Sacré Bleu

Bleu wasn’t about to tell the Colorman about the current state of Lucien’s Blue Nude.

“Remember this?” The Colorman dragged a large canvas from behind the divan where Juliette had been bent over. She really had been dusting, dusting the surface of an oil painting with her chemise.

“Berthe?” said Bleu, a little stunned. She stepped away from the painting and sat down gently on one of the Louis XVI chairs. “I thought you used this painting twenty-five years ago. Where…?”

Making Sacré Bleu required a painting, a stained glass window, an icon, a fresco—some work of art that had been made with the color, but when she was entranced, she didn’t always know which work of art the Colorman had used. But the color had to be made. Without it neither she nor the Colorman could go on. There was always a price, and the paintings were part of it. She had never expected to see this painting again.

“I had it lying around,” said the Colorman. “She is lovely, no?”

“Don’t try to distract me, Poopstick. If you had this lying around, why did you have to shoot Vincent? Why the panic about Lucien’s painting? Why all this drama and desperation?”

“I think maybe she is finer even than your Juliette,” said the Colorman. “The dark eyes—the fair skin—beautiful and clever.”

Berthe Morisot had, perhaps, next to Juliette, been the most beautiful woman Bleu had inhabited, certainly in the modern era, but Manet had painted this so long ago—how and why was it here now? She tried to calm herself, her anger at the Colorman.

“He really did adore her,” she said after a moment.

“It looks like he wanted to walk into the painting and die with her.”

“He did,” said Bleu.

“You were the best of them, Berthe,” he said. Berthe Morisot—Édouard Manet, 1872

Paris, April 1883

MANET WAS DYING. HE WAS SWEATING, SHIVERING WITH FEVER, AND THE stump, where they had severed his left foot a week ago, felt as if it was on fire. His wife, Suzanne, begged him to take the morphine for the pain, but he would not have it. He would not give up the clarity of his last hours on earth, even if the only vivid element left was pain.

The doctor called it locomotor ataxia because a gentleman’s physician does not tell a grieving wife that her husband is dying of late-stage syphilis.

Until the disease descended, he’d been at the height of his abilities. Only two years ago the state had made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, fulfilling a lifelong aspiration, but even now, those paintings that had earned him the honor, Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, attracted scandal whenever they were exhibited. The revolution he had started but had never joined, Impressionism, was coming into its own, with those students who had gathered around him like puppies at the 1863 Salon des Refusés—Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Degas—all becoming lions in their own right, as painters, anyway, if not yet financial successes. They all had come and gone from this room, paid tribute and said their good-byes, although none would admit that was what he was doing. But no more. No one should see the painter Manet like this.

“Suzanne, chérie, no more visitors. Please, give them my regrets and my thanks, but send them away.”

Suzanne sent them away, and amid the tears she cried every day, between the breathless moments of loss that she was already feeling, a few were tears of relief, of triumph, of joy—and immediately she felt ashamed. She had not come, would not come. Victorine, who had posed for those paintings so long ago, the haughty whore-model from the demimonde, had not come. Victorine, whose gaze Suzanne had borne over a thousand evenings as the nude stared down from the canvas, judging. Olympia, hung in the parlor, with the tiny, taut Victorine always watching the stout Suzanne lumber around her own house like an ox, going about the mundane business of caring for her home and her husband. Édouard’s greatest work. Victorine would be immortal, and ever thin, and poor Suzanne a lonely, fat, grieving footnote: the Dutch piano teacher who married her student. Édouard loved her, she knew that, she felt that, but there had been something else, a part of him she had never known, and she could see, every day, when she looked into the eyes of the woman in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, that Victorine had.

The bell rang and Suzanne heard the maid let someone in.

“Madame Morisot Manet,” the maid announced, leading Berthe in from the foyer. Berthe wore a dress of lavender silk, trimmed in white lace, and a hat with a diaphanous white chiffon veil. Berthe, so often dark of demeanor and aspect that Suzanne could not think of her except in black Spanish lace, as if eternally grieving, but today, bless her, she had come calling dressed like a bright spring flower.

“Suzanne,” said Berthe, rolling back her veil and embracing Édouard’s wife, kissing her cheeks. She stepped away but held on to Suzanne’s hands, squeezed them as she said, “How can I help?”

“He’s in so much pain,” said Suzanne. “If I could just get him to take the morphine.”

“I heard that he wasn’t seeing visitors.”

Suzanne smiled. “No, but he will see you. Come.”

Before they entered the bedroom, Suzanne turned to Berthe and whispered, “His color is bad, don’t let him see that you’re distressed.”

Berthe dismissed the thought with a nod. Suzanne opened the door.

“Édouard, look who has come to call. It’s Berthe.”

Manet fought to push himself up in the bed and despite the painful effort, he smiled.

“Berthe!” He said nothing else.

There was a sparkle of joy in his eyes and seeing it brought tears to Suzanne’s. She squeezed his hand and turned away. “Let me fetch us all some tea,” she said, and she hurried out of the room, closed the door, and once in the hall was wracked by a great, heaving, silent sob.