, the sky and sun reflected on the water, and even as I paint, he is there. I have to look to see him, and sometimes I don’t know he’s there until he moves, but he is there. There’s no image of him in any of these paintings, but he is in every one of them, under the surface. I know he was there. I can feel him there in these paintings, even if you cannot see him. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” said Lucien. He didn’t understand at all.

“The Colorman is like that carp, Lucien. In all of our paintings, Pissarro’s, Renoir’s, Sisley’s, Morisot’s—even poor Bazille, before he was shot in the war—even back then, from the first days when we all met in Paris, he is there, in all our art, just below the surface.”

BELOW THE SURFACE OF BOULEVARD SAINT-GERMAIN, THE COLORMAN LIMPED across the limestone floors of a chamber that had been cut into the Left Bank nearly two thousand years before. He held a storm lamp above his head, looking for the carved stone that marked the position and level of the room, but the space was so vast that the light evaporated into relentless murk.

“We need to follow the wall,” he said to Étienne, who didn’t particularly like going down steps or through narrow passageways, who thought that the dark was a signal to sleep, not something you should travel around in, and generally that this whole underground expedition was complete bullshit. Étienne was along because the Colorman didn’t like being alone in the dark, and he couldn’t allow Bleu to know about this place.

The entire Latin Quarter was undermined like this, in the most literal sense of the term. These remnants of quarries for limestone, clay, and sand went down ten levels. The upper levels were the oldest, dating back to the time of the Gauls, even before the Romans, but as each generation dug into the banks of the Seine for stone to expand the city, the miners would have to dig deeper, using the floor of the earlier quarry as the ceiling for the newer one, until 1774, when a huge sinkhole opened in rue d’Enfer, swallowing up a whole block of buildings, and a man named Charles-Axel Guillaumot was commissioned by Louis XVI’s royal architects to survey, excavate, and repair the quarries before the entire Latin Quarter sank into the earth. Over twenty years, even through the revolution, when few bureaucrats survived the guillotine, Guillaumot rebuilt the underground, shoring up each level, marking each chamber and passageway to correspond with the street above, until he had reconstructed a stable, safe underground city that plunged twice the depth that any structure at the time stretched to the sky. When the city’s cemeteries began literally to burst at the walls from the weight of centuries of the dead, the bones of millions were moved to the chambers under Montparnasse to make way for the nouveau dead, and the ossuary was christened the “Catacombs” after the ancient crypts of Rome.

The Colorman had entered through the Catacombs’ entrance at boulevard Saint-Jacques. In a quarter-hour he and Étienne had stumbled past the stacked femurs and fibulas of history and were making their way into the deepest part of the underground city where no one ever went.

They came to the carved stone that marked their location and the Colorman set his lamp on the floor, pulled a parchment map from his pocket, and spread it out on the floor.

“Not far now,” he said to Étienne, who was looking at a strand of cobwebs that was streaming from the brim of his new hat, which he felt was just another indicator of what complete bullshit this mission was.

They were so deep now that even the scurry of rats had ceased as there was nothing to draw them down here. The Colorman skirted a wall for the equivalent of a city block, leading Étienne by a rope, until he came to a bronze ring set in the stone about the level of his knees.

“Shhhhh,” shushed the Colorman. He cocked his head and listened. Étienne turned his ears away from the wall and scanned the great room: the sound of their breathing, and a very distant sound of dripping water.

“Did you hear footsteps?” asked the Colorman.

Étienne didn’t answer, as was his policy. However he thought he might have heard the scrape of a shoe; maybe not.

The Colorman grasped the bronze ring, and as his body described the shape of the letter C, he pulled on the ring. There was a scraping sound and a panel in the wall swung away. It was, in fact, a thick oak door, only faced with limestone tiles to match the wall.

“Voilà!” he said, holding the lantern high. The chamber inside was no bigger than the parlor in their apartment, and the lantern illuminated it entirely. Except for a bronze charcoal brazier that shone brightly, and scores of canvases leaning against the far wall, the room was empty. The Colorman shuffled to the canvases and picked one that was nearly as tall as he was, a Manet, a nude of a fair-skinned, dark-haired woman, painted under window light. She was sitting at her vanity in front of an ornate gold mirror, looking back over her shoulder at the painter as if she had expected someone to walk in on her and was pleased about it. More importantly to the Colorman’s purposes, the delicate chair on which she sat was draped with luxurious ultramarine velvet. It was a rare composition and would have been a national treasure as well as a scandal if anyone had known it existed, even now, eight years after the painter’s death. The Colorman, Manet, and the model had been the only ones to ever see the painting.

It was a treasure for the Colorman, too, and he did not like having to use it, but they needed the blue. He carried the painting out into the greater room and leaned it against the wall while he pushed the stone-clad door closed.

“I should hang the lamp from your neck,” the Colorman said to Étienne. “I need both hands to carry this.”

He wrestled with the lamp, tried to tie it around Étienne’s neck, only to find that the smell of burning donkey hair was not something his equine companion was willing to endure.

“We’re going to have to use Goya’s trick,” said the Colorman. He had packed a half dozen thick candles into his satchel, which he attached to the brim of Étienne’s hat, then lit, so that the donkey was the one who led their way out of the underworld, looking like a long-eared birthday cake, while the Colorman stumbled along behind, trying to steer the canvas through the passageways.

“Did you hear something?” asked the Colorman when they were almost back to the entrance of the Catacombs.

Étienne did not answer, because he hadn’t been listening, and he wouldn’t have said anything if he had, because now his new hat was ruined by melted wax, which proved, he thought, that this trip was complete bullshit.

The Colorman threaded the canvas through a narrow door and into a chamber that was lined floor to ceiling with human skulls. “We’ll take the painting to the flat, Étienne, then we’ll go to market and buy you some carrots. I need to buy a new pistol, too. Bleu is not properly cleaning up after herself.”

Twenty

BREAKFAST AT THE BLACK CAT

UPON HIS RETURN FROM THE SHOW IN BRUSSELS, HENRI DRAGGED LUCIEN out of the bakery and across the butte to Le Chat Noir cabaret for breakfast.

“But I own a bakery,” Lucien said, still squirming out of his apron as they crossed the square. “The Chat Noir isn’t even open for breakfast.”

“Today, they are,” said Henri. “Rodolphe Salis has commissioned me to decorate the walls of his cabaret. I must inspect the canvas.”