Read Online Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore - Free Book Online

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.)
    He caught up to Lessard in the “M” gallery. The baker was standing just outside a semicircle of people gathered around a large canvas. They were pointing and laughing.
    The baker looked up at his friend. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
    “I’ve just been mercilessly flirted with by a strange