“Madame, one thing. Did the doctor say the nature of his sickness?”
“He called it dementia paralytica,” said Madame van Gogh, and she quietly pushed the door shut.
“Merci, Madame.”
Lucien tore the top off the envelope and dumped it into his open hand: a tin tube of paint, almost completely used, and a small, folded note. He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked around to see Gauguin, holding out his hand.
“I think that is mine,” said Gauguin.
“In a monkey’s red ass, it is,” said Lucien.
It was then, with great force and no little glee, that Henri Toulouse-Lautrec swung the weighted pommel of his walking stick into Gauguin’s shin.
“En garde!” said the count.
It was some time before Gauguin was able to join his fellow artists outside on the sidewalk.
“I THINK YOU CHIPPED A BONE,” SAID GAUGUIN. THEY MADE THEIR WAY DOWN rue Caulaincourt toward Toulouse-Lautrec’s studio, two of the three limping, one emphatically.
Henri said, “You know, for a man of forty-three, you are surprisingly good at hopping downstairs on one foot.”
“You will pay for that, Lautrec,” said Gauguin. To Lucien, he said, “That envelope is mine.”
Lucien held up the envelope to show the writing on the side. “Despite my name on it and Madame van Gogh saying that the girl left it for me, it is yours?”
“Yes. I know the girl who delivered it.”
“You know her? A random Tahitian girl? You know her?”
“Yes, she said that she would be bringing me color, and that was a tube of paint in the envelope, was it not?”
Henri stopped and snagged Gauguin by the sleeve of his brocade jacket, nearly spinning him around. “Wait, how do you know this girl?”
Gauguin shook his sleeve out of Lautrec’s grasp. “I just know her.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“I met her only recently.”
“Recently where? Under what circumstances?”
Gauguin looked around, as if searching for an answer in the sky. “She may have appeared in my bed last night.”
“Appeared?” Lucien loomed over Gauguin, curious to a point that was beginning to look threatening.
Gauguin backed away from his fellow painters turned inquisitors, who, it seemed, were behaving much more intensely than the situation dictated.
“I got up to get a drink of water, and when I returned to bed she was there.”
“And you didn’t find that at all strange?” said Lucien.
“Or convenient?” added Henri, a recriminating eyebrow bounding over the lens of his pince-nez like a prosecutorial squirrel.
“It was as from a dream,” cried Gauguin. “What is wrong with you two?” He limped away to escape them, heading back the way they had come.
“She was perfect, then?” said Lucien. “As if conjured from an ideal?”
Gauguin stopped. “Yes. Exactly.”