“I’d run,” said Juliette to Carmen and Henri.
“En garde!” said Toulouse-Lautrec, stepping between Carmen and the Colorman and boldly drawing a cordial glass from his walking stick. “Oh balls. Run it is, then.”
He turned as the Colorman leapt, knife-first, at Juliette. She was sidestepping, hoping to duck under the blow, perhaps shoulder him through the window, when there was a loud pop in the air and he simply came undone—whatever elements had shaped themselves into the Colorman assumed their original form of salt or stone or metal or gas. The black knife dropped to the rug along with the clothes, among what appeared to be multicolored grains of sand. The watery bits of the Colorman assumed their hydrogen and oxygen forms and dissipated quickly, the increased volume causing everyone’s ears to pop for a second.
Juliette stood up from a defensive crouch and poked the toe of her shoe in the small spray of sand that had once comprised the Colorman’s head. “Well that’s new,” she said.
Toulouse-Lautrec had sheathed his cordial glass and was staring at the spot where a second ago an ancient enemy had stood. Carmen was winding up to what looked to be a complete hysterical breakdown, panting, as if gathering her energy for a skull-cracking scream.
Juliette prodded the pile that had been the Colorman’s torso with her toe, then stepped back.
“Check his trousers,” said Henri.
“Sure, he’d love that,” said Juliette, but she prodded the trousers and grinned at Henri.
That’s when Carmen began to let loose with her siren wail, her eyes rolled back in her head until there were only the white eyes of a madwoman. She barely got an eighth note of terror out before Bleu jumped back into her.
Carmen’s eyes rolled back down, she took a deep breath, then she assumed the same smile that Juliette had worn a second before. “That was new,” Carmen said.
“You said that,” said Henri. “I mean, she did.” He nodded to Juliette, who was now the vacant beautiful doll with the torn dress standing in a pile of sand and laundry.
“That’s just it, Henri, it’s new.” She grabbed him by the ears and kissed him chastely. “Dear, brave Henri, don’t you see, nothing is ever new. He’s really gone, for good.”
“How? He was burned to little more than cinders before. Why is this different?”
“Because I don’t feel him.”
“But you didn’t feel him when we thought he was dead before, then you did.”
“But now I feel the presence of another. I can feel my only, my ever, my Lucien. He saved us, Henri. I don’t know what he did, but I can sense him, like he is part of me.”
Toulouse-Lautrec looked at her hands, her rough, red laundress’s hands, and nodded. “I suppose that Carmen’s time modeling for me is finished?”
The redhead cradled his cheek. “She can’t be allowed to remember this. It would break her. But she will always know that she is beautiful because you saw the beauty in her. The woman would have never known but for your eye, for your love. Because of you, she will always have that.”
“You gave her that. You are the beauty.”
“That’s the secret, Henri. I am nothing without materials, skill, imagination, emotions, which you bring, Carmen brings. You obtain beauty. I am nothing but spirit, nothing without the artist.” She reached into her—into Carmen’s—bag and pulled out an earthenware pot about the size of a pomegranate and worked the wide cork lid off. The Sacré Bleu, the pure powder, was there. She poured a bit, perhaps a demitasse spoon’s worth, into her palm.
“Give me your hand,” she said.
He held out his hand and she rubbed the color over his palm, between their palms, until both of their hands were colored a brilliant blue.
“Carmen is right-handed, right?”
“Yes,” said Henri.
With her uncolored hand, she unbuttoned her blouse. “What I just told you, about being nothing without the artist, that’s a secret, you know?”
He nodded. “But of course.”
“Good, now put your hand, with the blue, on my breast, rub it in as long as you can.”
He did as he was told, looking more perplexed than pleased. “As long as I can?”
“I hope there isn’t much pain, my dear Henri,” she said, and she jumped to Juliette.
Carmen Gaudin became aware of a strange little man in a bowler hat and a pince-nez kneading her breast under her blouse with blue powder, and as quickly as she realized it she slapped him in the face, knocking his pince-nez completely into the hallway (as the door had been open all this time), sending his hat askew, and leaving a blue handprint from the tip of his beard to his temple. “Monsieur!” she barked, then she pulled her blouse together, stormed out the door, and ran down the stairs.
“But…” Henri looked around, perplexed.
“Ah, women,” said Juliette with a shrug. “Perhaps you should follow her, or instead, take a taxi to rue des Moulins, where the girls are more predictable. But first the secret.”
“What secret?”
“Exactement,” said Juliette. “Good night, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec. Thank you for seeing me home.”
“But of course,” said Henri, having no recollection of having seen anyone home, but then, he thought it might be a safe guess that he had been drinking.
Thirty
THE LAST SEURAT
THE MUSE LOUNGED ALONE IN THE PARLOR OF HER FLAT IN THE LATIN QUARTER, sipped wine, and gloated over the remains of her enslaver, which were contained in a large glass jar on the coffee table. Occasionally she giggled to herself, unable to contain the rising, ecstatic joy of freedom from the Colorman, whom she’d found was much more appealing as a jar full of multicolored sand.
“Hey, Poopstick, the only way you’ll frighten the maid now is if she forgets to bring her broom, non?”
She snorted. Perhaps taunting a jar of minerals did not evince the maturity of a creature of her years, but winning felt so good. She might have been a little drunk, too.
She had found, through the millennia, that being the inspiration, passion, and abject lesson in suffering for so many imaginative, whining narcissists made for long periods of suffering and neglect visited back upon her. She loved all of her artists, but after a time, after she’d endured enough sulking, paranoia, withdrawal of affection, moody self-aggrandizement, berating, violence disguised as sex, and beatings, the only way to clear her head was to occasionally murder some sons-a-bitches, with great vigor and violence, and over the years she had performed this catharsis to varying degrees of satisfaction, but nothing had been quite so exhilarating as slaughtering the Colorman. Ultimately. Forever. What a sweet, screaming death-gasm it was, and the only time that destruction had ever felt more arousing than creation. Much of that joy owed to lovely, sweet Lucien, whom she could feel was in the hall outside her flat.
“Where are your eyebrows?” she said when she opened the door. She was naked except for her thigh-high black stockings, but her hair was up in a chignon, affixed with chopsticks, a style she had only recently adopted.
Lucien forgot what he was going to say, so he said, “Where are your clothes?”
“I was dusting,” she said. Then she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Oh, Lucien, my only! My ever! You saved me.”
“The Colorman came back, then?”
“Yes!” She kissed him quickly, then let him breathe. “But he is no more.”
“When I saw the cave paintings at Pech Merle, I thought he might return. They had been sealed in the dark for thousands of years, but when the arc light hit them, I could feel the Sacré Bleu, the power in it.”
“Of course you could. They were the source.”
“I realized they meant that you were still not free of him, so I destroyed them. I think I’m guilty of a crime against history, or art, or something.”
“For saving your beloved? Nonsense.”
Footfalls sounded on the steps below. A heavy person trying to be stealthy. The concierge, no doubt.
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“Perhaps we should go inside,” said Lucien, although he was reluctant to let go of her at this point.
She dragged him into the flat, kicked the door shut, then pushed him back onto the divan. “Oh, mon amour,” she said, straddling him.
“Juliette!” He took her by the shoulders and pushed her back to her feet. “Wait.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. She sat on the other end of the divan and clutched a silk cushion over her breasts as she commenced a tragic pout.
“You said he was dead. You said he was gone forever.”
“So?”
“Well he wasn’t, was he?”
“It felt as if he was. More than it had before. Longer than before.”
“Before? How long have you been trying to kill him?”
“On purpose? Not that long, really. Since the fifteenth century. Of course he’d been mortally wounded many times before then, but that’s when I started planning. I couldn’t be obvious about it, because ultimately we would have to make the color, and he would control me then. At first it was accidents, then I hired some assassins, but he always came back. I knew he was protected, given power from the Sacré Bleu. That was when it first occurred to me that it wasn’t just the raw color but certain paintings. The first time I tried to destroy what I thought was all the paintings was in Florence, in 1497. I persuaded poor Botticelli to burn many of his best paintings in Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Not all, fortunately, since now I know that it wasn’t those paintings that protected the Colorman anyway. The cave paintings at Pech Merle were the source of his power, of his becoming the Colorman. They always had been. I know that now. Silly, I suppose, not to have thought of it.”
“But how do you know he won’t come back again?”
She pointed her toe to the jar on the coffee table. “That’s him.”
“He was only a gob of burning goo when we left him in the Catacombs.”
“I’m going to put a spoonful of him in the Seine every day. He’s gone though. I know that because I can feel you.”
“You stay on your side of the couch, at least until we sort this out.”
She held a finger in the air to mark the moment, then rose and coquetted across the parlor, where she stopped at the writing desk and opened a leather box, then looked over her shoulder at him and batted her eyelashes.
Lucien really thought he should be angry, or disappointed, but here she was, his ideal, conjured from his very imagination, his Venus, and she loved him and wanted him and was teasing him. “Hey, how did you know it wasn’t a stranger in the hall when you opened the door, nude?”
“I could feel you out there,” she said, reaching into the box. “I wasn’t really dusting. I lied.”
She pirouetted, snapping to his eyes as her spot, her arms out to her sides. In her right hand she held a black glass blade shaped like a long, razor-sharp fang. She smiled and approached him, never letting her eyes leave his.
Lucien felt his pulse quicken, leap really, in his neck, but he smiled back. So this is how it ends.
“I really thought you’d use syphilis on me,” he said.
She stepped around the coffee table, knelt, and presented the knife to him on the flat of her palms. “This is yours,” she said. “You use it to make the Sacré Bleu.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Take it!”
He took the knife.
She cradled his cheek. “Those times, before, when I tried to rid myself of the Colorman, I had never thought it through, planned for someone to take his place. You have to make the Sacré Bleu or I will be no more.”
“I don’t know how.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“You said we have to have a painting.”
She held her finger to her lips, then went to the bedroom and returned carrying a small canvas, Henri’s oil of Carmen in the Japanese kimono.
“But we burned all of the—” He leaned forward, set the black knife on the coffee table, and touched the surface of the painting lightly near the edge. “This is still wet. It’s just been painted.”
“Yes.”
“But that means Carmen—you, were with Henri. That’s where you were when I couldn’t find you.”
“He saved me. Well, I thought he saved me. Carmen was something I could give him as a reward. I love him.”
“I thought you loved me.”
“You are my only and my ever, but I love him, too. I am your Juliette. No one but you shall ever touch, ever be loved, by Juliette.”
“Ever?” he asked.
“Ever and ever,” she said.
“If I make the Sacré Bleu, you will have to inspire other painters, to make more paintings. The price always has to be paid; you said that. You’ll be with them, in whatever form. And I’ll be what—alone?”
“Juliette will be with you, even when I am not, Lucien. You can paint her, watch her dust, whatever you want, and I will return to you. You are unique, Lucien, among all the painters I have known, over thousands of years. I chose you, shaped you to grow into the man who would be my ever when I saw how you loved painting when you were still a little boy.”
“Then I knew you, as my—? When you were—?”
“Do you remember when your mother told you that women were wondrous, mysterious, and magical creatures who should be treated not only with respect but with reverence and even awe?”
“That was you?”
Juliette grinned. “Did I lie?”
“You weren’t always my mother?”
“To you? Just a few times.”
“God, that’s a disturbing thought.”
Lucien looked at the painting of Carmen—the soul that Henri had captured, the intimacy he’d put on the canvas—then into Juliette’s eyes. She had been there present and adoring in Carmen when this was painted. “How will I ever know you’re true?”
“You’ll know. If you want recipes, bake bread. I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am not here to make you comfortable.”
He nodded, letting the reality of it wash over him, all of his father’s words, all of the words of his masters, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet. All the uncertainty that they accepted, the risks they took, the peace they resolved to never have, all so they could paint, all for art.
He looked at her again, smiling at him adoringly over the beautiful painting his friend had made. He said, “Henri has to be protected. We can’t make the Sacré Bleu from Henri’s painting if it means he will come to harm.”
She sat, still holding the painting, looking over the edge to Carmen’s image. “We’ll have to leave Paris,” she said. “Not forever, but for a long time. Henri must forget our story. If we are here he will remember, eventually, and that can’t be. He’s already forgotten the Colorman’s death, those last sessions with Carmen, but he remembers the rest, about me, us.”
“And you’ll need the Sacré Bleu to make him forget?”
“Yes. And there is no more.”
“Then we have to use his painting, and he’ll suffer.”
“No, we’ll use another painting.”
“The Blue Nude? My painting? Can I do that? Can I paint the paintings that we make the color from?”
“No. You would waste away. No, your Blue Nude has been crated, wrapped in layers and layers of oilskin, and the entrance to the mine sealed by a discreet explosion. To protect you, the way the cave paintings protected the Colorman.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I love you.”
“But if we don’t use my painting, and Henri doesn’t have to suffer for the ones he’s made, how will you—how will we make the Sacré Bleu?”
Juliette handed him the Toulouse-Lautrec, which he leaned face-in against the wall under the window behind him; then he turned back to her.
She reached behind the divan. “Just dusting,” she said. Then she looked over her shoulder and grinned. “I jest. Voilà!” She pulled up a medium-size canvas with a wild motif of
nymphs playing in a meadow, pursued by satyrs, all of it rendered in meticulously placed dots of pure, bright pigment, a dominant blue tint to the air all around the figures.
“What is that?” he asked. He’d never seen something with so much motion and life rendered in the pointillist technique.
“The last Seurat,” she said. “Pick up your knife, love. I’ll teach you to make the Sacré Bleu.”
“I have to say good-bye to my family, and Henri.”
“You will, we both will. We have to.”
“The bakery. Who will make the bread?”
“Your sister and her husband will take over the bakery. Pick up the knife.”
He did, felt the blade vibrating in his hand. “But there’s blood on it.”
“Well, you want to make an omelet…”
THEY MET FOR COFFEE AT THE CAFÉ NOUVELLE ATHÉNES IN PIGALLE, just below the butte. Lucien had only just told Henri that he was leaving when Toulouse-Lautrec said, “You know Seurat is dead?”
“No? He’s barely older than us. What, thirty-one, thirty-two?”
“Syphilis,” said Henri. “You didn’t know?”
Lucien shrugged, giving up the ruse. “Yes, I knew. Juliette would like to say good-bye, too, Henri. She’s going to meet us at your studio.”
“I look forward to it,” said Henri.
Later, as they made their way up rue Caulaincourt, Henri limping badly and Lucien walking sideways so he could keep his friend in sight, Lucien told him.
“I probably won’t see you again. Juliette says we have to stay away from Paris for a while.”
“Lucien, I know you love her, but if you don’t mind me saying, I think Juliette is inordinately fond of syphilis.”
“What do you mean you know I love her? She was Carmen. You love her, too.”
“But I have chosen to ignore that.”
“You slept with her when she was possessed by a muse who is, as you put it, ‘inordinately fond of syphilis,’ particularly as a way of dispatching painters.”
Henri looked at the cobbles, then bounced his walking stick off its tip and caught it in front of his face as if snatching an idea from the very air.
Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Page 35