Lucien tilted his head this way and that. “Oh yes, now I see it.” He didn’t see it at all.
His father slouched, suddenly looking weary. “No you don’t. I’m no artist, Lucien. I am a baker. My father was a baker, and his father before him. Our family has fed the people of the butte for two hundred years. I have smelled of yeast and breathed the dust of flour my whole life. Not one day did our family or friends go hungry, even when there was war. Bread is my life, son, and before I die, I will have made a million loaves.”
“Yes, Papa,” said Lucien. He had seen his father slide into melancholy like this before, usually, like now, right before dawn when they were waiting for the first loaves to come out of the ovens. He patted his father’s arm, knowing that soon the bread would be ready and the bakery would boil with activity that would allow no time to grieve over ships that looked like birds.
“I would trade it all if I could lay down the colors of water like our friend Monet, or move paint like the joy in a young girl’s smile like Renoir. Do you know what I am talking about?”
“Yes, Papa,” Lucien said. He had no idea what his father was talking about.
“Is he going on about his pets again?” said Mother as she breezed into the room from the front, where she had been arranging the pastries in baskets. She was a stout, wide-bottomed woman who wore her chestnut hair up in a loose chignon that trailed tendrils that were either born of weariness or were simply attempting escape. Despite her size, she glided around the bakery as if dancing a waltz, her lips set in a bemused smile and a spark of annoyance in her eyes. Bemused and annoyed was more or less the lens through which Mère Lessard viewed the world. “Well, there are people waiting outside already, and it’s for the bread, not that paint stain you are raffling off.”
Père Lessard put his arm around Lucien’s shoulders. “Promise me, son, that you will become a great painter and that you will not let a spiteful woman ruin your life as I have.”
“A beautiful and spiteful woman,” said Mother.
“Of course, ma chère,” said Lucien’s father, “but I don’t need to warn him off of beauty, do I?”
“Warn him off taking in paint-spattered vagabonds as pets, then, would you?”
“We must forgive Madame her ignorance, Lucien. She is a woman and therefore hasn’t the capacity to appreciate art, but one day she will realize that my painter friends are great men, and she will repent for her unkind words.”
Lucien’s parents did this sometimes—talked through him as if he were a hollow tube simply muting the harsh tone and timbre of their words. He had learned that at these times, it was best to stare at a distant and neutral spot on the wall and resist the urge to appear attentive until one of them formulated an exit line sufficiently droll to dismiss the whole exchange.
Mother sniffed the air, which was rich with the smell of baking bread, and harrumphed. “You have a few minutes before the bread is done. Monsieur, why don’t you take your son outside to watch the sunrise. Once you turn him into a painter he’ll never be up in time to see one again.” And then she waltzed past the heavy wooden table and up the stairs to the family apartments.
Lucien and his father slipped out the side door of number 6 rue Norvins and crept down between the buildings and behind the back of the waiting customers, across the Place du Tertre, to look out over all of Paris.
The butte Montmartre rose four hundred feet above the north end of Paris. For hundreds of years Montmartre had been a village unto itself, outside of the city walls, but as the city walls moved out and were torn down to make way for boulevards, Montmartre had become a country village in the midst of one of the biggest cities in the world. If you were an artist in Paris, Montmartre was where you came to starve, and it was Père Lessard who kept you from it.
Père Lessard produced a small pipe from his apron pocket and lit it with a match, then stood with his hand on his son’s shoulder, as he did six mornings a week, and smoked as they watched the city turn pink under the dawn.
This was Lucien’s favorite part of the day, when most of the work was finished, school was still ahead, and his father spoke to him as if he was the only person in the world. He imagined himself a young Moses, the Chosen, and Father’s pipe the Burning Bush, except that he was a short, French, Catholic Moses and didn’t understand a word of the Hebrew that the bush was speaking.
“Look there, you can see the Louvre,” said Père Lessard. “You know that before Haussmann changed Paris, the courtyard of the Louvre was a shantytown where workmen and their families lived? Monsieur Renoir grew up there.”
“Yes,” said Lucien, eager to show Father how grown-up he was. “He said he used to play pranks on Queen Amalia’s guards when he was a boy.” Lucien knew Monsieur Renoir better than Father’s other painters, as Renoir had agreed to tutor Lucien in drawing in exchange for bread, coffee, and pastries. Despite their time together, Renoir didn’t seem very fond of him. Lucien thought it might be the syphilis.
It had come up during their second lesson, when Lucien was lamenting that he just wasn’t smart enough to be an artist.
“Art is not about thinking, Lucien,” said Renoir. “It is about the skill in your hands. I am not an intellectual, I have no imagination. I paint what I see. There is more to be said in the look of a man’s hands than in his discourse.”
“But your hands are tiny, monsieur,” said Lucien. Renoir was a very slight fellow. Madame Jacob, who owned the crémerie across the square, was always trying to convince him to marry one of her two daughters, who she promised would put some meat on his bones and save him from his domestic helplessness.
“What are you trying to say?” asked Renoir.
“Nothing,” said Lucien.
“Your hands are tiny too,” said Renoir.
“But I am only nine,” said Lucien, who was only nine at the time.
“This is why no one likes you, Lucien,” said Renoir. “You probably have small hands because you have syphilis.”
Lucien didn’t know what syphilis was, but he worried it would ruin him as a painter.
“You don’t have syphilis,” said Father. “Your hands are fine and strong from kneading dough. You will be a great painter.”
“I don’t think Monsieur Renoir thinks I will be great. He says I’m simple.”