Sacre Bleu (54 page)

“I will leave you two to your sugary times,” the Irishman said, thinking he had said something far more clever and gallant. He stumbled down the butte’s stairs to Pigalle and happened into the Moulin Rouge, where he met and became quite fascinated with a young Moroccan man who worked there as a dancer and an acrobat, who taught the Irishman how to light the sugar cube over a glass of absinthe to release the green fairy, among other tricks.

The next morning Oscar awoke to find in his breast pocket a sheaf of notes, written in his own hand, which he had no recollection of having written and which were almost entirely incoherent, except for the repeated concept of a painting whose magical powers kept an old and twisted man eternally vibrant. A concept he would use as a theme for his next novel, which he would call
The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Back on the bench, across from the Lapin Agile, Carmen ran her hand over Henri’s beard and said, “Oh, my sweet count, I have missed you so. Let us go to your flat, or even your studio.”

“But my dear,” said Henri, on the razor’s edge between joy and passing out, “I fear I may not be able to perform.”

“I don’t care, you can paint, can’t you?”

“Of course, if I can draw breath I can paint.”

I
N THE MONTH THAT FOLLOWED THE
C
OLORMAN’S DEATH,
L
UCIEN FOUND IT
very difficult to paint, despite Juliette’s inspiration. For one thing, she was only seeing him every second or third day, and then only for a few hours. And while he had hoped that she would stay with him in his little flat on Montmartre, she insisted that she keep the apartment in the Latin Quarter that she had shared with the Colorman.

“But,
mon chèr,”
she’d said, “the rent is paid for months in advance. It would be a shame to waste it. And besides, I am thinking of going to university and the Sorbonne is so close.”

“I could stay there, then,” he’d argued, but as soon as he’d said it, he knew it wouldn’t work. Until his paintings began to sell better, he still needed to be at the bakery at four in the morning. It was an hour’s walk from the Latin Quarter to Montmartre, and there was no finding a taxi at that hour. Finally, he relented, and had stayed in with Juliette only on Saturday nights.

He had even suggested that she let him mix up some of the last of the Sacré Bleu that the Colorman had made, use it to shift time so he could paint for weeks on end and still make it back to the bakery to make the dough for the loaves, but she would not hear of it.

“No,
cher,
we cannot use the Bleu. That is all there is left. It would be wrong.”

She never told him exactly why it would be wrong but redirected his questions, as she often did, with her physical charms.

So, one afternoon after finishing at the bakery, when Juliette had announced that she would be otherwise engaged and Henri was nowhere to be found, Lucien made his way down the butte to the Maquis to visit Le Professeur, in the hope that a man of science might help make sense of it all.

“My boy, I’m so glad you’ve come,” said the Professeur with enthusiasm he seldom showed for anything that anyone else could understand. “Come in. Come in. I was going to come see you at the bakery. I’ve just received a telegram from a colleague of mine, Dr. Vanderlinden from Brussels. He’s working at a place called Pech Merle, near Albi, and he’s just discovered a new series of caves with drawings. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Oh, that’s terrific,” said Lucien, not understanding why he would want to know, but not wanting to be rude.

“You see, from the animal bones they’ve found among the ashes, they know the caves were used by humans many years before the others we’ve found.”

“Splendid,” said Lucien, having no idea whatever why this would be splendid.

“They could have been used ten, twenty thousand years ago. We don’t know.”

“No?” Lucien was having trouble coming up with falsely enthusiastic things to say, so he was going with false incredulity.

“Yes. And these drawings, older than any we have found, have figures rendered in blue pigment.”

“But you said ancient blue pigment didn’t last, it—”

“Exactly. I’m leaving in the morning to go test the pigment against the samples we used when I tested the color Toulouse-Lautrec brought to me.”

“You think it could be—”

“Yes! Do you want to come with me? The train to Albi leaves from Gare du Nord at eight.”

“Absolutely,” said Lucien. There had been a lot of interest in primitive art among Paris artists lately, but no artist had seen anything this old, and apparently, no one at all had seen anything this old and blue. And nothing was going well for him in Paris. Why not?

“And Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec?”

“Henri is from Albi. He’ll probably want to join us. I’ll find him and meet you here at six thirty.”

But Henri was nowhere to be found, and Lucien even ended up leaving a note for Juliette with the concierge at her building.

“Do you want me to give it to her maid?” asked the woman.

“She has a maid?”

“Oh yes, for nearly a month now. The first she’s been able to keep. That uncle of hers was—well, monsieur, their last maid shot him, and I don’t mind telling you—”

“I know,” Lucien interrupted. “No, please, just give it to Juliette, personally. Thank you, Madame.”

L
UCIEN LEFT A MESSAGE FOR
H
ENRI AT THE
M
OULIN
R
OUGE, WHERE
L
AUTREC
could be depended upon to show before anywhere else, and so Lucien boarded the train to Albi with only the Professeur. They were met at the Albi station by Dr. Vanderlinden, a silver-bearded walrus of a man who spoke French with a clipped Dutch accent that accentuated his formal, academic demeanor, despite the fact that he dressed like a mountaineer in canvas and leather, his boots dusty and run over at the heels.

Vanderlinden installed them in a modest inn where he kept his quarters, and in the morning they rode several miles into the hills in a workman’s wagon, then hiked two more, on steep forest trails that would not have accommodated a horse, let alone the wagon.

The mouth of the cave at Pech Merle was long and low, as if some giant, clawed creature had worked away the stone while trying to dig out its prey. They had to crawl on their hands and knees for nearly twenty meters before they entered a chamber in which they could even stand. Dr. Vanderlinden had prepared them for the crawl, however; they all wore gloves and had padded their knees with leather backed with wool.

The Belgian had the hardest time making the crawl, but when they stood in the open chamber and turned up their lanterns, it was difficult to tell if his breathlessness was from exertion or excitement.

“So you see, Bastard!”

The chamber they were in was at least six meters tall, and the walls were decorated floor to ceiling with pictures of horses, bison, some sort of antelope, rendered in white and red and brown ochre. Each animal was marked with spots that sometimes extended to the area around them. Lucien was impressed with the skill of the artist, because even on the rough surface there was the hint of perspective, shading on the horses that indicated dimension.

“The examples are better preserved as you go deeper into the cave,” said Vanderlinden.

“Why do the spots extend outside of the outlines?” asked Lucien.

“I have a theory about that,” said Vanderlinden. “You see, I don’t believe these are actually animals. You see here and there the human figures? Small compared to the animals. No dimension, just shadows, yes? But the animals are fully formed.”

“Hunters?”

“That’s just it,” said the Belgian. “We’ve excavated several fire rings in this cave. From the strata, and the smoke built up on the ceiling, people lived here on and off for thousands of years, yet there are no large animal bones to be found in any layer. Many, many examples of small animals, rabbits, marmots, badgers, even a few human bones, mostly teeth. These people did not hunt large animals.”

“Then?”

“Close your eyes,” said Vanderlinden.

Lucien did as he was told.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing. Darkness.”

“No, what do you really see? What do you see in the darkness?”

“Circles, like auras, where our lanterns were. Afterimages.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed the Belgian, clapping his hands. “These are images that were seen in the dark. In the mind’s eye. I believe that these people were drawing images of animals that they saw in trance. These are spirit animals, not corporeal animals. That’s why the humans are not fully developed. These drawings are shamanistic. Religious, if you will. Not narrative. They are not telling a story, they are invoking the gods.”

“Interesting,” said Professeur Bastard.

“Oh that’s just fucking grand,” said Lucien. He’d really had enough of trying to reconcile the spirit world lately and had really hoped for some hands-on empirical science you could taste.

“I know,” said Vanderlinden, missing the sarcasm. “Wait until you see the rest.”

He led them farther into the cave, ducking through very low passages, following chalk marks at forks he’d obviously left himself from previous explorations. At one point they had to shimmy through an opening on their bellies, handing their lanterns ahead of them, but the narrow passage opened into a huge chamber.

“This passage had been blocked by debris for what must have been thousands of years, but one of my students saw a pattern to the stones, larger at the bottom, getting smaller and smaller to the top. They had been placed. This had been purposely walled up. Thank heavens for fresh, young eyes. I’d have never seen it myself.”

Vanderlinden played his lantern over the walls.

“These, Bastard, these are the drawings I sent the message about.” The drawings higher up on the walls were similar to those outside the chamber, but lower, there was a repeated motif, most of the figures black.

“You can’t see anything under this yellow lamplight. Wait, let me light a magnesium light. The small arc light you provided, Bastard. The battery will only work for a few minutes, but you’ll see. You can take samples for your analysis.”

Vanderlinden took a strange-looking brass lantern from his knapsack, and then a battery about the size of a cantaloupe, but it must have been very heavy by the way the doctor handled it, and Lucien felt guilty for not having helped the older man carry his burden.

“Now, don’t look into the light. It will blind you. I’m pointing it away.” He attached wires to the leads on the lantern, then turned a small knob at the top of the lamp, which advanced a thin magnesium bar toward an electrode. When the current arced, the cave lit up like bright sunshine, and Lucien could see the size of the chamber. It was larger than the nave at Notre-Dame, and all around it, for about a meter from the floor up the wall, were drawings of human figures, many different human figures: dancing, fighting, hunting, traveling. In every motif, however, two figures were repeated again and again: that of a small, twisted figure, smaller than the others, rendered in brown ochre, holding a black knife; and a tall, slender female figure, rendered in bright, ultramarine blue.

“So you see! The blue is mineral, I’m sure of it,” said Vanderlinden. “The blue brushes off quite easily, so it’s never been disturbed. I’ve tested some of it in a flame. It’s not copper. Perhaps your liquid chromatography method—”

Professeur Bastard held up his hand to signal for his colleague to pause. “And you believe these drawings are how old?”

“It’s only a theory, this chamber has been dry for millennia, but because we had to remove some stalactites and stalagmites on the other side of the constructed barrier, and we have some idea of how long it takes them to grow, given the amount of minerals in the water around here, these could have been painted as long as forty thousand years ago.”

Le Professeur looked at Lucien looking at the drawings—the painter’s face was contorted in horror.

“Sacré Bleu,” he said. “These are
his.
He lives.”