Sacre Bleu (23 page)

“Willette, you dolt,” Henri had told him, “I would love to support you, but being of noble birth myself, if I were to discriminate based on the accident of birth I’d have to eschew the company of all you horseshit commoners, and then who would I drink with?”

It was sometimes difficult to reconcile a man’s talents with his personality. Even the great Degas, who, as an artist, was a hero to Henri, and probably the best draftsman of all the Impressionists, had turned out, in person, to be a complete prick. Henri had even lived for a while in the same apartment building as Degas, but instead of being able to glean some bit of wisdom from the master, all he got was disdain. At first, a simple dismissive harrumph in the courtyard as they passed, but later, when Henri encountered Degas at an exhibition where they were both showing, Degas, acting as if he didn’t see Henri standing nearby, said, “These redheads of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, they all look like syphilitic whores.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Henri said over his shoulder, but he was hurt. Insulted by his hero, he limped away to a corner of the gallery where people were not so surly. Degas inspired him, and he’d been open in his admiration, showing Degas’ influence in his own art, and that made the rejection all the more painful. Henri was preparing to shrug off his friends and go get outrageously, scandalously drunk in some working-class dance hall when he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see a thin, white-goateed man in his fifties looking at him from under the brim of a rough linen hat: Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

“Monsieur, take heart. Degas hates everyone. He may be the best sculptor alive, now that his eyesight is too far gone to paint, but I will tell you a secret. His dancers are
things
to him. Objects. He has no love for them. Your dancers, monsieur, they live. They live on canvas because you love them, no?”

Henri didn’t know what to say. He was stunned, having gone somehow from a grinding self-loathing at the hands of Degas to an electric numbness at Renoir’s extraordinary kindness. He felt faint and had to steady himself on his walking stick.

“No. I mean, yes. I mean,
merci beaucoup,
Monsieur Renoir, I think you know…”

Renoir patted his arm to quiet him. “Watch. In a moment I will go tease him about his hatred of the Jews until he storms out like a spoiled child. It will be fun. Degas is always separate from his subjects. He separates himself by choice. Always has. He doesn’t know what it is to laugh with a fat girl, but we do, don’t we?”

A bit of a satyr’s grin under the hat brim, a sparkle of joy in his eye. “Don’t let Degas’ ugliness bring you down. Camille Pissarro, my friend, he is a Jew. You know him?”

“We have met,” said Henri. “We both show at Theo van Gogh’s. I share a studio with Lucien Lessard, who is close with him.”

“Yes, Lucien. A student of mine. Always drawing pictures of dogs humping. I think there was something wrong with that boy. Maybe all that time in the bakery—perhaps he had a yeast infection. Anyway, Pissarro, he looks like a rabbi with his big beard and his hook nose, but a pirate rabbi, always in those high boots of his. Ha, a pirate rabbi!” Renoir laughed at his own joke. “When he comes to Paris now, he has to hide out in a hotel room because he looks so Jewish, people will spit on him on the streets. What pettiness! Pissarro! Master of us all. But what they don’t know, that I know, is that from his hotel room window, he is doing the best painting of his life. You do that, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec. Take Degas’ petty treatment and make great paintings from it.”

Henri felt that he might begin to weep if he stood there any longer. He thanked Renoir again, bowed deeply, and excused himself to leave for an engagement he had only just then made up, but Renoir grabbed his arm.

“Love them all,” said Renoir. “That is the secret, young man. Love them all.” The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. “Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.”

“Love them all,” Henri repeated with a smile. “Yes, monsieur. I will do that.”

And he had tried, still tried to show that in his work, but often his separation from his subjects wasn’t driven, like Degas, by disdain for humanity, but by his own self-doubt. He loved them for their humanness, their perfect imperfection, because that was what they all shared, what he shared. But only one had he really loved, perhaps the only one as imperfect as he. He found her in the third laundry he visited in the Marais.

The proprietor of the laundry was a scruffy, haggard man who looked as if he might have been hanged and revived at some point. He was badgering a delivery boy when Henri came through the door.

“Pardon, monsieur, but I am the painter Toulouse-Lautrec. I am looking for a woman who modeled for me several years ago, and I have lost track of her. Does a Mademoiselle Carmen Gaudin work here?”

“Who is asking?”

“Forgive me, I didn’t realize you were both deaf and a buffoon. I am, as I was ten seconds ago, the Count Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, and I am looking for Carmen Gaudin.” Henri was finding the detective work did not agree with his constitution as it involved talking to people who were odd or stupid, without the benefit of the calming effect of alcohol.

“I don’t care if you have a fancy name and a title, there’s no Carmen here,” said the scruffy man. “Now fuck off, dwarf.”

“Very well,” said Henri. Usually his title would ease this sort of resistance. “Then I will have to take my business elsewhere, where I will be forced to hire an assassin of launderers.” Times like these, Henri wished he had the bearing of his father, who, although a loon, carried himself with great pomp and gave no second thought to pounding a counter with his walking stick and calling down nine hundred years of aristocratic authority upon the head of any service person unwise enough to displease him. Henri, on the other hand, dropped his empty threat and limped away.

As he reached the door, a woman’s voice called from behind him. He turned to see her coming through the curtain from the back room.

“I am Carmen Gaudin,” she said.

“Carmen!” Just the sight of her wholly unnaturally red hair, pinned up in a haphazard
chignon,
with two great scimitar bangs swooping down and framing her face, made his heart race, and he walked, light with excitement, back to the counter.

“Carmen,
ma chère,
how are you?”

She looked confused. “Excuse me, monsieur, but do I know you?”

Henri could see that her confusion was real, and, apparently, contagious, because now he was confused. “Of course you know me. All the paintings. Our evenings? It’s Henri,
chérie.
Three years ago?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Now go away,” said the scruffy man. “She has work to do.”

Carmen’s gaze went from demure and confused to furious, and she directed it at her boss. “You wait!” To Henri, she said, “Monsieur, perhaps if we stepped outside for a moment.”

He wanted to kiss her. Hold her. Take her home and cook dinner for her. That quality of being both strong and fragile at the same time was still there, and it appealed to a part of him that he normally kept hidden. Take her home, eat with her, and sip wine, laugh softly at sad things, make love to her and fall asleep in her arms: that’s what he wanted to do. Then wake up and put all that melancholy sweetness on canvas.

“Please, mademoiselle,” he said, holding the door for her. “After you.”

On the sidewalk she quickstepped to the doorway of an apartment building next door, out of sight of the laundry, then turned to him.

“Monsieur, three years ago I was very sick. I was living on Montmartre, working in Place Pigalle, but I don’t remember any of it. I forgot things. The doctor said the fever hurt my brain. My sister brought me to her house and nursed me back to health, but I remember almost nothing I did in the time before that. Maybe we met then, but I am sorry, I do not know you. You say I modeled for you? You are a painter?”

Henri felt his face go numb, as if he’d been slapped, but the stinging lingered. She
really
didn’t know him. “We were very close, mademoiselle.”

“Friends?” she asked. “Were we friends, monsieur?”

“More than friends, Carmen. We spent many evenings, many nights together.”

Her hand went to her mouth, as if she were horrified. “Lovers? We weren’t lovers.”

Henri searched her face for some hint of deception, some glimmer of recognition, of shame, of joy, but he found nothing.

“No, mademoiselle,” he said, the words as painful to him as having a tooth pulled. “We worked together. We were more than friends. An artist’s model is more than a friend.”

She seemed relieved. “And I was your model?”

“The best I’ve worked with. I could show you the paintings.” But even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t. He could show her
a few
of the paintings. But he had only three. Yet he remembered, or thought he remembered, painting a dozen. He could see the nude he painted of her, and remember how reluctant she had been to pose for it, but he couldn’t remember selling the painting, and he certainly didn’t have it now. “Perhaps you could come to my studio. Perhaps I could do some sketches of you, and perhaps your memory will return when you see the paintings.”

She shook her head, looking at her feet as she did. “No, monsieur. I could never model. I can’t believe I ever modeled. I am so plain.”

“You are beautiful,” he said. He meant it. He saw it. He had put it on canvas.

The proprietor of the laundry stepped out on the street then. “Carmen! You want a job or you want to run off with a dwarf, it is no matter to me, but if you want a job, go back to work, now.”

She turned from him. “I have to go, monsieur. I thank you for your offer, but that time is forgotten. Perhaps it is best.”

“But…” He watched her hurry by the boss into the laundry. The boss snarled at Henri as he closed the door.

Toulouse-Lautrec climbed into the taxi, which had been waiting.

“Another laundry, monsieur?” asked the driver.

“No, take me to the brothel at rue d’Amboise in the Second. And easy around the corners. I don’t want to spill my drink.”

M
ÈRE
L
ESSARD HAD NEVER REALLY USED VIOLENCE AGAINST ANOTHER
person before. Of course, living on Montmartre, where bohemians, working people, and the bourgeoisie mixed in the dance halls and cafés, she’d seen many fights and had nursed cuts and bruises on her own men. And during the Prussian War, she had not only endured the shelling of the city and helped with the wounded, but she had also seen the riots after the war, when the Communards took the cannons from the Church of Saint-Pierre, overthrew the government, then were massacred against a wall at Père-Lachaise. Certainly she had always implied, even threatened, that she was capable of violence, and had more or less convinced her family and most of the artists on the butte that she might go berserk at any moment and slaughter them all like an angry she-bear, a reputation of which she was proud and had worked hard to achieve. But smacking Juliette in the forehead with a
crêpe
pan was her first
real
act of violence, and she found it wildly unsatisfying.

“Perhaps a different pan,” Régine said, trying to console her mother.

“No,” said Mère Lessard. “I could have used the copper one from our own kitchen, the one with the tin lining, which is lighter, and better, I think, for
crêpes,
but the one from the bakery is perfect for braining a model. Heavy, yet not so heavy that I cannot swing it. And I didn’t want to use a rolling pin. The point was to knock her unconscious, not crush her skull. No, the pan was perfect.”