Sacre Bleu (17 page)

“I love her.”

“No one cares. Go!”

A
LL MORNING, WHILE HE WENT ABOUT HIS WORK IN THE BAKERY
, L
UCIEN HAD
been telling himself,
Today I am an artist. I will make art. I am not going to throw her on the lounge and boff her senseless, no matter how much she begs.
He really hoped she wouldn’t beg, because he wasn’t that sure of his resolve.
And even if I throw her on the lounge and boff her senseless, I’m not going to ask her to marry me.

He found her waiting by the shed door when he came out of the bakery. She wore a festive white dress with blue and pink bows and a tall hat that looked more like a flower arrangement than headwear. The sort of ensemble a girl might wear to dance in the courtyard of the Moulin de la Galette on a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon, not an outfit you would put on to walk a dozen blocks so you could take it off for a painter.

“Don’t you look pretty.”

“Thank you. I brought you a present.”

“And you’ve wrapped it beautifully,” he said, putting a hand on her waist.

“Not that, you goat, something else. I’ll show you inside.”

As he unlocked the door, she took a hinged wooden box from her bag and opened it. “Look, color! The man assured me it’s the finest quality. ‘Pure pigments,’ he said, whatever that means.”

There were a dozen tubes of paint, large, 250-milliliter tubes—enough color to easily cover the canvas, unless he used the thick impasto method that van Gogh liked, and he didn’t think that technique suited his subject. Each tube had a small label of paper pasted on it with a dab of the color, but there was no writing, no note on the mixture.

“But I was going to go buy paint from Père Tanguy this afternoon.”

“Now you can start painting instead,” she said. She kissed his cheek, set the box onto the table he’d set up for supplies, then she noticed a changing screen had been set up at the far end of the studio.
“Oh là là.
Is that to preserve my modesty?”

“It’s proper,” he said.

Actually, he had fetched the screen from Henri’s studio on rue Caulaincourt in the wee hours, while the bread was baking, so he wouldn’t be able to watch her dress or undress. He thought perhaps he would be able to keep his concentration on the painting that way.

She emerged from behind the screen wearing a white Japanese silk kimono that Henri kept around the studio for his models, or for himself, as on occasion he liked to dress like a geisha girl and have their friend Maurice Guibert take photos of him. But as far as making Juliette look like the diminutive aristocratic painter, the robe failed miserably.

“How do you want me?” Juliette asked, letting the kimono fall open.

Well now she was just
trying
to be annoying.

Lucien looked only at the canvas, made a point, in fact, of looking
only
at the canvas, and waved her toward the lounge as if he didn’t have time to bother with showing her how to pose. “Like yesterday will be fine,” he said.

“Oh really, shall I lock the door?”

“The pose,” Lucien said. “Like yesterday, do you remember?”

She dropped the robe and reclined into the same pose she had been in the day before. Exactly the same pose, he figured, looking at the sketch. It was uncanny for a model to find the pose that quickly without direction.

He’d decided to set her in an Oriental harem, after the Algerian paintings of Delacroix. Great flowing silks and golden statues in the background. Maybe a slave fanning her. A eunuch, perhaps? He heard his masters, Pissarro, Renoir, and Monet, lecturing him:
“Paint what you see. Capture the moment. Paint what is real.”
But the whitewashed storeroom would not do as a setting for this beauty, and he didn’t want to paint the background black and bring up the image from darkness as the Italian masters had, as had Goya with his
Maja.

“I’m thinking about painting it in the Florentine style, laying down all the values in
grisaille,
a gray-green underpainting, then glazing the colors on over it. It will take longer than other methods, but I think it’s the only way I can capture your light. I mean,
the
light.”

“Could you do the underpainting in another color, say that pretty blue the man sold me?”

Lucien looked again at her, the sun filtering in from the skylight on her naked skin, then at the canvas. “Yes, yes, I can do that.”

And he began to paint.

After he’d been at it an hour, Juliette said, “My arm is going to sleep. Can I move it?” Without waiting for his permission, she started to swing her arm around in a windmill motion.

“Sure, I’ll call the painting
Aphrodite Waving Like a Lunatic.”

“No one has done that before, I’ll bet. You would be the first to paint a waving nude. It could start a revolution.”

Now she was nodding as well as swinging her arm around; the unsynchronized motion put him in mind of one of Professeur Bastard’s bizarre machines.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Lucien said.

“Buy me lunch.”

“I can get you something from the bakery.”

“I want you to take me out.”

“But you’re naked.”

“Not permanently.”

“Let me finish your thighs, then we’ll go.”

“Oh,
cher,
that sounds delicious.”

“Stop moving your legs, please.”

“Sorry.”

It was two hours before he stepped away from the canvas and stretched his back. “That seems like a good place to take a break.”

“What? What? Is there a voice there? I’m faint from hunger.” She threw her arm over her eyes dramatically and pretended to faint, which on the fainting couch looked terribly appropriate and made Lucien wonder if he might not have chosen the wrong pose for her.

“Why don’t you get dressed while I clean these brushes?”

She sat up quickly, pushed her lower lip out in a pout. “You’re bored with me, aren’t you?”

Lucien shook his head; there really was no winning here, as his father had taught him was often the case when dealing with women.

“Where do you want to go for lunch?” Lucien asked.

“I have an idea,” she said.

Before he could fully fathom what she had in mind, they were boarding a train at Gare Saint-Lazare and headed for Chatou, only a few miles northwest of the city.

“It’s lunch, Juliette. I need to get back to work.”

“I know. Trust me,” she said.

From the train station she led him to the banks of the Seine; out on the river he could see people gathered on a small island, connected to the shore by a long wooden dock. Rowers and day sailors had tied their boats to the dock. There was music playing and people on the platform were laughing, dancing, and drinking, the men in bright, striped jackets and straw boaters, the women in brightly colored pastel dresses. All along the shore bathers waded, splashed, and swam, and farther up the river, Lucien could see couples lying together under the willows.

“I can’t believe there are so many people out here on a weekday,” Lucien said.

“Isn’t it marvelous?” Juliette said, taking his hand. She pulled him down the riverbank.

Lucien saw two painters working side by side on the near bank, concentrating intensely on their work and laying down color at a mad speed. He stopped to watch and Juliette yanked him away. “Those two are—”

“Come on, it will be lovely.”

Finally, he gave himself up to the experience. They ate, and drank, and danced. She flirted with various boaters and the gentlemen slumming among the rowers, who were having a look at all the young girls, and just as she’d get their interest, she would cling to Lucien’s arm and profess to her suitor that the painter was her only and her ever. The resentment from the men was palpable.

“Juliette, don’t do that. It’s—well, I don’t know what it is, but it makes everyone involved uncomfortable.”

“I know,” she said, and she planted a wet kiss on his neck, which made him squirm and laugh.

A fellow in a T-shirt and boater who was rowing by at the time shouted, “Ah, nothing like a Sunday afternoon at La Grenouillère,
oui?”

“Oui,”
said Lucien with a smile, tipping his own straw boater, which he didn’t remember putting on, or for that matter owning. He was sure it was Tuesday. Yes, Tuesday.

“Let’s explore,” said Juliette.

They walked up the riverbank, talking and laughing, Lucien noting how the light played on the water, Juliette noting how silly everyone looked in their bathing costumes, some of the men still wearing their hats as they swam. They found a spot under a willow tree whose branches hung all the way to the ground, and there, on a blanket, they finished a bottle of wine, teased, kissed, and made love, all of it feeling very exciting and dangerous and naughty.

After they dozed in each other’s arms for what seemed like the whole afternoon, they made their way back to the train station, where the last train of the day was just boarding. They took the train to Gare Saint-Lazare, leaning on one another as they looked out the window, not saying a word, but both grinning like blissful idiots.

Although he could ill afford it, Lucien paid for a cab to take them from the station back to the bakery, where she assumed her pose on the fainting lounge, and he took his seat, palette in hand, and he resumed his work, without a word, until the light from the skylight went orange.

“That’s it,” Juliette said.

“But,
ma chère
—”

She stood and began dressing, as if she had suddenly remembered an appointment. “That’s enough for today.”

“They used to call this the painter’s hour, Juliette,” Lucien said. “There’s a softness to the early evening light, and besides—”

She put her finger to his lips. “Have you not had a good day?”

“Well, uh, yes, of course, but—”

“The day is done,” she said. And in a minute she had dressed and was out the door. “Tomorrow,” she said.

Lucien sat back on the little stool he’d been sitting on to work on the lower parts of the canvas. It had been a good day. A very good day. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever having had such a day before.

He put down his brushes and palette and moved to the fainting couch, where he could still feel the warmth of Juliette’s body. La Grenouillère: he had always heard about it, about the wonderful times. He’d seen the paintings Monet and Renoir had made there side by side. It was even more magical than he had imagined. He lay back on the couch and covered his eyes with his arm, letting the day play in his head. He wondered why, in all of his life in Paris, he hadn’t spent a glorious Sunday afternoon among the boaters and the “little frogs” at La Grenouillère. Perhaps, he thought, it was because La Grenouillère had burned to the waterline in 1873, when he was ten, and had never been rebuilt. Yes, that was probably why. And for some reason, that didn’t bother him at all.

London, 1865

A
LIGHT FOG WASHED THE BANK AT
B
ATTERSEA
B
RIDGE
. B
ARGES MOVED
like great black ghosts on the Thames, silent but for the
clop clop
of a team of draft horses on the shore echoing off the houses of Chelsea.