Sacré Bleu

  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.

  “I think I should like to paint a clown fucking a bear. To round out my oeuvre. You know, they say that Turner left thousands of erotic watercolors and that twat critic Ruskin burned them upon his death to save his reputation. Critics. I’m glad Whistler ruined Ruskin with that lawsuit over his night paintings. Served him right. Can you imagine? Turner erotica? I’m going to buy Whistler a drink the next time he’s in Paris.”

  “So, you’re choosing to ignore the whole Juliette-Carmen-syphilis connection?”

  “Exactement.”

  “Well then,” said Lucien. “What kind of bear?”

  “Brown, I think.”

  WHEN THEY CAME TO THE STUDIO, JULIETTE WAS WAITING BY THE DOOR, wearing a dark dress, appropriate to winter.

  “Bonjour, Henri!” She bent and they exchanged kisses on the cheeks.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle. Lucien tells me that you’re leaving.”

  “Oui, I am sorry to say.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Spain, I think,” she said, shooting a glance at Lucien. “There is a young painter there who needs to start using more blue in his work. Barcelona, I think.”

  “Ah, well, it will be warm there. You will both be missed.”

  “As will you, mon cher. Shall we go in and say good-bye properly?”

  Henri tipped his hat. “Over a cognac, you mean?”

  “But of course,” she said.

  Epilogue in Blue: Then There Was Bleu, Cher

  New York, October 2012—The Museum of Modern Art

  IT WAS A WEEKDAY AND THE MUSEUM WAS NOT BUSY, WHICH WAS UNUSUAL anytime. A striking, fair-skinned brunette, her hair pinned up with chopsticks, in an elegant suit of ultramarine blue wool and impractically tall shoes, stood in front of Starry Night, staring into the white and yellow swirls painted through a night sky of Sacré Bleu. She had staked out a territory directly in front of the painting, about a meter away, making the other museum patrons look around her, or just peek at the painting as they passed by, most thinking she was a self-absorbed model, as there were a lot of those wandering around this neighborhood, and her skirt seemed confidently well fitted about the bottom. She rubbed at a pendant on chain around her neck as she examined the painting.

  “This is mine, you know?” she said. “I wouldn’t try to take it. I’m not going to take it, but it’s mine.”

  The young man, who sat on a bench nearby, sighed, slightly amused. He was about thirty, and had dark eyes, and a shock of dark brown hair fell across his forehead.

  She said, “He painted it at night and had Theo store it in the dark. That’s why Poopstick couldn’t find it.”

  “As you’ve told me,” said Lucien. “Don’t you have someone you have to be?”

  She did. There was a boy in the Bronx who painted subway cars with spray cans, who loved a Latina girl with vibrant blue eyes. She would go to him, enchant him, inspire him, and leave the Juliette doll in an apartment with Lucien to wait. And when the boy finished his work, she and Lucien would go to a tunnel or depot where no one was around, and Lucien would light the fires and chant the strange words, sending her into a trance, then he would scrape the Sacré Bleu from her body, as he had done now for more than a century, as the painting on the train faded away.

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “Shall we?”

  As they walked, she continued to worry the pendant, which looked like a scrap of distressed leather.

  “I wish you’d get rid of that thing.”

  “It’s a memento. He gave it to me.”

  “It’s a dried-up old ear.”

  “Oh, Lucien, I would carry your ear if you gave it to me. Please don’t be jealous.”

  “Never, chérie. Never,” he said. He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.

  Hand in hand, the handsome young couple, the painter and the muse, walked out of the Museum of Modern Art into a soft autumn New York day.

  Finis

  Afterword: So, Now You’ve Ruined Art

  I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING: “WELL THANKS LOADS, CHRIS, now you’ve ruined art for everyone.”

  You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. I simply set out to write a novel about the color blue; I can’t remember why now. When you start with a concept that vague, you have to narrow your scope fairly quickly or it will get out of hand, so very early in my research great bits of history had to go by the wayside so I’d have room to make stuff up.

  So what I’d be asking right now, if I were you, is what, among this big blue lie, is true? What really happened?

  First, I drew the characters’ personalities mostly from accounts written by people who knew them, many of the accounts of the Impressionists coming from Jean Renoir’s biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Renoir, My Father. Jean Renoir had been wounded in World War I and had come home to Paris to recover in his father’s apartment, where the artist recalled his life to his son in an interestingly sanitized version. Jean Renoir talks in his book about “this little girl, Margot,” whom his father had such an affection for, and who died, and how he must find out more about her. Margot was no little girl, as one can see from the paintings in which she appears—his major paintings from the 1870s to the 1880s, Moulin de la Galette and Déjeuner des Canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party), as well as other portraits, although Margot (Marguerite Legrand) isn’t actually the girl in the painting The Swing. I chose that figure for the character because of the vivid ultramarine bows on her dress. It was clear from the accounts of his friends that Renoir was in love with Margot, and when she died (Dr. Gachet did come from Auvers to treat her), the painter became despondent and went off wandering for a couple of years, only to return to Paris to marry Aline Charigot, who was “his ideal.” It’s no accident that Renoir’s girls all seem to have a similar look to their faces. He chose them by his ideal. He is quoted in his son’s book: “You need only find your ideal, then marry her, and you can love them all.” After which he says, “But never trust a man who is not moved by the sight of a pretty breast.”

  My portrayal of Les Professeurs is inspired by another character written about in Renoir’s biography. Renoir writes of a retired academic who lived in the Maquis, wore a medal given to him by the state, and tried to train rats and mice to perform the chariot-racing scenes from the novel Ben-Hur. The novel was not published until 1880, and Renoir’s account refers to the 1890s, when Renoir had moved back to Montmartre with his wife and family, but I have placed Le Professeur’s rat races in 1870 to coincide with the Franco-Prussian War.

  Letters were less helpful than you might think for revealing the artists’ personalities. Most letters of the period are formal and seem at odds with the accounts of the artists who wrote them. Cézanne’s letters reveal a thoughtful, educated man, almost painfully polite, while all accounts of him from his fellow painters speak to his need to portray himself as the country bumpkin, uncouth, uncultured, with no manners, slurping his soup and wearing his garish red belt to mark that he was a Provençal. One suspects he played the role to the expectation of the Parisians. While the letters between Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo reveal the deep, analytical approach Vincent took to painting, a very calculated method to what seems to be madness on the canvas, they do reveal much of the pain that Vincent was experiencing and trying to work through while painting away from Paris.

  There’s absolutely nothing in the letters of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec to indicate the debauched lifestyle he was leading in Paris. He was the earnest and dutiful son or grandson, always writing home with news of how hard he was working, how his health was progressing, and when he might next visit. Yet, in Paris he was the very model of the bon vivant: there are photos of him clowning, dressed as a geisha, a choirboy, a samurai, displaying his paintings in his studio with a completely nude prostitute named Mireille (who really was his favorite, and probably bec
ause she was, indeed, shorter than he). He did live in brothels for weeks at a time, and he was an installation in the dance halls and cabarets of Montmartre and Pigalle, including the infamous Moulin Rouge. The account of his challenging someone to a duel over the offender’s criticism of Vincent van Gogh’s painting is true and was recounted by several friends who were present. He did study with Vincent at Cormon’s studio, along with Émile Bernard, and they all idolized the Impressionists. Jean Renoir’s biography of his father speaks of Toulouse-Lautrec with great affection. It was Jean Renoir’s nanny and his father’s model, Gabrielle, who always referred to Lautrec as “the little gentleman.”

  What doesn’t appear in any context I could find is the depressed, heartbroken victim portrayed in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec did drink to excess and would die at thirty-six from complications from alcoholism, but it appears that he drank not because he was depressed or self-pitying, but because he really liked being drunk. I suppose it’s a minor miracle that he didn’t die of syphilis, given his social regimen.

  Speaking of which, Manet, Seurat, Theo van Gogh, and Gauguin all really did die of syphilis as described, although none of their wives appeared to have contracted the disease and all lived into old age. It was Johanna van Gogh, Theo’s wife, who promoted, defended, and stridently protected Vincent’s paintings and she is probably responsible for us having ever heard of the painter, although it appears that she and Vincent did not get along well while he was alive.

  While most of the scenes in Sacré Bleu are from my imagination, including all between Lucien and Henri, many scenes were inspired by real events. Monet really did go to Gare Saint-Lazare, announce himself as “the painter Monet,” and convince the station manager to direct all of the engines to fire up and release the steam so he could paint it. And he really did paint his wife, Camille, on her deathbed to capture the particular shade of blue she was turning. Even today, if you go to Giverny and the laboratory of light that Monet built there, you will see the dark carp, hiding under the water lilies, almost invisible but for the light line that is his dorsal fin. Monet and his student friends Renoir and Bazille did go to the Salon des Refusés and saw Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and while Manet himself never counted himself as one of the Impressionists, they acknowledge him as “their source.” Monet and his friends went to great lengths after Manet’s death to get the French state to buy Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia and install them in the Louvre.

  While Berthe Morisot was an accomplished painter, one of the original group of the Impressionists, and she did marry Manet’s brother Eugène, there is no evidence that Manet had anything but the most proper relationship with her, and that affair is entirely of my invention. Neither is there any evidence that Manet had an affair with the model Victorine Meurent, who posed for his most famous paintings. There is a terrific confrontation scene between Madame Manet and Victorine in the short story “Olympia’s Look” from Susan Vreeland’s collection Life Studies, which I would recommend, as I would her excellent novels portraying the lives of artists, if you’re interested in more accurate biographical fiction.

  Whistler and Manet did know each other, were friends in fact, and while both showed at the famous Salon des Refusés, described in chapter 5, Whistler didn’t attend the Salon in person; he sent his painting, The White Girl, later retitled Symphony in White Number 1. Whistler was in Biarritz at the time, recovering from lead poisoning from painting The White Girl, and really was nearly drowned while making a painting called The Blue Wave, when he was swept out to sea by a rogue wave and was saved by fishermen.

  Whistler did have a redheaded Irish mistress named Joanna Hiffernan, whom he hid from his stern mother when she visited London. He really did throw his brother-in-law through a restaurant window when he criticized Jo, and Whistler was said to have gone quite mad for a time when he was with Jo. Joanna really did run off with Whistler’s friend Courbet and posed for some of the most notorious and lewd pictures that anyone had ever painted at the time. Courbet would, indeed, die in exile and poverty in Switzerland, of alcoholism. Whistler did, for a time, only paint at night, and it was his libel lawsuit against the critic John Ruskin, who equated one of the nocturnes with “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,” that eventually destroyed the famous critic. It was not the damages, which were only a farthing (one quarter penny), but the expense and effort of defending the suit that put him over the edge. Ruskin died a few weeks after the trial was completed.

  There was no Boulangerie Lessard on Montmartre, nor a Père Lessard, baker, but there was a real baker, named Muyen, who had a shop on rue Voltaire near the École des Beaux-Arts, who did, indeed, hang the work of the Impressionists and bought their paintings to keep them alive. When Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War, Muyen made country pâtés from rat meat to feed his customers. He even raffled off one of Pissarro’s paintings as I wrote in chapter 3, and the girl who won the painting was supposed to have actually asked if she could have a sticky bun instead.

  Speaking of Pissarro, when one reads any accounts of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist periods in art, he will find no more glowing reviews than those for Pissarro. Less well-known, even today, than the other Impressionists, and less successful in his time, he was teacher, friend, and mentor to nearly every one. He painted alongside Cézanne, Gauguin, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and probably a dozen others. The oldest of the group, he remained open always to learning new techniques and was the only one of the original Impressionists who would follow Seurat into pointillism and the techniques of optical painting, even though Seurat was young enough to be his son.

  THE ENTIRE TIME FRAME OF SACRÉ BLEU WAS CONSTRUCTED AROUND THAT July afternoon in 1890 when Vincent shot himself because of a fact I stumbled across very early in my research. Vincent van Gogh did shoot himself in that field in Auvers where three roads converge—shot himself in the chest—then walked a mile cross-country to Dr. Gachet’s house seeking treatment. Vincent and Theo are buried beside each other within sight of that field in Auvers. I have stood in that spot, and walked from there to the doctor’s house, which is a museum now, and I thought, What kind of painter does that? Who tries to kill himself by shooting himself in the chest, then walks a mile to seek medical attention? It made no sense at all. Even when you read Vincent’s letters, look at his last paintings—The Church at Auvers, Wheat Field with Crows, Portrait of Adeline Ravoux (the innkeeper’s daughter from chapter 1), Portrait of Doctor Gachet—you realize that this is a fellow at the height of his powers, and apparently getting better. His death was both a mystery and a tragedy, a resignation, and yet, there’s the evidence of a great passion for excellence that only the artist himself could define, and pursuing that passion seems to have been the basis of much of his self-torment. What is the standard when you are doing something that’s never been done? What kind of muse inspires that? Exactly.

  WHEN YOU START TO WRITE ABOUT ART AND PARIS IN THE 1890S, THE POSSIBILITIES absolutely explode. During the time frame of Lucien’s story, between 1863 and 1891, nearly everyone who was anyone was in Paris, and not just Paris, but on Montmartre. Mark Twain, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Jules Verne, Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, John Singer Sargent, and on, and on, and on. It would take a hundred books to tell the stories of the painters alone, so deciding what and whom to leave out became a bigger challenge than writing a novel about the color blue.

  Where, you ask, is Degas? Gustave Caillebotte? Mary Cassatt? Alfred Sisley? Why so little on Cézanne? Truth be told, in the case of Cézanne, it was geography—he didn’t like Paris, and for most of the time frame of the story, he was in Aix, in Provence, or in one of the villages outside Paris, painting with Pissarro. Cassatt was a passionate collector and an accomplished painter, but like Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès, and the other women Impressionists, she was confined to the world allowed to a woman at the time, which is reflected in her paintings of children and home life; convention
did not allow her to travel in the demimonde in which Sacré Bleu takes place. Caillebotte was also an accomplished painter, but as a member of a banking family, it was his collecting and patronage, which kept Renoir, Monet, and Cézanne alive to paint on, that became his greatest contribution to the group. He also (like Frédéric Bazille) died young, and I sensed he was never really part of the Montmartre community. As for Degas, well, Degas was unpleasant. I started my engagement with art knowing absolutely nothing about the artists, just looking at the pictures in museums—the biographies of the artists didn’t much matter to me. I like Degas’ paintings and sculptures, I have since I studied photography in college, but now, as a storyteller, considering him as a potential character, it seemed as if he was a miserable, unlikable guy, and I didn’t want to have to portray that. So he doesn’t get a part in my book. See, if you hadn’t been a jerk, you’d have had a speaking part, Degas, but no. And as much as I’d have liked to explore the whole Art Nouveau movement that started in Paris in the 1890s, and with which Toulouse-Lautrec was involved, well, that’s another story.

  As far as the history and mystical properties of ultramarine pigment, some details are based in truth, most are just constructed for the story. The pigment was, for a long time, more valuable than gold, and during that time, to commission a painting that used it was a sign of status for the patron and his family. The two Michelangelo paintings Lucien and Juliette see in London, The Entombment and what is called The Manchester Madonna, are unfinished, the blue parts remain unpainted, and both hang in the National Gallery in London to this day, but it’s likely that they remain unfinished because the painter was unable to obtain the ultramarine he needed and moved on to other commissions, or the patron refused to pay the high price of the color. The physics of light and color were as close to factual as I could convey within my understanding, but to be honest, I’m still a bit fuzzy on the whole refraction, absorption, and scattering aspects of how color is produced and perceived, so it’s not your fault if you’re a bit confused as well.