Afternoons in Paris

by Janice Law

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  Afternoons in Paris

  A Francis Bacon Mystery

  JANICE LAW

  For Anne Galloway

  The Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon spent time in Paris as a teenager and lived for a while with a French family who befriended him. But his adventures in this story, as well as all the characters, are wholly imaginary, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  “Just sneaky-weaky over here and hold this, Francis,” Armand said. Of course, he said it in French because he speaks no English except Hello, Francis, which was how he greeted me when I arrived at the studio in the morning—and if I had stayed over and gotten up early, which I always did, to make a pot of coffee first thing. Hello, Francis, he would say and pat me on the bum and giggle, because he was a right old queen. But nice, I had to say, nice, and, as I’d written more than once to Nan, an excellent teacher.

  What was I learning in the City of Light, the Art Capital of the World? A multitude of things, and much more pleasantly, if less excitingly, than in Berlin. My français was improving by leaps and bounds, although much of it, like my German, was not fit for polite company. This amused Armand, who was affected and fastidious but not as timid as he liked to pretend. He would tell me I was shocking and fan himself, and then he’d get a gleam in his eye and get me to drop whatever work I was doing to help him with his hobby and his passion, his “art” photography.

  His real work was designing rugs, fabrics, wallpapers, and the occasional furniture piece, along with screens and various high-end decorations. His work was very skillful, if not as innovative as the Bauhaus pieces I saw in Berlin. Armand leaned toward art deco, and his fabric designs, full of sinuous flowers and leaves, looked back toward art nouveau.

  I was becoming familiar with them because Armand was lazy. He sketched out the motifs and indicated the colors before he had me work up several repeats in gouache so clients could see the effects in fabric or wallpaper. If a design was approved, he’d set me to doing anywhere from two to five color variations. It was careful, tedious work, but I was learning a great deal about color harmonies and contrasting shapes.

  Because Armand was generous with both praise and criticism, I was becoming technically skillful. Just yesterday, I was working on a version of a tulip pattern in blues and browns, impossible for the flowers but a favorite harmony among fashionable decorators. “Le marché, Francis, le marché, c’est le Dieu,” Armand said, and then he looked at my work a long time with a thoughtful expression. “Trés intéressant,” he said. “But you must not add too many tones. Too expensive for this client. But good. You have a feel for these colors.”

  In my next letter to Nan, I’d be able to assure her that I was making progress, that blues and browns were my colors, that I’d been entrusted with making a first sketch for a rug. All this gave me hope of realizing my ambition to make a home with Nan. Let it be soon! While things were not as bad as they were immediately after the war, jobs were scarce and my dear nanny had been reduced to a wretched position with an elderly invalid in Brighton. She wrote me amusing letters about this gorgon, but I could tell she was unhappy.

  When I was small, I often dreamed of living alone with Nan instead of with Nan and my disapproving and unsympathetic family. Now that I was old enough to make that wish come true, I intended to support us in London as a designer. And Armand was my ticket, because he understood the principles of design and how to work with manufacturers and how to present ideas to clients.

  So when he asked me to sneaky over to the modeling stand, I washed off my brush and left the stylized iris I was painting unfinished. I moved Armand’s lights around for him then waited to see what was to be the subject du jour. Sometimes he had a model, one of the pros, sturdy compact men with well-defined muscles and the strength to hold long and difficult poses in the ateliers. Or one of the garçons off the street, thin and hungry and sometimes larcenous.

  But today, the subject was moi. I would rather be painting. Armand was fine; I didn’t at all mind going to bed with him. It was the elaborate preliminaries that got me down, because le maître required elaborate little dramas. Perhaps I could tell Nan that I was learning the theatrical trade as well.

  Armand put his arms in the air and lifted one foot. “Le danseur,” he said.

  One of our favorites, a little glimpse of Bacchic revels—wouldn’t my old classics master be impressed! In this one, I was a celebrant with a wreath of fake ivy around my brow and a strategic trailing scarf so that Armand could send some images to a respectable gallery. Some. The others were frankly pornographic and were kept for his private amusement.

  He demonstrated each pose for me. I had to keep from giggling, because Armand, as fat as a prosperous butcher, was a most unlikely dancer. And yet he had something I did not: a feel for music, a sense of motion. I tried to repeat the gestures but failed, so that he had to step up on the stand and correct my position. This was par for the course, and half the time we didn’t get any pictures at all but end up en flagrante, a new and useful term, on the modeling stand.

  That was afternoons in the studio. All amusing in a way, but I still had another repeat of the tulips to paint, and if Armand was flirtatious, even kittenish, before, afterward he was all business. I was his apprentice, and while the master can knock off early and head out to a café, the apprentice needs to finish the piecework of the day.

  “The client comes tomorrow, Francis!” he said, collecting his hat and his light jacket and sashaying off.

  Of course, even late work was better than the alternative: imprisonment at some wretched school with Latin declensions or Greek verbs or other topics that would never pay the rent. Still, I hated missing Madame Dumoulin, my gallery-going acquaintance, who had planned to stop by Galerie Billiet this afternoon. Now I would surely be too late. Madame’s tastes were catholic, and although a show of sculptures and toys made of wire sounded less interesting than paint on canvas, I learned something new every time I accompanied her.

  We’d by chance met in the Palais de Luxembourg. I had just finished cleaning the studio—the apprentice must keep things spick-and-span—and wandered in to see the famous Impressionists: bright skies, pretty women, and sporting types on an eternal holiday. Well, mostly. I did like Manet’s Olympia, realistically skinny and cynical, lying naked on her bed while her femme de chambre brings her the most immense and beautiful bouquet and her black cat arches its back as if this visitor (or even moi, the spectator) is deeply unwelcome. I’ve been there and I can attest to the truth.

  The Olympia, Victorine Meurent, was not only a famous model but a painter herself, and now I recognized her features in half a dozen canvases. I knew this thanks to Madame Dumoulin, who stopped next to one of Monet’s Nympheas while I was looking at the huge canvas. Imagine a billboard in the most beautiful blues and greens imaginable, that’s how big the painting seemed, and scattered across it were the water lilies, the botanical nymphs—more echoes of my classics master—with, and this is what interested me, no real center. The whole thing was like a beautiful length of fabric without a single repeat. I was standing there trying to figure out how it worked and what kept the eye from
sliding off the canvas, when I became aware that someone was standing near me, also absorbed in the Monet.

  She was tall with a fair, open face, strong features, and dark hair just beginning to be streaked with gray. She was wearing a simple taupe day dress with a jacket in a darker hue and a matching beret, an effortlessly elegant effect that was another mystery of French design. She smiled and, as if she had read my thoughts, said, “He has devised a new way of organizing the canvas. Am I right?”

  It took me a minute to understand her comment—even working for Armand, I had not had too many discussions about style or construction, his method being to give me a pattern and see that I copied it exactly. It took me a minute more to convey agreement in my weak French.

  She began to point out some of the beauties of the canvas, and, when I indicated that I did not know all the French names of the colors, she repeated the shades carefully for me. She was, she told me, fascinated by Monet’s experiments, by his late works, struggling as he was with cataracts. “How much art has been affected by failing vision,” she remarked. “Degas, too.”

  I expressed my admiration for his portraits.

  “And the dancers?”

  “Marvelous,” I said, “but I am interested in the human face.” This surprised me a little as somehow I had not known that before. But, yes, if I ever painted, I would want to paint faces and bodies, not flowers or landscapes, no matter how beautiful. “Not exactly portraits,” I added.

  “Very wise,” she said. “The photograph has ruined a lot of livelihoods. Shall we visit the Degases?”

  I said, in the best French I could manage, I would be charmed, and she smiled. Without being beautiful or even pretty, she had a lovely face, a good smile. Though I am only interested in sex with men, I like women, especially clever older women who enjoy conversation and ideas.

  “I am Madeline Dumoulin,” she said, “and I visit the Degases as often as I can.”

  I told her my name and mentioned that I was working—studying, actually—with Monsieur Armand.

  “Formidable,” she said. We strolled through the galleries like old acquaintances, talking, despite my weak French, about every painting, every painter, the gallery light, the beauties of the gardens. Her charm made me miss Nan, who is full of eccentric and unconventional ideas and whose conversation is always interesting.

  I did not really expect to meet Madame Dumoulin again, even though I looked in at the Luxembourg several times in the hope that I would. Then one day when I was window-shopping among the little galleries along the rue Bréa and rue de Grande Chaumière, I spotted her at L’Academie. She was wearing a pair of spectacles and examining a painting with the utmost concentration. I overcame my shyness and went inside. “Bonjour, Madame Dumoulin.”

  She turned and her face lit up. “Monsieur Bacon! Quelle surprise!”

  As if we were continuing our previous conversation, she gestured toward the painting, a technically astonishing image of a woman as smoothly and firmly rendered as a motorcar. When I said this, Madame Dumoulin laughed, corrected my grammar, and laughed again.

  “Tres vrai!” she said, and we spent a happy hour admiring and criticizing the work. As we were leaving, she remarked that Thursday was her day for Paris, that she spent all afternoon in one gallery or another and usually took in a concert or a play at night. From then on, I was sure to be around the museums or the galleries on Thursdays, and more often than not, I met Madame Dumoulin, who started to mention plans for seeing such and such a show or visiting certain galleries of the Louvre on her next visit. You could be sure that, work permitting, I would show up.

  So being trapped in the studio on any Thursday afternoon was a real loss, but, though I’d miss Madame for sure, there was still a chance that I’d be finished in time to meet my pal Pyotr. He was foreign, like me, his people Russians who fled after the revolution. They lodged in what he said was appalling squalor out near the Vaugirard slaughterhouses, and Pyotr, who preferred the streets, had become a real Parisian garçon despite his broad shoulders and his wide, Slavic face. He was stylish in his own way, a demi-apache look with his neck scarf and striped shirt. He wore a big dark hat and a surly expression, projecting a mostly bogus air of menace that was attractive to the punters.

  I saw the charm, although he was too young for my taste, and I was too poor for his. He had no interest in art, either, associating painters with the poverty that he was determined to escape. “Give me a fat wallet any day,” he said often enough to make me suspect that he was also a pickpocket. I know that he kept an eye out for the flics when we were together, which was reassuring in a way.

  What had we in common? Only food. He knew every good, cheap restaurant on the Left Bank, and if we met up, I planned to treat him to a decent dinner since Mother had sent my allowance. This was to be followed by an evening trolling the cafés of Montparnasse, where he would look for trade, and I would try to interest an English-speaking foreigner. Schoolboy exercises of la plume de ma tante and le table de mon oncle did not prepare me to chat up a French painter—or pick up a French sailor. More’s the pity.

  But I was learning! Also the decorator’s trade, a craft requiring concentration and a steady hand, which that particular day I lacked—a big blotch of indigo paint landed squarely on a beige-and-cream highlight. I exhausted my vocabulary in three languages as I struggled to blot up the paint, then wasted time trying to cover over the remains of the error, a difficult matter in gouache, even if it is opaque. Half an hour later, I gave up, got a new sheet and began the whole tedious exercise again. By the time I was finished, the famous lavender dusk of Paris was fading into darkness, the streetlights were coming on, and my pal Pyotr would already have set his course for Le Select, the Dôme, the Café de la Rotonde, or even the Parnasse Bar, tended by the famous Jimmy, one of my countrymen.

  Personally, I favored Le Select, even though my French was too poor yet for real conversation, because the Surrealists met there. Pyotr gave me no help with them, and he even refused to introduce me to the one rather shabby Russian painter he recognized. “No, no, Francis,” he said. “It is a life of poverty and misery, fit only for Jews and Frenchmen. Flee it as you would the devil.” He was so moved that he broke into Russian, which made him different somehow, more mysterious, more threatening. Pyotr had hidden depths, I suspected, and more to him than the average street hustler. I found that interesting, and I was disappointed to miss him.

  Still, the night held promise. Fortified by lamb stew with white beans and a pichet of red wine, I ventured along Vaugirard to the boulevard du Montparnasse and the ex-pats’ playground. So many Americans, so many English, all rejoicing in the cheap franc. Me, too, although the pound does not stretch as far as the almighty dollar that has brought Yank writers and painters by the boatload.

  They came for art and stayed to drink on the cheap and swan around with their money. I disliked their showy wealth, even if a couple of the black chorus boys were marvelous looking, as was Vander Clyde, the Texas aerialist who performed as the gorgeous Barbette on the wire. But they were all workingmen like Pyotr, my guide to Paris de nuit, whom I spotted at one of the Dôme’s outside tables.

  He was sitting with a large, rawboned man wearing a bad suit and a cloth cap. The cap hid the man’s eyes but not his heavy ill-shaven jaw and thin, wide mouth. He was not your average boulevardier by any means, and he did not look as if he’d be a profitable companion for Pyotr either. I smelled mysterious Russian politics and gave a wave, intending to walk on, but my friend jumped up and called me over.

  “Mon amie, Francis,” he told his companion, adding, “Il est l’anglais,” although I’d told him often enough that I’m Irish born.

  The man glowered at me, and I rather doubt my reception would have been any different if he’d known I’d sprung from Mother Ireland. He did not respond to my greeting but leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette before saying something in Russian
to Pyotr. He didn’t seem happy to see me, and I told Pyotr that I would not stay.

  “Non, non, Francis,” Pyotr said. At this, the mystery man signaled the waiter and ordered me a vin blanc.

  Had I read the signals wrong? I’d gotten good at scenting hostility in Berlin, but maybe Russian manners were different, because he leaned forward and, in heavily accented French, introduced himself. He was Igor, no surname mentioned, and my friend Pyotr was taking him around to see the sights.

  Right. I mentioned the Louvre and Notre-Dame and Luxembourg Garden and Palace, and he nodded as if taking this all in for his next walking tour. Now and again, he spoke to Pyotr in Russian, and I sensed that I was being evaluated in some way.

  “Francis est tres gentil,” Pyotr said, but I didn’t think Igor was too concerned with my manners.

  He said something else in Russian, but though Pyotr shook his head, the Russian persisted. After a moment, he turned to me. “We are meeting a friend,” he said in slow, rough French. “Three is an irregular number.”

  I agreed that three could be awkward and tried to exchange glances with Pyotr.

  “It would be pleasing if you would join us.”

  “For a little time, perhaps.”

  “A walk,” said Igor. “Une promenade.”

  Pyotr said something in Russian but was cut off with a gesture. Igor then ordered another round of vin blanc. Pyotr and I sat there looking awkward; Igor, in contrast, now seemed quite at his ease. Our wine disappeared, and I was about to remark on the time, invent another appointment, remember something left undone at Armand’s studio, when Igor leaped to his feet and waved over another Russian, this one tall and lean with hollow cheeks and glittering gray eyes behind little gold-rimmed spectacles.

  If Igor looked like a street tough or a rustic from some remote farm, Lev suggested a professor or a bureaucrat in exile. His clothes were old, many seasons out of style, but of good quality, and his rapid French sounded polished. When he shook hands, I noticed that his fingers were stained to the second joint: a chain-smoker or a chemist.