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“Lucien, Professeur, have you met the great, the wonderful, the beautiful Jane Avril? Jane, my friends—”
“Enchanté,” said the singer. She slid off her stool, steadied herself on the table, then presented an elegantly gloved hand each to Lucien and the Professeur, over which each bowed. She turned back to Henri, lifted his bowler hat, and placed a kiss on his temple. “And now, puppet, since you have someone to look after you, I am going home.” She raised an eyebrow to Lucien. “He wouldn’t let me go home unless I took him with me. Then what would I do with him?”
Lucien saw her to the door and offered to help her find a cab, but she elected to stumble down the long stairway to Pigalle, saying the brisk morning air might sober her up enough to sleep.
When Lucien joined them at the table, Henri threw a bread crust down on his plate. “I am a traitor, Lucien. I’m ashamed you’ve found me here eating some stranger’s bread. I don’t blame you if you abandon me. Everyone does. Carmen. Jane. Everybody.”
Lucien signaled to Madame Jacob, who stood among her cheeses, to bring coffee for him and the Professeur and shrugged. He’d seen her at the bakery only an hour ago, so the pleasantries of the day had already been exchanged.
“First, Henri, you are eating my bread. Madame Jacob has been serving Lessard bread for fifty years, so you’re not a traitor. And Mademoiselle Avril did not abandon you, she simply went home, exhausted, no doubt, after watching you drink all night, and if things had gone differently, and she’d taken you home and taken you to bed, you’d either be passed out or singing annoying sailor songs. Yours is a false melancholy, Monsieur Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“Well,” said Henri, picking up his bread again. “In that case, I feel better. How are you, Professeur? Anything interesting in Spain?”
“There has been a new cave discovered in the south, at Altamira. The drawings on the walls may be the oldest that have ever been found.”
“How can you tell?” asked Lucien.
“Well, the interesting thing about that is my colleague and I have formulated a relative date, only relative, because of the color used in the drawings. It seems there is no blue in any of the drawings that remain.”
“I don’t understand,” said Lucien.
“You see, mineral-based pigments for blue, azurite, copper oxide, and lapis lazuli, were not used until after three thousand B.C., when the Egyptians began to use them. Before that, the blue pigments used in Europe were all organic, like woad, which is made from crushing and fermenting the leaves of the woad shrub. Over the years, the organic pigments deteriorated, molded, were eaten by insects, so only the mineral pigments like clays, chalks, charcoals remain. If there’s no blue pigment in the drawing, we can assume that it is at least five thousand years old.”
“The Picts of Scotland used woad to paint themselves, didn’t they?” asked Henri.
The Professeur seemed surprised at the painter’s interjection. “Why yes, yes they did. How did you know that?”
“One of the few truths of history the priests at my school actually taught us.”
“That’s not true at all,” said Lucien. Juliette had just told them about the Picts.
The Professeur drained his espresso and signaled to Madame for another. He seemed very excited now. “That is not all I saw in Spain. I may have some disturbing news about your Colorman. You see, when I was in Madrid, I went to the Prado and looked at their entire collection. It took days. But it was in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch that I saw the figure, amid hundreds of others in The Garden of Earthly Delights, a depiction of hell. It was a knotted, apelike figure, with spindly limbs, and he was torturing a young woman with a knife. And his hands and feet were stained with blue.”
“But, Professeur,” said Toulouse-Lautrec, “I saw the Boschs at the Uffizi in Florence when I went there with my mother as a boy. I remember that they are all filled with twisted, tortured figures. They gave me nightmares.”
“True, but there was a plaque depicted in the painting, hung around the figure’s neck, and on it was writing in Sumerian cuneiform. As you know, in addition to my other studies, I am an amateur necrolinguist?—”
“It means he likes to lick the dead,” explained Henri.
“It means he studies dead languages,” corrected Lucien.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said the Professeur.
“My education is shit,” said Henri. “Lying priests.”
“Anyway,” said the Professeur. “I was able to make out the cuneiform and translate it. The plaque read ‘Colorman.’ As long as three hundred years ago, there was someone acting as your Colorman. I think it must have been some kind of warning from Bosch.”
“It wasn’t a Colorman, it was the same Colorman,” said Lucien.
“I don’t understand,” said the Professeur. “Then he would be?—”
Lucien held up a hand to stop the Professeur. “I told you, we have much to tell you. There’s a reason that I said that Juliette killed a man whom you saw walking by not an hour ago.”
Lucien and Henri told the Professeur of the Colorman, the Picts, all that Juliette had told them, all that they had experienced, and when they had finished, finally, and admitted that it was now on them, two painters, to vanquish the Colorman and free the muse, the Professeur said, “By Foucault’s dangling pendulum, I have to rethink it all. Science and reason are a sham, the Age of Reason is a ruse, it’s been magic and ritual all along. If this is true, can we even trust Descartes? How do we even know that we exist, that we are alive?”
“A question that often plagues me,” said Toulouse-Lautrec. “If you’d like to accompany me to rue des Moulins, I know some girls there who, if they cannot convince you that you are alive, will at least help soothe your anxiety about being deceased.”
