Sacre Bleu (9 page)

She ventured to say, “Madame, I assure you—”

“And I’ll have you know that if you hurt my son again, if he so much as sighs sadly over his coffee, I will hire a man, a Russian, probably, to hunt you down and rip all that shiny black hair from your head, then break your skinny arms and legs, and set you on fire, and then put you out with a hammer. And should there be children from your beastly rutting, I shall have the Russian man cut them into tiny pieces and feed them to Madame Jacob’s dog. Because, although he may be only a worthless, simpleminded, libertine artist, Lucien is my favorite, and I will not have him hurt. Do you understand?”

Juliette just nodded.

“Good day, then,” said Madame Lessard. “Go with God.” And she glided across the bakery and up the stairs to the apartment.

“I’m her favorite,” said Lucien with a big smile.

Paris, May 1863

A
LTHOUGH HE WOULD NOT REMEMBER IT, WHEN
L
UCIEN WAS BORN,
the first thing he saw as he peeked over the edge of the world was Madame Lessard’s bunghole.
Well that can’t be right,
he thought. And he thought he might cry for the shock. Then the midwife flipped him over and the second thing he saw was the blue sky through the skylight. He thought,
Oh, that’s better.
So he cried for the beauty and was at a total loss for words for almost a year. He wouldn’t remember the moment, but the feeling would come back to him from time to time, when he encountered blue.

“Perhaps I’ll call it
Luncheon on the Grass,
then,” said Manet. “Since I’ve clearly forgotten to paint the model wet enough.”
Édouard Manet
—Henri Fantin-Latour, 1867

O
N THE DAY
L
UCIEN WAS BORN,
P
ÈRE
L
ESSARD WAS NOT TO BE FOUND IN THE
bakery or the apartment above. While Madame Lessard was alternately pushing Lucien out and cursing the baker’s very being, Monsieur Lessard made his way across Paris to the Palais de l’Élysée to look at paintings, or, perhaps more important, to look at people looking at paintings. Although he would not remember it later, that day, the day his only son was born, was the first time Père Lessard would encounter the Colorman.

He wouldn’t have noticed them at all among the crush of people lined up to get into the
palais,
except that the woman was wearing a full veil of Spanish lace over her hat, which made her look like a specter against the white macadam paths and marble palace façade, looming, as she was, over the crooked little man in a brown suit and bowler hat. He held a stretched canvas wrapped in butcher paper under his arm. He might have been a hunchback, but his hump was in the middle of his spine and strained the buttons on his waistcoat as if the suit had been tailored for a taller, straighter man. Père Lessard sidled down the queue of people, making a great show of trying to look over the crowd while he found a position where he could hear the unlikely couple’s conversation.

“But two at one time!” said the woman. “I want to see.”

The little man patted the painting under his arm. “No, I have what I came for,” he said, his voice like the crunch of gravel under a scoundrel’s shoes. “These are not my pictures.”

“They are
my
pictures,” said the woman.

“No. You may not go in there. Who will you say you are? Do you even know?”

“I don’t need to know. I have the veil.” She bent down now and ran a lace-gloved finger down the little man’s cheek. “Please,
cher.
There will be so many painters in there.”

Père Lessard found himself holding his breath, hoping she would raise her veil. There were a thousand pretty women on the walkway, but there was no intrigue in getting a glimpse of their faces. He needed to see her.

“Too many people,” said the little man. “Tall people. I don’t like people taller than me.”

“Everyone is taller than you,
cher.”

“Yes, tall people can be annoying, monsieur,” said Lessard. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like him to impose himself into other people’s conversations, even in his own bakery, but this woman... “Pardon me, but I overheard your conversation.”

The little man looked up and squinted against the bright spring sky; his eyes were set so far back under his brow that Lessard could only see the faintest highlight reflecting off them, like lanterns disappearing into a dark cavern. The woman turned to look at Lessard. Through the Spanish lace veil, the baker caught sight of a blue ribbon tied at her throat and just the impression of white skin.

“You are tall, too,” said the little man.

“Are you a painter?” asked the woman, a smile in her voice. Père Lessard was caught off guard; he was neither tall, nor a painter, so he was going to excuse his rudeness and move on, but even as he shook his head and prepared to speak, the woman said, “Then we have no use for you. Do piss off, if you would be so kind.”

“I would,” said Lessard, turning on one heel as if he’d been ordered by an army captain to about-face. “I would be so kind,” he said.

“Lessard!” called a familiar voice out of the crowd. The baker looked up to see Camille Pissarro coming toward him. “Lessard, what are you doing here?”

Lessard shook Pissarro’s hand. “I’m here to see your paintings.”

“You can see my paintings anytime, my friend. We heard that Madame Lessard went into labor. Julie has gone up the butte to help.” Pissarro and his wife, Julie, lived with her mother in an apartment at the base of Montmartre. “You should go home.”

“No, I will just be in the way,” said Lessard.

Later, he would exclaim to Pissarro, “How was I to know she was going to give me a son? She was making the same daughter-birthing noises she made before—casting insults on my manly parts and so forth. I love my daughters, but two is double the number a man needs to break his heart. And then a third! Well, I thought it only courteous to give her time to discuss my downfall with her mother and sisters before I looked into her little-girl eyes for the first time and lost my heart again.”

“But Madame gave you a boy,” said the painter. “So you are saved the heartbreak.”

“That is yet to be seen,” said Lessard. “You can never underestimate her trickiness.”

Now, outside the palace, Lessard turned to excuse himself from the little man and the woman in Spanish lace, but they were gone, and in an instant, he had forgotten about them. “Let us go view these machines of genius,” he said to Pissarro.

A cackling laugh echoed out of the great hall, and a wave of laughter washed through the crowd, even though they couldn’t see what had inspired the reaction.

“Machines of the rejected,” said Pissarro, for once a note of despair dampening the Caribbean lilt in his accent.

They moved into the column of people that was squeezing itself into the palace: the upper-class men in top hats, black tailcoats, and tight gray trousers, women in black crinoline or black and maroon silk, their long skirts dusted at the fringe with white from the macadam; the new working class, men in white and blue striped jackets and straw boaters, the women in bright dresses of every color, sporting frilly pastel parasols, the mandala of the Sunday afternoon of leisure, a recent gift of the Industrial Revolution.

“But you said that the Salon was made up of charlatans.”

“Yes,” said Pissarro. “Stodgy academicians.”

“ ‘Slaves to tradition,’ you said.”

They were shuffling through the galleries now, which were packed with people and oppressively hot. The walls were hung from floor to ceiling with framed canvases of every size, with no regard for subject matter, the paintings having been hung in alphabetical order by the last name of the artist.

Pissarro paused in front of a landscape with a scandalously unremarkable red cow in it. “The enemies of ideas,” said the painter.

“If the bastards had not rejected you,” said Lessard, into the momentum of artistic anarchy now, “you would have been forced to remove your paintings yourself.”

“Well, yes,” said Pissarro, stroking his beard in the direction of the red cow. “But I might have sold a few before I removed them. If a man is to paint, he needs to eat.”

And there was the rub. While being a painter in Paris was a perfectly legitimate career choice, and there were eighteen thousand painters in the city at the time, the only track for making a living as an artist was the government-sponsored Salon. Only through the Salon could an artist display his art to the public and therefore receive sales and public commissions. To be excluded was to go hungry. But this year the jury of the Salon, which was, indeed, made up of traditional academic painters, had rejected over three thousand paintings, and there had been a public outcry. Emperor Louis-Napoléon decided to placate the public by holding the
Salon des Refusés,
for the paintings that had been rejected. Pissarro was showing two paintings, both landscapes, neither with a red cow.

“You’re thinking that your own paintings might have been improved by a red cow,” said a woman’s voice at the painter’s ear. He nearly jumped, then turned to see a woman right beside him, wearing a hat with a veil of Spanish lace that covered her face.

Lessard must have moved on into another gallery, for he wasn’t there.

“Then you have seen my landscapes, mademoiselle?”

“No,” said the woman. “But I have a sense for these things.”

“How did you know I was a painter, then?”

“Paint under your nails,
cher.
And you’re looking at the paint, not the picture.”

Pissarro was uncomfortable being called
cher
by this strange, enshrouded, unescorted woman. “Well there was no cow in the scene, so I didn’t paint a cow. I paint what I see.”

“A realist then? Like Corot and Courbet?”

“Something like that,” said Pissarro. “I’m more interested in light and color than painting a narrative.”

“Oh, I’m interested in light and color as well,” said the woman, squeezing the painter’s arm and playfully hugging it to her breast. “Particularly the color blue. A blue cow, perhaps?”

Pissarro felt sweat beading on his scalp. “Pardon me, mademoiselle, I must find my friend.”

Pissarro pushed through the crowd, passing hundreds of paintings without even looking—feeling as if he was rushing through a jungle, away from some dark voodoo ritual he had stumbled upon. (Which had happened to him as a boy on Saint Thomas, and even now he could not pass any of Paris’s cathedrals without suspecting that inside, some dark ritual involving bloody chicken feathers and entranced, sweat-slick African women was going on. To a secular Caribbean Jew, Catholicism was like a malevolent, mystical stepchild lying in wait.)