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“These dogs are not fighting.”
“Yes they are. Like the paintings we saw in the Louvre,” said Lucien. “Gecko-Roman wrestling, Father called it.”
“Ah, of course,” said Pissarro, as if it had become clear. “Yes, Gecko-Roman dog wrestling. Superb! I presume you haven’t shown your wrestling dogs to Madame Lessard, then.”
“No, monsieur, Mother doesn’t appreciate art.”
“Ah, well, then I must insist that you give it to me for my collection.”
Lucien felt he would nearly burst with pride. “Really, monsieur, you want it?”
“It will hang next to a Cézanne. I believe he has an affinity for wrestling dogs.”
“And you will tell Minette that I drew it?”
“Of course.”
Lucien started to tear the drawing out of his sketchbook, then paused and looked up. Lucien had dark eyes that often seemed a bit too wide for his face, like those of a hungry kitten, and now they bore distress that bordered on tears. “But, monsieur, I don’t want your Lucien to feel bad when he sees my wrestling dogs in your house.”
Pissarro laughed. “Your friend has his own sketchbook, Rat Catcher, don’t you worry about him.”
Lucien smiled, tore out the page, and handed it to the painter, who folded it carefully in half and tucked it into his coat pocket.
A murmur rose in the crowd and there was polite maneuvering for position at the door. Mère Lessard pulled up the shade, turned the sign, and opened the door. Madame called out a joyful bonjour to the customers and welcomed them into the shop with a breezy flourish and a smile such as one might find on a pre-revolution Marie-Antoinette painted on a teacup, which is to say, sparkling with charm and warm possibility.
“Maman reserves her stormy side for her family,” Père Lessard would say, “for the world she has only sunshine and butterflies.”
It was then that she smacked young Lucien in the head with a baguette. The crunchy yet tender crust wrapped around his head, bending but not breaking, showing that the oven had been precisely the right temperature, there had been exactly enough moisture, and in fact, by the ancient Lessard test method, it was perfect. Lucien thought this was the way of all French boulangers, and he would be a young man before anyone explained to him that other bakers did not have a test boy who was smacked in the head with a loaf of bread every morning.
Madame Lessard held the perfect baguette up to the crowd. “Voilà,” she said, pronouncing the day’s sales begun.
“May I pick the ticket, Maman? May I pick the ticket?” called Lucien, hopping up and down, crumbs falling from his hair before the customers, who waited four-deep at the counter, most of whom looked quite perplexed at his enthusiasm.
“I already have, Rat Catcher,” said Lucien’s oldest sister, Régine, who was sixteen and had joined her mother behind the counter. Régine had her father’s dark hair and eyes, and stood taller than either of her parents. Père Lessard said that she would make someone a fine wife someday, and in lieu of that, he could send her to Quebec, where she would be the prettiest lumberjack and Red Indian fighter ever. Régine held the winning ticket in the air. “Number forty-two,” she said. “Does anyone have number forty-two?”
As it turned out, no one had number forty-two; in fact, no one in the bakery that morning had bought a ticket at all. An hour later the ticket had been tacked up on the wall under Pissarro’s painting, a small landscape looking down from a hill in Auvers-sur-Oise, portraying the red tile roofs and the river below. Pissarro sat at the little café table outside the bakery with Père Lessard. Lucien danced from foot to foot beside the table, his schoolbooks tucked under his arm.
“We can’t even give them away,” said Pissarro forlornly.
“Nonsense,” said Père Lessard. “The winner simply hasn’t shown yet. And all the better if they don’t. You have the ten francs we got for selling the tickets, and your magnificent painting will hang in my bakery where the people may admire it.”
“But, Papa—” said Lucien, who was about to correct the arithmetic when Father shoved a buttered roll in his mouth. “Mmmpppf,” Lucien continued with a spray of crumbs. After all, the tickets had only sold for a sou each, with twenty sous to the franc, and they’d only sold seventy-eight tickets—why, it was less than four francs! And Lucien would have said so if his father hadn’t muzzle-loaded him with un petit pain while handing a ten-franc note across the table to Pissarro.
Across the square a donkey brayed, and they turned to see a bent little brown man in an ill-fitting suit trudging up the street, leading the donkey, but their attention was immediately captured by the girl who walked but ten paces ahead. Lucien’s mouth fell open and a ball of half-chewed bread tumbled out of his mouth onto the cobbles. Two pigeons in the square cackled at their good fortune and made a fast walk for the gift from above.
“I’m not too late, am I?” the girl called. She held her raffle ticket before her.
She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, a delicate thing in a white dress with puffy sleeves and great ultramarine bows all down its front and at the cuffs. Her eyes matched the bows on her dress, too blue, really, and even the painter, a theorist and student of color, found he had to look a bit askew at her to keep from losing his train of thought.
Père Lessard stood and met the girl with a smile. “You are just in time, mademoiselle,” he said with a bit of a bow. “May I?”
He plucked the ticket from the girl’s hand and checked the number. “And you are the winner! Congratulations! And how lucky it is that the great man himself is here. Mademoiselle…”
“Margot,” said the girl.
“Mademoiselle Margot, may I present the great painter, Monsieur Camille Pissarro.”
Pissarro stood and bowed over the girl’s hand. “Enchanted,” he said.
