Sacré Bleu

by Christopher Moore

  “Poor Suzanne,” said Berthe. “Victorine haunts her.”

  “The passion she’s jealous of was for the work, not the woman,” he said.

  “I know,” said Berthe. She did know. She’d been there. She had been Victorine Meurent in those times, modeled for those paintings. As Victorine she had seduced, enchanted, inspired, and ultimately killed him, for it was Victorine who had given him the syphilis. But he had never loved Victorine. It was as Berthe Morisot that she had inspired his love and his greatest painting. The painting that only she, Manet, and the Colorman had ever seen. The painting that had been stored in underground Paris for over twenty years.

  “Do you remember now?” she asked, the blue starting to take effect.

  “Yes. Oh yes.”

  She took his hand and led him to the forest at Fontainebleau, where they rented a cabin with a sunroom and she posed on a daybed during the day while he painted, where they made love with the sun on their skin. She led him to a little inn at Honfleur, where the Seine met the sea, and there they drank wine in a café on the mirror-calm harbor, painted side by side, and walked the beach at sunset. She led him to a sunny villa in Provence, near Aix, and she smiled at him from under the brim of a white straw hat, her dark eyes shining like gemstones while he painted.

  Only one other time had Bleu been both the model and the painter, both the inspiration and the creator, and not a woman, then. Berthe’s artistic talent had nothing to do with Bleu, and was profound, and out of time. Women didn’t paint, and if they did, they weren’t recognized for it. But Berthe had been accepted among the Impressionists from the start—had painted alongside them all. In the evening, when they retreated to the cabarets and cafés to discuss art, ideas, and theory, she would go home, sit with the other women, where it was proper, despite the fact that she was, as Manet had said, the best of them. Bleu had seen through Berthe’s painter’s eye, and seen Berthe through Manet’s eye, in his paintings. He adored Berthe, before Bleu possessed her and after she had left. He had gone to great lengths to arrange the circumstances for Berthe’s marriage to his younger brother, Eugène, just so he might be near her—all very proper and aboveboard. She the lady, he the gentleman of society. It was only when Berthe was inhabited by Bleu that Manet’s passion was able to manifest in art and love. Bleu, as Berthe, had taken the painter to places he would have never gone, even as she led him now.

  They stayed in the South for a month together, painting and laughing and lounging in the blue shade of olive trees, until Suzanne returned to Édouard’s bedside with the tea.

  “He’s gone,” Berthe said. “He was sketching, and then suddenly he gasped and he was gone. It was so sudden, I didn’t even have time to call for you.”

  Suzanne stumbled and Berthe caught the tea tray and steered it away to the bureau, then was back at Suzanne’s side.

  Berthe gently pried the canvas from Manet’s hand, smearing the oil sketch as she did, just enough so that it might have been an image of any woman.

  “He called your name,” Berthe said. “He said he wanted to sketch you, and he began drawing with the brush, then he gasped and called your name, ‘Suzanne.’”

  “SYPHILIS HAS BEEN GOOD TO US,” SAID THE COLORMAN.

  “Very good,” Bleu said.

  “Not satisfying, though,” he said.

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “It’s slow; sometimes you don’t want to wait and a pistol is better.”

  “A pistol doesn’t always work for us, as you proved with Vincent,” said Bleu. Then it occurred to her that it might have worked perfectly. What if the Colorman had hidden the painting Vincent had made with the Sacré Bleu, the same way he had hidden the Manet nude? What if he’d shot Vincent to keep her from knowing the painting’s location? What if he had found some new trick to play on her while she was in a trance or in character and couldn’t watch him? He was sneaky to start out, and he’d had a lot of time to get sneakier. He might have been caching paintings away for years, and she would have never known.

  “You need to get ready now,” said the Colorman. He closed the drapes and unfolded an oilcloth over their dining table.

  “Really? You’re going to do it on the table?” asked Bleu.

  “Yes. It’s a sturdy table. Why not?”

  “Because you’ll have to stand on a chair—chairs. Dangerous. We should use the divan.” She started gathering cushions from the couch, and upon lifting the third one discovered a small, nickel-plated revolver stuffed in the gap by the arm. She quickly replaced the cushion before the Colorman noticed she had seen. “Or the floor,” she said. “The floor is best.”

  She swept the oilcloth off the table and spread it out over the floor between the dining room and the parlor. As she undressed, she said, “I found Gauguin, the painter who shared Vincent’s yellow house in Arles. As soon as we have the blue, he is ours. He has a weakness for Polynesian girls.”

  The Colorman stripped off his jacket, then unlaced his shoes and kicked them across the room. “I wondered why you picked this one. There is another painter, too, who bought color from me. Called Seurat, a theorist, though; he may be slow.”

  “Gauguin will be fast. He had the vision he was going to paint before he even met this girl.”

  “Good, we just need to clean up from the last one, then, yes?” The Colorman was nude now, except for a loincloth made of tattered linen, his bent spine and spindly twisted limbs making him appear like the product of a giant rat crossbred with a chanterelle mushroom. Coarse black hair like a boar’s peppered his umber skin. He was setting four small braziers around the oilcloth, building small charcoal fires in each. To the side, he had placed two round earthenware jars the size of pomegranates, each had a leather cord at its neck and a wide cork lid.

  “No cleanup to do,” she said. She was nude now, too, standing aside as the Colorman prepared the site. “Vincent’s brother is taken care of.”

  The Colorman turned slowly toward her, holding a long, black obsidian knife, the hilt wrapped with some sort of tanned animal skin. “The art dealer? You shot the Dutchman’s brother?”

  “Syphilis,” she said. A smile then, looking shy on the naked island girl as she peeked out from behind a curtain of hip-length hair. “See, it’s not always slow, but slow enough to ask them questions before they die.”

  The Colorman nodded. “Good, then we only have to shoot the baker and the dwarf and it’s all done.”

  “Yes, that’s all,” she said. Damn it. This was not at all what she had expected. Not at all.

  “I’m ready,” he said. “Lie down.” He uncapped one of the jars and hung it around his neck like a medallion.

  She lay on her back in the middle of the oilcloth and stretched her arms above her head. The Colorman sprinkled powder into the braziers and a rich aromatic smoke filled the flat. Then he ran about the room hopping on chairs and turning down the gaslights, so that the girl was barely visible in the dim glow of the braziers. He began to chant as he stepped around her, waving the knife over her face. The chant didn’t consist of words, as such, but rhythms, animal sounds given meaning by cadence.

  “No shagging the Vuvuzela,” said Bleu.

  He stopped chanting. “What the fuck is a Vuvuzela?”

  “That’s this girl’s name. No shagging her.” Sometimes the trance was so deep for both of them that when Bleu emerged she was relatively sure she’d been molested. There was never any proof. He was careful and covered his tracks, so to speak, but still, she suspected.

  He looked a little disappointed. His thick brow hung over his eyes a little more than normal. “Maybe when we’re done you can leave her and I can frighten her, no?”

  “Maybe. Make the color, Colorman.”

  He laughed, a wheezing cough of a laugh, and resumed his chant. The girl’s eyes rolled back in her head and she convulsed several times in rhythm to the Colorman’s chant, then she went rigid, bent-backed, and locked that way; only her shoulder blades and her heels still touched
the oilcloth. The Manet painting began to glow then, a dim, throbbing blue light that shone over the whole room.

  The Colorman chanted, danced his wounded-bird march, the painting glowed, and slowly, ever so slowly, the girl began to turn blue as the color rose on her skin. Even the soul-empty body of Juliette looked wide-eyed at the scene as the Colorman lay the blade of the black glass knife on the girl’s skin and began to scrape the blue powder.

  The knife was sharp, but not so sharp that it would shave, and for all his broken-spider awkwardness, the Colorman wielded the knife with smooth precision, shaving the powder off of every surface of the girl’s body, even off her eyelids, and scraping it into the earthenware jar. He rolled her on her side and scraped the delicate curves of her back, rolling her again, back and forth, breaking into a sweat, so that the blue powder covered his own hands, his feet, his thighs. Meanwhile the painting, the masterpiece Manet that almost no one had ever seen, faded by degrees as the Colorman filled his jar. The painting—the passion, the suffering, the intensity, the skill, the time, the life that Manet had put into it, guided by his inspiration—all came out on the girl’s skin as the powder, as the Sacré Bleu. There was always more color from the painting than had gone into it. Sometimes a small painting might yield two jars of the color, especially if it had been created with great sacrifice, great suffering, and great love, for that, too, was part of the formula.

  The Colorman chanted and scraped until the Manet painting was just a blank canvas. It had taken more than an hour. He capped the jar and unslung it from his neck, setting it by the blank canvas.

  The girl relaxed by jerky degrees, like the tension being released in a spring with each click of some cosmic gear, until she lay flat again, peaceful. She opened her eyes, now the only bit of her body not covered in the flat, blue ultramarine powder—even her long dark hair was dusted with the color from the Colorman stepping on it as he worked. She turned on her side and looked at the Colorman, then at the blank canvas.

  “Just one jar,” said the Colorman. He was rolling his glass knife up in a piece of rawhide.

  She was exhausted, felt as if someone had dragged the very life force out of her, which, essentially, someone had. “But there is enough color for a painting?”

  “For many,” said the Colorman. “Unless they paint impasto, like that fucking Dutchman.”

  She nodded and climbed to her feet, stumbled, then caught herself. She looked at Juliette, who was looking back, as blank-faced as a mannequin. Bleu could hear footfalls outside on the landing. The nosy concierge, no doubt, brought up by the Colorman’s chanting, just as she thought.

  “You want to share a bath?” asked the Colorman, leering at the island girl, his loincloth now covered in blue and looking rather more alert than it had during the making of the color.

  “One minute,” she said. Bleu padded to the kitchen, leaving powdery blue footprints on the parquet floor. She wiped her hands on a tea towel, then returned to the parlor. “Did you light the fire under the water?”

  The Colorman grinned. “Before we even started.” He was folding up the oilcloth, coaxing the last of the blue powder into its creases so he could pour it into a jar.

  “Good,” she said. “Then we can clean up.” She went to the writing desk in the foyer, listened—yes, the concierge was still out there—then she pulled a roll of bills out of one of the desk’s pigeonholes, took it to Juliette, and stuffed it in the girl’s bag.

  “Your hat,” said Bleu to the Juliette doll. “The one with the black chiffon band and train.” The hat was on the oak hall tree by the door and Juliette retrieved it and put it on. When she turned back around, Bleu was placing the jar into Juliette’s bag on top of the money.

  “Perfect,” said Bleu. She padded over to the couch, reached between the cushions, and pulled out the Colorman’s revolver. To Juliette she said, “Scream.”

  Juliette screamed, a pathetic little toot of a scream.

  “What are you, a baby chicken?” said Bleu. “Louder and longer!”

  Juliette screamed, much louder and longer this time.

  “What are you doing?” asked the Colorman.

  “Cleaning up,” said Bleu. She pointed the revolver at him and fired. The bullet hit him high in the chest and knocked him back. She cocked the revolver and fired again.

  “Ouch,” he said. Blood fountained from a hole in his sternum.

  “Keep screaming,” she said to Juliette. She cocked and fired again, three more times, until the Colorman lay motionless on the oilcloth, his blood pooling around him in the ultramarine powder. She cocked the revolver, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger. The gun just clicked.

  “Hmmm. Only five shots. Okay, stop screaming and open the door.”

  Juliette pulled open the door to reveal the concierge, a large, severe woman, who peered into the room, her eyes wide with horror.

  And Bleu jumped bodies into Juliette. The island girl dropped the gun and began to scream hideously.

  “I came in from the other room and he was attacking her,” said Bleu as Juliette. “The poor thing had to save herself, I don’t know what horrible thing he was doing to her. I’ll go get a policeman.”

  Juliette whisked by the concierge, down the stairs, and out into the Paris morning.

  Part III

  Amused

  All varieties of picture, when they are really art, fulfill their purpose and feed the spirit.

  —WASSILY KANDINSKY, CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

  He made painting his only muse, his only mistress, his sole and sufficient passion. . . . He looked upon woman as an object of art, delightful and made to excite the mind, but an unruly and disturbing object if we allow her to cross the threshold of our hearths, devouring greedily our time and strength.

  —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, ON THE DEATH OF DELACROIX

  Twenty-three

  CLOSED DUE TO DEATH

  THE SIGN ON THE DOOR OF THE BOUSSOD ET VALADON GALLERY READ “CLOSED DUE TO DEATH.” The three painters stood by the front window, looking in on the small array of paintings displayed in the window, among them one by Gauguin of some Breton women in stiff, white bonnets and blue dresses, threshing grain, and an older still life that Lucien had painted of a basket full of bread. One of Pissarro’s landscapes of Auvers’ wheat fields stood between the two.

  “I would paint more farms,” said Toulouse-Lautrec, “but they always put them so far from the bar.”

  “That bread still life will never sell,” said Lucien. “That painting is shit. My best work is gone. Gone…”

  “How will I survive now?” said Gauguin. “Theo was the only one selling my paintings.”

  Hearing Gauguin’s selfish lament, Lucien suddenly felt ashamed. Theo van Gogh had been a young man, just thirty-three. He had been a friend and supporter to them all, his young wife with a baby boy not even a year old would be distraught, yet the painters whined like kittens pulled from their mother’s teats, blind to anything but their own cold discomfort.

  “Perhaps we should call on Madame van Gogh at home,” said Lucien. “Pay our respects. I can fetch a basket of bread and pastries from the bakery.”

  “But is it too soon?” said Gauguin, realizing, like Lucien, that Theo van Gogh’s death was not a tragedy crafted for his personal misfortune. “Let a day or two pass. If I could prevail upon one of you for a small loan to tide me over.”

  “You came here to ask Madame van Gogh for money?” asked Lucien.

  “No, of course not. I had heard of Theo’s death in Père Tanguy’s shop only minutes before I saw you at Le Rat Mort, I was simply—” Gauguin hung his head. “Yes.”

  Lucien patted the older painter’s shoulder. “I can spare a few francs to get you through until a proper amount of time has passed, then you can go see Madame van Gogh. Perhaps they will find a new dealer to run the gallery.”

  “No,” declared Henri, who had been looking through the door into the gallery. He turned to face them, cocked his thumb
over his shoulder, and looked over the top of his dark pince-nez. “We go see the widow now.”

  Lucien raised an eyebrow at his friend. “I can also lend you a few francs until your allowance arrives.” Then Lucien followed the aim of Henri’s thumb to the red frame of the door. There, at exactly Henri’s eye level, was a single, distinct thumbprint in ultramarine blue—long, narrow, delicate—the thumbprint of a woman.

  JOHANNA VAN GOGH ANSWERED THE APARTMENT DOOR WITH A BABY ON HER hip and a look of stunned horror on her face. “No! No! No!” she said. “No! No! No!”

  “Madame van Gogh—” said Lucien, but that was all he got out before she slammed the door.

  Toulouse-Lautrec nudged Gauguin. “This may not be the opportune time to ask for money.”

  “I wasn’t going to—” began Gauguin.

  “Why are you here?” Madame van Gogh said through the door.

  “It is Lucien Lessard,” said Lucien. “My deepest sympathy for your loss. Theo was a friend. He showed my paintings at the gallery. Messieurs Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec here are also painters who show at the gallery. We were all at Vincent’s funeral. Perhaps you remember?”

  “The little man,” said Johanna. “He must go away. Theo told me I must never let the little man near Vincent’s paintings. Those were his last words: ‘beware of the little man.’”

  “That was an entirely different little man,” said Lucien.

  “Madame, I am not little,” said Henri. “In fact, there are parts of me—”

  Lucien clamped his hand over Henri’s mouth, knocking his pince-nez askew in the process. “This is Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Madame van Gogh, a good friend to Vincent and Theo. Surely Theo mentioned him.”

  “Yes,” said Johanna, the hint of a sob in her answer. “But that was before—”

  “He is very small,” said Gauguin, looking a bit tortured now at the grief in the widow’s voice. “Forgive us, Madame, it is too soon. We will pay our respects another time.” Gauguin turned and began to walk down the hall toward the stairs.