Betsy made a face as though she’d smelled something offensive. “How disgusting. But then, you were always drawn to the macabre. Thank goodness it hasn’t affected your painting.”

Marcia smiled. “Virginie’s tale of cruelty and imagined revenge gave me an idea. I would paint her experiences as an indictment of child abuse. It would be something entirely new, at least in my art; a plea for tormented children, the victims of indifference and intolerance.

“Until now, I’ve avoided social comment like the plague. I’ve spent my life earning good fees and prizes painting pretty pictures for the well-heeled bourgeoisie, so I suppose my deathbed conversion will strike many as insincere. Do you think I’m a hypocrite?”

Betsy took Marcia in her arms and held her close. She pitied her longtime companion, but could not forget Marcia’s past transgressions. Even in her present condition, Marcia might be lying to cover-up an affair. Betsy closed her eyes, her jealous mind conjuring a vision of the beautiful dancer.“No, dear,” she whispered, “I’d never think that of you.”

Marcia, Betsy, and Sir Henry rode in an open barouche down a shady avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, past the race course and round the serpentine lake. The weather had changed for the better. The afternoon was unseasonably balmy with a few wispy clouds in a bright blue sky. Sir Henry considered it a good opportunity for Marcia to get some fresh air and sunshine. She sat across from Betsy and Sir Henry, half-lulled to sleep by their monotonous chatter, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, and the rumble of carriage wheels.

Marcia looked tiny sitting by herself on the broad leather seat; she seemed to be fading away by the hour. Her wasted body was wrapped in a pure white, furbelow-frilled dress, her gaunt skull half hidden under a black ribbon-trimmed and flower-bedecked straw hat and small, fringed parasol. A crocheted shawl draped her bony shoulders.

Marcia’s bright green eyes fixed on Betsy, who giggled like a schoolgirl while flirting with the handsome English doctor. She’s far away from me now. So much the better. Marcia did not want her friend to be shackled to a corpse. Life is for the living; the dying dwell in a twilight world of their own, a sort of limbo between the quick and the dead. A wry smile crossed her rouged lips. Où sont les neiges d’antan? Villon’s poem had taken on a new meaning for her. She would soon join those beauties of yesteryear.

Marcia turned her attention to the trees and their dying leaves. Bright red, orange, and old gold, they fell from branches, drifted in the mild breeze, floated for an instant before landing on the surface of the mirror-like lake. How beautiful. She had devoted her life to beauty, her art. But her art was dying, too. Why had she committed herself to something so ephemeral? Beauty was fragile and transitory, like the floating leaves. Truth endured, though it could be ugly. She predicted the new art would be ugly in its uncompromising honesty, reflecting a changing world, a fin de siècle ethos oriented toward darkness and despair.

She had changed her mind; she would not return to America to die in a sanatorium. She had not yet told Betsy or Sir Henry, but she intended to remain in Paris. Marcia wanted to finish one last great testament, her painting of Virginie’s suffering, but her will had been dissipated by disease, oozing out of her like gummy sap from a dying tree. She closed her eyes and sought inspiration in a vision. The image of Virginie Ménard appeared shining through Marcia’s closed eyelids like a celestial being floating in a golden nimbus. A single tear formed a rivulet running slowly down her powdered cheek, but no one noticed.

4

MONTMARTRE

EVENING, OCTOBER 14;

EARLY MORNING, OCTOBER 15

Le Chat Noir occupied a three-story half-timbered building on the Boulevard de Clichy, not far from the Moulin Rouge. Originally located on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, the popular cabaret had opened to promotional hoopla; a torch-bearing parade of Hydropathes costumed like Swiss Guards, led by a flamboyant mountebank, Rodolphe Salis.

Prior to opening his cabaret, Salis, an artist of modest talent, and three of his painter friends, had eked out a living by painting cheap religious paintings. Each friend contributed to the product, the Stations of the Cross, according to his specialty, drawing and painting faces, bodies, draperies, or background. But in a marketplace glutted with shoddy artwork the scheme could never prove lucrative. On the other hand, Salis’s idea for a new cabaret was, like Oller and Zidler’s Moulin Rouge, a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, meeting a demand for bawdy, avant-garde entertainment in exactly the right place at the right time.

Salis based his interior design for the cabaret on a fanciful seventeenth-century tavern that might have been frequented by Cyrano de Bergerac or Dumas père’s Musketeers. Customers sat at long wooden tables in a hall lit by cast iron chandeliers. Paintings and posters decorated the walls, and Salis added iron, glass, and stone objets d’art, the genesis of Art Nouveau.

In addition to serving cheap wine and absinthe to his thirsty crowd, Salis provided an innovative form of amusement—the stage was open to anyone who had the daring to take it and the fortitude to hold it. On a given night a genius like Verlaine might recite one of his poems, but for the most part the performers were amateurs. And Salis encouraged these naïve hopefuls with free absinthe.

Fortified with cheap liquor, the trembling tyro would brave his audience like the condemned at the guillotine, showing his grit to the bloodthirsty mob. He would begin his quavering declamation in relative silence, which he might mistake for rapt interest. But the performer would soon be disabused by the rowdy audience, consisting of all classes, almost all of whom were pissing drunk.

The merry crowd would pelt the poor performer with sarcastic invective the way their forbears showered a pilloried criminal with rotten vegetables, dung, piss, and offal. This was jolly good fun, especially when the scorned and rejected artist fled the premises and wandered off into the darkness crying tears of despair and harboring suicidal thoughts. This theater of the cruel and absurd appealed to Toulouse-Lautrec.

Salis guarded the entrance, where he greeted his customers sarcastically, saving his most singular insults for celebrities and regulars. “Hey Lautrec, what have you done with our sweet, little Virginie? I hear the cops are dragging the Seine for her body.”

Lautrec laughed while noting, with some concern, that this was the second time someone had alluded to Virginie Ménard’s disappearance. Inured to the impresario’s caustic wit, Lautrec hobbled over to his favorite spot at the foot of a table, where he ordered absinthe and began recording the scene in pastels on brown paper. He was soon joined by Émile Bernard. The young man seemed agitated.

“Where have you been hiding, Émile? I haven’t seen you,” Lautrec checked his watch, “for at least six whole hours. Pull up a chair, old man, and have a drink.”

Bernard sat and stared wildly at Lautrec. “I’ve been running round looking for Mademoiselle Ménard. I talked to her concierge, to Cormon, to Zidler, and to her best friend, Delphine; nobody’s seen her for days.”

Lautrec took a deep breath and smiled. “You worry too much. They all turn up, sooner or later.”

“This isn’t funny, Henri. People are worried, and you’re taking it awfully cool. After all, she was your model and your—”

Lautrec put up his hand and shook his head. “If you were about to say ‘lover’ that was true once, but no longer. Mademoiselle has since moved on to greener pastures. That is to say, she has abandoned me for those who can better afford her charms and talents. But if you and others are concerned as to her whereabouts, why not go to the police?”