Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art

by Christopher Moore

  At only thirty-one, Seurat felt used up, or at least weary of standing still, tired of the intellectual art of theory; he wanted to grasp the visceral, the sensual—grab the movement of life before it got away. Perhaps The Circus, with all the figures off balance, ready to tumble down on each other in the next second, would be his portal back into life.

  As he placed a precise and tiny dot of red in the clown’s hair, there was a knock at the door. Life interrupting art. He wanted to be angry, but in fact he was grateful. Perhaps it would be a delivery of supplies, or better, Signac or Bernard dropping by to see the progress on his painting. So much easier to discuss theory than to apply it.

  He opened the door and nearly dropped the brushes, still splayed out of his left hand. It was a young woman, stunning in a satin dress the color of cinnamon, fair skinned with dark, nearly black hair, eyes as blue as sapphires.

  “Pardon me, monsieur, but I understood that this is the studio of the painter Seurat. I am a model in need of work.”

  Seurat stood for an embarrassing moment just looking at her, sketching her in his mind’s eye, then she smiled and jolted him out of his imagination. “I’m sorry, mademoiselle, but I have all my studies for the painting I am working on. Perhaps when I begin another—”

  “Please, Monsieur Seurat, I am told that you are the greatest painter in Paris, and I am desperate for the work. I will pose nude. I don’t mind. I won’t get cold or tired.”

  Seurat forgot completely what he meant to say next. “But, mademoiselle—”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, monsieur,” she said, extending her hand. “My name is Dot.”

  “Come in,” said Seurat.

  WHEN LUCIEN AND THE PROFESSEUR ARRIVED AT MADAME JACOB’S CRÉMERIE, Toulouse-Lautrec was already seated at one of only three tall café tables, eating Camembert spread on bread, drinking espresso with a touch of cream floated over it. Seated with him, still in her overdone theatrical makeup, was a very thin, very tired Jane Avril. Lucien had never seen her in person but recognized her immediately from Henri’s drawings and posters.

  “Lucien, Professeur, have you met the great, the wonderful, the beautiful Jane Avril? Jane, my friends—”

  “Enchanté,” said the singer. She slid off her stool, steadied herself on the table, then presented an elegantly gloved hand each to Lucien and the Professeur, over which each bowed. She turned back to Henri, lifted his bowler hat, and placed a kiss on his temple. “And now, puppet, since you have someone to look after you, I am going home.” She raised an eyebrow to Lucien. “He wouldn’t let me go home unless I took him with me. Then what would I do with him?”

  Lucien saw her to the door and offered to help her find a cab, but she elected to stumble down the long stairway to Pigalle, saying the brisk morning air might sober her up enough to sleep.

  When Lucien joined them at the table, Henri threw a bread crust down on his plate. “I am a traitor, Lucien. I’m ashamed you’ve found me here eating some stranger’s bread. I don’t blame you if you abandon me. Everyone does. Carmen. Jane. Everybody.”

  Lucien signaled to Madame Jacob, who stood among her cheeses, to bring coffee for him and the Professeur and shrugged. He’d seen her at the bakery only an hour ago, so the pleasantries of the day had already been exchanged.

  “First, Henri, you are eating my bread. Madame Jacob has been serving Lessard bread for fifty years, so you’re not a traitor. And Mademoiselle Avril did not abandon you, she simply went home, exhausted, no doubt, after watching you drink all night, and if things had gone differently, and she’d taken you home and taken you to bed, you’d either be passed out or singing annoying sailor songs. Yours is a false melancholy, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec.”

  “Well,” said Henri, picking up his bread again. “In that case, I feel better. How are you, Professeur? Anything interesting in Spain?”

  “There has been a new cave discovered in the south, at Altamira. The drawings on the walls may be the oldest that have ever been found.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Lucien.

  “Well, the interesting thing about that is my colleague and I have formulated a relative date, only relative, because of the color used in the drawings. It seems there is no blue in any of the drawings that remain.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Lucien.

  “You see, mineral-based pigments for blue, azurite, copper oxide, and lapis lazuli, were not used until after three thousand B.C., when the Egyptians began to use them. Before that, the blue pigments used in Europe were all organic, like woad, which is made from crushing and fermenting the leaves of the woad shrub. Over the years, the organic pigments deteriorated, molded, were eaten by insects, so only the mineral pigments like clays, chalks, charcoals remain. If there’s no blue pigment in the drawing, we can assume that it is at least five thousand years old.”

  “The Picts of Scotland used woad to paint themselves, didn’t they?” asked Henri.

  The Professeur seemed surprised at the painter’s interjection. “Why yes, yes they did. How did you know that?”

  “One of the few truths of history the priests at my school actually taught us.”

  “That’s not true at all,” said Lucien. Juliette had just told them about the Picts.

  The Professeur drained his espresso and signaled to Madame for another. He seemed very excited now. “That is not all I saw in Spain. I may have some disturbing news about your Colorman. You see, when I was in Madrid, I went to the Prado and looked at their entire collection. It took days. But it was in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch that I saw the figure, amid hundreds of others in The Garden of Earthly Delights, a depiction of hell. It was a knotted, apelike figure, with spindly limbs, and he was torturing a young woman with a knife. And his hands and feet were stained with blue.”

  “But, Professeur,” said Toulouse-Lautrec, “I saw the Boschs at the Uffizi in Florence when I went there with my mother as a boy. I remember that they are all filled with twisted, tortured figures. They gave me nightmares.”

  “True, but there was a plaque depicted in the painting, hung around the figure’s neck, and on it was writing in Sumerian cuneiform. As you know, in addition to my other studies, I am an amateur necrolinguist—”

  “It means he likes to lick the dead,” explained Henri.

  “It means he studies dead languages,” corrected Lucien.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” said the Professeur.

  “My education is shit,” said Henri. “Lying priests.”

  “Anyway,” said the Professeur. “I was able to make out the cuneiform and translate it. The plaque read ‘Colorman.’ As long as three hundred years ago, there was someone acting as your Colorman. I think it must have been some kind of warning from Bosch.”

  “It wasn’t a Colorman, it was the same Colorman,” said Lucien.

  “I don’t understand,” said the Professeur. “Then he would be—”

  Lucien held up a hand to stop the Professeur. “I told you, we have much to tell you. There’s a reason that I said that Juliette killed a man whom you saw walking by not an hour ago.”

  Lucien and Henri told the Professeur of the Colorman, the Picts, all that Juliette had told them, all that they had experienced, and when they had finished, finally, and admitted that it was now on them, two painters, to vanquish the Colorman and free the muse, the Professeur said, “By Foucault’s dangling pendulum, I have to rethink it all. Science and reason are a sham, the Age of Reason is a ruse, it’s been magic and ritual all along. If this is true, can we even trust Descartes? How do we even know that we exist, that we are alive?”

  “A question that often plagues me,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “If you’d like to accompany me to rue des Moulins, I know some girls there who, if they cannot convince you that you are alive, will at least help soothe your anxiety about being deceased.”

  “And now, puppet, since you have someone to look after you, I am going home.” Jane Avril (poster)—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893


  Twenty-seven

  THE CASE OF THE SMOLDERING SHOES

  TWO MEN IN BROAD-BRIMMED HATS, ONE TALL, ONE OF AVERAGE HEIGHT, stood at the taxi stand at the east end of the Cimetière du Montparnasse, looking toward the entrance to the Catacombs across the square. One carried a black ship’s signal lantern with a Fresnel lens, which he held by his side as if no one would notice; the taller one had a long canvas quiver slung over his shoulder, from which protruded the wooden legs of an artist’s easel. Both wore long coats. Other than the lantern, they were conspicuous only in that they were standing at a taxi stand, at midday, with no intention of taking a taxi, and the shoes of the taller man were smoldering.

  “Hey, your shoes are smoking,” said the cabbie, who leaned against his hack, chewing an unlit cheroot and scowling. He had already asked them three times if they needed a taxi. They didn’t. They were both peeping out from under the brims of their hats, surreptitiously checking on the progress of a little man in a bowler hat who was leading a donkey across the square.

  “It is no concern of yours, monsieur,” said the tall man.

  “I think he’s going into the Catacombs,” said the shorter one. “This may be it, Henri.”

  “Are you two detectives?” asked the cabbie. “Because if you are, you are horrible at it. You should read this Englishman Arthur Conan Doyle to see how it is done. The new one is called The Sign of the Four. His Sherlock Holmes is very clever. Not like you two.”

  “The Catacombs?” Henri pulled his pant legs up so that the cuffs hovered above his shoes, showing his gleaming brass ankles. “I’m finally tall and I have to go into the Catacombs, where it will be a disadvantage.”

  “Perhaps the Professeur can design a new model powered by irony,” said Lucien, tilting his head so the brim of his hat lifted to reveal his grin. The Loco-ambulators had allowed them to follow the Colorman at a distance for over a week, without revealing Henri’s conspicuous height or limp, but now it seemed the steam stilts were going to become a distinct disadvantage.

  “We have a little time.” Lucien set the lantern down and crouched by Henri’s feet. “We need to let him get ahead of us if we’re going to follow him down there. You there, cabbie, help me get his trousers off.”

  “Messieurs, this is the wrong neighborhood and the wrong time of day for such a request.”

  “Tell him you’re a count, Henri,” said Lucien. “That usually works.”

  Five minutes later Toulouse-Lautrec, with his trousers rolled up and his long coat dragging the ground, led the way across the square. They’d given the cabbie five francs to watch the Loco-ambulators and showed him the double-barreled shotgun in the canvas quiver, borrowed from Henri’s uncle, to let him know what would happen to him should he decide to abscond with the steam stilts. He, in turn, charged them two francs for a guaranteed—more or less—complete map of underground Paris.

  Toulouse-Lautrec unfolded the map until he had revealed the seventh level below the city, then looked to Lucien. “It follows the streets as if on the surface.”

  “Yes, but with fewer cafés, more corpses, and it’s dark, of course.”

  “Oh, well then, we’ll just pretend we’re visiting London.”

  The city of Paris had installed gaslights for the first few hundred yards of the Catacombs, as well as a man at the entrance who charged twenty-five centimes for the pleasure of looking at the city’s bones.

  “That shit is morbid, you know that, no?” said the gatekeeper.

  “You’re the gatekeeper of an ossuary,” said Lucien. “You know that, yes?”

  “Yes, but I don’t go down there.”

  “Give me my change,” said the baker.

  “If you see a man with a donkey, tell him I turn the gaslights off at dark and he’ll have to find his own way out. And report to me if he’s doing anything unsavory down there. He goes down there and stays for hours at a time. It’s macabre.”

  “You know you charge people money to look at human remains, no?” said Lucien.

  “Are you going in or not?”

  They went down the marble steps into wide tunnels lined with stacked tibiae, fibulae, femurs, ulnae, radii, and skulls. When they reached the iron gate with the sign that said NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT, Lucien knelt down to light the signal lantern.

  “We’re going in there?” asked Henri, staring past the bars to infinite black.

  “Yes,” said Lucien.

  Henri held the cabbie’s map up to the last gas lamp. “Some of these chambers are massive. Surely the Colorman will see our lantern. If he knows he’s being followed, he’ll never lead us to the paintings.”

  “That’s why the signal lantern. We close it down until we can only just see beyond our feet, so we don’t trip. Keep it directed downward.” Lucien held a match to the wick, then, once it was going, adjusted the flame until it was barely visible.

  “And how will we know which way he goes?”

  “I don’t know, Henri. We’ll look for his lantern. We’ll listen for the donkey. Why would I know?”

  “You’re the expert. The Rat Catcher.”

  “I am not the expert. I was seven. I went into the mine only far enough to set my traps, that was all.”

  “Yet you discovered Berthe Morisot naked and painted blue. If not an expert, you have extraordinary luck.”

  Lucien picked up the lantern and pushed open the gate. “We should probably stop talking. Sound carries a long way down here.”

  The arch that contained the iron gate was smaller than the rest of the vault and Lucien had to duck to go through. Henri walked straight through, until the easel he carried on his back caught the archway and nearly knocked him off his feet.

  “Perhaps we should leave the easel here, just bring the shotgun.”

  “Good idea,” said Henri. He pulled the shotgun from the canvas sleeve, then set the bag and the easel to the side of the gate in the dark.

  “Breech broken,” said Lucien, thinking that the next time Henri tripped, the gun might discharge, taking off one of their heads or some other appendage to which they might have a personal attachment.

  Henri broke the shotgun’s breech and dropped in two shells he’d had in his pocket, then paused.

  Lucien played the hairline beam of light up and down his friend’s face. “What?”

  “We are going into these tunnels to kill a man.”

  Lucien had tried not to think of the specific act. He’d tried to keep the violence abstract, an idea, or better yet, an act based upon an ideal, the way his father had helped him through dispatching the rats when he was a boy and he’d find a suffering rodent still alive, squirming in the trap. “It is mercy, Lucien. It is to save the people of Paris from starvation, Lucien. It’s to preserve France from the tyranny of the Prussians, Lucien.” And one time, when Père Lessard had drunk an extra glass of wine with lunch, “It’s a fucking rat, Lucien. It’s disgusting and we’re going to make it delicious. Now smack it with the mallet, we have pies to make.”

  Lucien said, “He killed Vincent, he killed Manet, he’s keeping Juliette as a slave: he’s a fucking rat, Henri. He’s disgusting and we’re going to make him delicious.”

  “What?”

  “Shhhhh. Look there, it’s a light.”

  After only a minute out of the gaslights their eyes had adjusted to the darkness. In the distance they could see a tiny yellow light bouncing like a moth against a window. Lucien held the signal lantern so Henri could see him hold his finger to his lips for silence, then signal for them to move forward. He pointed the light down, so it barely cast the shadow of their feet. They followed the flame in the distance, Henri walking with a pronounced waddle to cover the heavy steps of his limp and to compensate for not having his walking stick.

  At times, the flame would disappear and they found themselves trying to find some speck in the distance, and Henri remembered, as a very small boy, closing his eyes to sleep at night, only to see images on the back of his eyelids, moving lik
e ghosts. Not afterimages, not memories, but what he was actually seeing in the absolute darkness of night and childhood.

  As they stepped carefully, quietly, over the even, dusty floors of the underground, those images came to him again. He remembered seeing electric blue moving among the black, and sometimes a face would come at him, not an imagined specter, nothing that he had conjured, but a real figure made of darkness and blue that would charge him from out of the infinite nothing, and he would cry out. That was the first time, he realized, there in the Catacombs, that he had seen Sacré Bleu. Not in a painting, or a church window, or a redhead’s scarf, but coming at him, out of the dark. And that was when he realized why he would kill the Colorman. Not because he was evil, or cruel, or because he kept a beautiful muse as a slave, but because he was frightening. Henri knew then he could, he would, put down the nightmare.

  “Can you get us out of here with that map?” Lucien whispered, his lips nearly touching Henri’s ear.