“Nonsense, this painting is shit,” said Henri.
“It’s not shit,” said Lucien, really having trouble trying to figure out what, exactly, was their plan. It might not be a masterpiece, but it wasn’t shit.
“It’s not shit,” van Gogh confirmed.
“Thank you, Theo,” Lucien said. “Your opinion means a lot to me, which is why we’ve brought the painting to you unfinished. I’m thinking of painting a scarf—”
“Do you have all of Vincent’s paintings here now?” interrupted Henri.
Theo looked startled at the mention of his brother. “Yes, I have them all here in Paris, although not hanging, obviously.”
“In the lot of his last paintings, were there any figure paintings? Any paintings of women?”
“Yes, one of Madame Gachet; three, I think, of the young girl whose family owns the inn at Auvers, where Vincent was living; and one of the innkeeper’s wife. Why?”
“Often, when an artist is tormented, a woman is involved.”
Surprisingly, Theo van Gogh smiled at this. “Not just artists, Henri. No, when Vincent first went to Arles he mentioned a woman briefly in one of his letters, but it was the way you talk about a pretty girl you see walking in the park, wistful, I think you would call it. Not as if he knew her. Mostly he wrote about painting. You know him—knew him. Painting is all he talked about.”
“Was there something about his painting that would have—that was causing him distress?”
“Enough distress to kill himself, you mean?” Now Theo lost his semblance of gentlemanly detachment and gasped as if unable to catch his breath.
“I’m sorry,” Lucien said, steadying Theo with a hand on his back.
In a second van Gogh snapped back into his clerk aspect, as if they were talking about the provenance of a painting, not the death of his brother.
“He kept saying, ‘Don’t let anyone see her, don’t let anyone near her.’ He was talking about a painting he sent from Arles, but I received no figure painting from Arles.”
“And you don’t know who ‘she’ was?”
“No. I don’t. Perhaps Gauguin knows; he was there when Vincent had his breakdown in Arles. But if there was a woman, he never mentioned her.”
“So it wasn’t a woman…” Henri seemed perplexed.
“I don’t know why my brother killed himself. No one even knows where he got the pistol.”
“He didn’t own a gun?” asked Henri.
“No, and neither did Dr. Gachet. The innkeeper only had a shotgun for hunting.”
“You were a good brother to him,” said Lucien, his hand still on Theo’s back. “The best anyone could expect.”
“Thank you, Lucien.” Van Gogh snapped a handkerchief from his breast pocket and ran it quickly under his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m still not recovered, obviously. I will find a place for your picture, Lucien. Give me some time to put some of the prints in storage and sell a few paintings.”
“No, that’s not necessary,” said Lucien. “I need to work on her. I meant to ask you, as an expert, do you think I should paint a scarf tied around her neck? I was thinking in ultramarine, to draw the eye.”
“Her eyes draw the eye, Lucien. You don’t need a scarf. I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to paint, but this picture looks finished to me.”
“Thank you,” said Lucien. “That helps. I would still like to work on the texture of the throw she is lying on.”
“You will bring it back, then? Please. It really is a magnificent picture.”
“I will. Thank you, Theo.”
Lucien nodded to Henri, signaling him to pick up his end of the painting.
“Wait,” said Henri. “Theo, have you ever heard of the Colorman?”
“You mean Père Tanguy? Of course. I have always bought Vincent’s paints from him or Monsieur Mullard.”
“No, not Tanguy or Mullard, another man. Vincent may have mentioned him.”
“No, Henri, I’m sorry. I know only of Monsieur Mullard and Père Tanguy in Pigalle. Oh, and Sennelier by the École des Beaux-Arts, of course, but I’ve had no dealings with him. There must be half a dozen in the Latin Quarter to serve the students, as well.”
“Ah, yes, thank you. Be well, my friend.” Henri shook his hand.
Theo held the door for them, glad that they were going. He liked Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent had liked him, and Lucien Lessard was a good fellow, always kind, and, it seemed, was turning into quite a fine painter. He didn’t like lying to them, but his first loyalty must always be to Vincent.
“THE PAINTING IS NOT SHIT,” SAID LUCIEN.
“I know,” said Henri. “That was just part of the subterfuge. I am of royal lineage; subterfuge is one of the many talents we carry in our blood, along with guile and hemophilia.”
“So you don’t think the painting is shit?”
“No. It is superb.”
“I need to find her, Henri.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Lucien, she nearly killed you.”
“Would that have stopped you, when we first sent you away from Carmen?”
“Lucien, I need to talk to you about that. Let’s go to Le Mirliton. Sit. Have a drink.”
“What about the painting?”
“We’ll take the painting. Bruant will love it.”
FROM INSIDE A RECESSED DOORWAY AT THE REAR OF SACRÉ-COEUR, SHE watched them walk her picture out the door of the gallery. They moved like a pair of synchronized drunkards, up the middle of the street, sideways, trying to keep the edge of the painting pointed into the breeze. Once they rounded the first corner she quickstepped down the stairs, across the small square, and into Theo van Gogh’s gallery.
“Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed. “Who is this painter?”
Theo van Gogh looked up from his desk at the beautiful, fair-skinned brunette in the periwinkle dress who appeared to be climaxing on his gallery floor. Although he was sure he hadn’t seen her before, she looked strangely familiar.
“Those were painted by my brother,” Theo said.
“He’s brilliant! Do you have any more of his work I could see?”
Sixteen
IT’S PRONOUNCED BAS’TAHRD
“He was two parts talent, three parts affectation, and five parts noise.” Aristide Bruant (poster)—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892
OH LOOK, IT IS THE GREAT PAINTER TOULOUSE-LAUTREC ACCOMPANIED by some dog-shit unknown bastard!” cried Aristide Bruant as they entered the half-lit cabaret. He was a stout, stern-faced man, in a grand, broad-brimmed hat, high-heeled sewer-cleaner boots, a black cape, and a brilliant red scarf. He was two parts talent, three parts affectation, and five parts noise. Le Mirliton was his cabaret, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was his favorite painter, which is why Henri and Lucien were dragging the blue nude into the bar in the middle of the day.
“When you break a tooth on the gravel in your blackberry tart,” Lucien called back, “it will be a present from that same dog-shit unknown bastard!”
“Oh ho!” shouted Bruant, as if speaking to a full house of revelers instead of the four drunken butchers falling asleep over their beers in the dinge of the corner and a bored barmaid. “It appears that I have failed to recognize Lucien Lessard, the dog-shit baker and sometime dog-shit painter.”
Bruant wasn’t being particularly unkind to Lucien. Everything at Le Mirliton was served with a side order of abuse. It was Bruant’s claim to fame. Businessmen and barristers came from all the best neighborhoods of Paris to sit on the rough benches, rub elbows on greasy tables with the working poor, and be outwardly blamed for society’s ills by the anarchist champion and balladeer of the downtrodden, Aristide Bruant. It was all the rage.
Bruant strode across the open floor of the cabaret, snatching up his guitar, which had been resting on a table, as he went.
Lucien set down his end of the painting, faced Bruant, and said, “Strum one chord on that thing, you bellowing cow, and I will beat you to death with it and dismember your corpse with the strings.” Luc
ien Lessard may have been tutored by some of the greatest painters in France, but he hadn’t ignored the lessons from the butte’s finest crafter of threats, either.
Bruant grinned, held the guitar up by his face, and mimed strumming. “I’m taking requests…”
Lucien grinned back. “Two beers with silence.”
“Very good,” said Bruant. Without missing a step, he turned as if choreographed, docked the guitar on an empty table, and headed back to the bar.
Two minutes later Bruant was sitting with them at a booth, and the three of them were looking at the blue nude, which was propped up against a nearby table.
“Let me hang it,” said Bruant. “A lot of important people will see it in here, Lucien. I’ll put her up high, over the bar, so no one will get any ideas about touching her. They might not buy it, because their wives won’t let it in the house, but they’ll see it and they’ll know your name.”
“You have to show the painting, Lucien,” Henri said to Lucien. “We can put together a show later—maybe Theo van Gogh will sponsor it, but that will take time. I can’t organize it. I need to go to Brussels, and to show with the Twenty Group, and I have promised to print new posters for the Chat Noir and the Moulin Rouge.”
“And he owes me a cartoon for Le Mirliton,” said Bruant. He irregularly published an arts magazine with the same name as his cabaret, and all of Montmartre’s young artists and writers contributed to it.
“All right, then,” said Lucien. “But I don’t know what to ask for it.”
“It shouldn’t be for sale,” said Henri.
“I would agree,” said Bruant. “That’s the power of the coquette, isn’t it? Make them want it, but don’t let them have it. Just tease.”
“But I need a sale.” And therein lay the artist’s dilemma: to paint for filthy lucre was a compromise of principles, but to be an artist who didn’t sell was to be anonymous as an artist.
“If she’ll sell now, she’ll sell later,” said Henri. “The bakery makes enough money for you to live.”
“Fine, fine,” Lucien said, throwing his hands up. “Hang her. But if someone makes an offer, I want to know about it.”
“Excellent,” said Bruant, hopping up from his seat. “I’ll go borrow a ladder. You can supervise the hanging.”
When the singer had gone, Henri lit a cheroot with a wooden match and leaned into the cloud of smoke he’d just expelled over the table.
“Before he returns, Lucien, I need to tell you something—warn you.”
“Don’t be so ominous, Henri. It doesn’t suit you.”
“It’s just that, Juliette—while I will help you find her, if you wish—I need to warn you—you may not want to find her.”
“Of course I want to find her, Henri. I’m a wreck without her.”
“I think you’re romanticizing your time with her. You were a wreck when you were with her, too.”
“I was painting.”
“That’s not the point.”
“That’s always the point.”
“She was definitely living with the Colorman.”
“Are you saying she was secretly his mistress? That can’t be. Who lets his mistress spend so much time with another man?”
“I’m saying they have an arrangement.”
“He’s her pimp, then? Is that what you’re saying? Are you saying that the woman I love is a whore?”
“You make it sound so sordid. Some of my best friends are whores.”
“That’s not the point. She is not a whore, he is not her pimp. You think everyone is a pimp. That’s why you always lose the game.”
Henri liked to play a game he called Guess the Pimp in the ballroom of the Moulin de la Galette. He and a group of friends (sometimes Lucien included) would sit at the edge of the crowded dance hall and try to guess which men in the booths were pimps tending to their girls and which were simply workingmen or rascals trying to make time with a pretty thing. They would place their bets, then one of the Moulin’s doormen would come by and confirm or disprove their suspicions. Henri almost always lost.
“Not her pimp,” said Henri. “I don’t know what he is to her, but what I need you to ask yourself is, what if you found Juliette and she didn’t know you?”
“What?”
“Lucien, you know after I followed her to the Colorman’s apartment, I spoke to him.”
“I know this, Henri. You thought he was lying about knowing Vincent.”
“I’m sure he was lying about Vincent, but what I didn’t tell you is I asked about Carmen.”
“Carmen? Why?”
“When I saw him outside of the Dead Rat, the day you ran into Juliette, I remembered seeing Carmen with him.”
“No!”
“You know I couldn’t remember much of my time with Carmen.”
“Absinthe,” said Lucien. “That’s why we sent you to your mother’s. It was for your own good.”
“Damn it, Lucien, it wasn’t the absinthe. You heard Dr. Gachet. Renoir, Monet, all of them have had these moments of memory lapse, of hallucinations, going back years. Renoir remembers the Colorman but nothing about him. You’ve had them, and you haven’t been drinking absinthe, have you? It’s the color. Something in the color. And it doesn’t just affect the painter. I found Carmen, Lucien. I found her and she had no idea who I was. She blamed it on a fever. She almost died after I left.”
Lucien felt his face go numb at the revelation, both over what he had done to Henri and what it might mean to him and Juliette. He, Maurice Guibert, and Émile Bernard had physically dragged Henri out of his studio, bathed him, dressed him, then Guibert and Bernard had taken Henri to his mother’s castle and stayed there with him until he sobered up.
“You were killing yourself, Henri.”
“I was painting.”
“We were trying to be good friends to—”
“She doesn’t know me, Lucien,” Lautrec blurted out. “She doesn’t remember ever having met me.” He ground his cheroot out on the floor (as Bruant not only allowed but required), then removed his pince-nez and pretended to wipe the fog from the lenses on his cravat. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. Juliette may not even know you.”
“She will. We’ll go to the Batignolles now. We’ll save her—break whatever kind of hold the Colorman has over her. She’ll understand about my mother braining her with a crêpe pan. You’ll see.”
Henri shook his head. “You think I haven’t gone back? You were unconscious for a week, Lucien, and we were certain she was the cause. Of course I went back to where she lived. They are gone.”
“I thought you were drunk in a brothel the whole time I was out.”
“Well, yes, I was drunk, but I wasn’t always in a brothel. I took a taxi to their apartment—but I did take two whores with me in case of an emergency. The concierge said that when she checked on them one morning, the Colorman and the girl were just gone. Not a word.”
“We’ll find her,” said Lucien, realizing even as he said it that they’d both been this way before.
“Like we found her when she left two and a half years ago? Like I found Carmen after I came back from Mother’s?”
“But we did find them.”
“We found them because of the Colorman.”
“Then we’ll find the Colorman again.”
“We are painters,” said Henri. “We don’t know how to find things.”
“Speak for yourself. I’ll find her.”
Henri sighed and drained his beer, then looked to the bar. Bruant hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone to fetch the ladder. The butchers still dozed in the corner. The barmaid had her head propped on her hands and was on her way to dozing off as well. “Fine, then. Let’s move your painting behind the bar. Then we’ll go see your friend Professeur Bastard.”
“Le Professeur? But he’s a lunatic.”
“I don’t think he is,” said Henri. “I think he is just eccentric.”
“Well his father was a lunatic,” sa
id Lucien, draining the last of his beer as well.
“So is my father and so was your father.”
“Well, yes, he was eccentric.”
“Then shall we go see if Le Professeur has found the secret of our Colorman’s paints?”
“SHOULDN’T WE BE GOING TO THE ACADÉMIE?” ASKED LUCIEN AS THEY MADE their way down the back of the butte and through the Maquis. It was well past midday now and there was all manner of industry, from goat milking to rag picking to rat racing, going on in the shantytown. (Yes, real rat racing. The old Professeur had never been able to train his rats to perform Ben-Hur, but when he died, the junior Bastard gave the track and the race-trained rodents to some local boys, who started a betting operation. They were grown men now and had staged twenty races a day for nearly fifteen years. In doing so they had also managed to prove that even in the most squalid slum, full of bandits, beggars, whores, con men, lechers, drunkards, layabouts, and egregious weasels, it was possible to attract an even more unsavory element. Le Professeur Deux, pioneering the budding demi-science of sociology, had done a study.)
“He told me he would be home today,” said Henri, who snatched up his walking stick and tapped on Le Professeur’s weathered plank door with the brass pommel. There was the sound of steam being vented, as if several espresso machines were all winding down at once, and the Professeur Émile Bastard opened the door and stepped awkwardly out of the doorway, nearly bumping his head on one of the open ceiling rafters.
“Gentlemen. Welcome. Come in, please. I’ve been expecting you. Lucien, so good to see you.”
“And you,” said Lucien.
Toulouse-Lautrec limped in but looked over his shoulder at Lucien and whispered, “I stand corrected. He is a lunatic.”
Lucien nodded in agreement as he shook hands with Professeur Bastard. The Professeur was a very tall man—his thin, aquiline aspect put one in mind of a tweedy wading bird of some sort, an academically inclined egret, perhaps—but today he stood at least a foot taller than his normal height. He had to duck under each ceiling joist as he led them into the parlor in halting, careful steps. Bastard was wearing some kind of stilts under his trousers, fitted with shoes to appear to be his own feet. They crunched hazelnut shells strewn across the floor as he walked.
Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Page 18