“If she doesn’t turn up soon, I believe that’s what I’ll do.”

Lautrec shrugged. “Do as you please,” he muttered, and then returned to his sketch.

Shortly thereafter, they were interrupted: “Hello Lautrec, Bernard. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Not at all, Sir Henry,” Lautrec replied. Lautrec and Bernard had become acquainted with Sir Henry Collingwood at Cormon’s Atelier. Lautrec and Sir Henry had formed a special bond, a consequence of the doctor’s interest in art and the artist’s interest in surgery.

Sir Henry settled in and ordered a drink. He glanced round the room to see if he could recognize anyone, and then lit a cigar. Relaxed, he leaned back, tucked a thumb in his waistcoat pocket and blew a few smoke rings. After a moment he remarked, “I say, Lautrec, I saw you at Péan’s clinic today. A neat little hysterectomy, eh what?”

Lautrec raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t recall seeing you there?”

Sir Henry smiled. “Oh, I can be a furtive fellow, at times. Besides, you were concentrating on the operation and your sketch. I doubt you would have noticed if Gabriel had blown the last trumpet.” Sir Henry and Lautrec laughed. Then the doctor turned his attention to Émile, who seemed pensive and detached. “Why so gloomy, Bernard?”

Émile remained silent. Lautrec answered for him. “He’s worried about a girl gone missing.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Sir Henry said. He placed a hand on Bernard’s shoulder sympathetically and asked, “Do I know her, Émile?”

Bernard turned his sad eyes toward the doctor. “I believe you do, Sir Henry. She’s the pretty little blonde we sketched at the Atelier.”

The doctor stared blankly for a moment and then his eyes brightened. “Yes, of course, that was Mademoiselle uh—Mademoiselle Ménard. I saw Lautrec’s portrait of her at Joyant’s gallery. Well, let’s hope she turns up soon. By the way, here’s an odd coincidence. I’m treating another admirer of Mademoiselle Ménard and the portrait, an American artist, Marcia Brownlow. Do either of you know her?”

“I do,” said Lautrec. “She and her rich companion were at the Moulin Rouge a few evenings ago. I thought they were going to make an offer for my painting, but I’ve heard nothing since.”

“Oh, I see. I’m afraid Miss Brownlow is quite ill. Her friend, Miss Endicott, is making arrangements to return to America as soon as Miss Brownlow can travel, and I will accompany them to a sanatorium.”

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, I don’t see what this has to do with Virginie. If you’ll excuse me.” With that curt declaration, Bernard got up and left the cabaret.

Sir Henry watched Émile go out the door, then turned to Lautrec. “Poor fellow. I diagnose a case of Virginie on the brain. I suppose he’s sweet on her.”

Lautrec muttered, “Perhaps.” He turned his attention to a slender man walking toward the piano. “You see the man who’s about to play?”

Sir Henry screwed a monocle into his eye and gazed across the smoke-filled hall. “Yes; who is he?”

“His name’s Satie; not bad, really. The crowd listens when he plays.”

Lautrec abandoned Le Chat Noir in the early morning hours. He ventured into the rabbit’s warren of dark, narrow streets snaking up the hill. His button-hook tapping the cobblestones, the artist limped painfully up a murky, echoing brick cavern roofed over by a cloudy, moonless sky. Cats crouching in cubbyholes hissed and yowled as he passed. Gaslamps glowed, their feeble yellow flames lighting his way toward his favorite whorehouse. There the artist would drink, sketch, and joke with the girls, afterward engaging in a game of rumpy-pumpy until the sun rose, shining its light on the alabaster dome of Sacré-Cœur.

Puffing with fatigue from the steep walk, Lautrec rested under a lamp and reached into his coat pocket for his cigarette case. Unable to locate the case, he muttered, “Damn,” then patted and rummaged round in his other pockets until he found a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.

Continuing up a flight of steps, the always perceptive artist failed to notice someone tailing him, a silent observer lurking in the shadows. As Lautrec approached the brothel, a powerful stench assaulted his nostrils. Staring ahead he noticed a familiar form, the oval iron tank of a sewage wagon parked beside a cesspit. The night soil collectors were pumping human waste, some of which had slopped over onto the pavement where it commingled with piles of horse dung and unswept rubbish. Lautrec cautiously skirted the work area and proceeded to the maison, where he rang for the madam.

The proprietress, a feather-bedecked trull with flaming red hair, recognized the little gentleman and greeted him with a grin. But her smile soon turned to a comical grimace as she got a whiff of the street. Lifting a perfumed handkerchief to her nose, she urged, “Quickly, Monsieur, come in before my house fills with miasma.” Lautrec crossed the threshold, chuckling at the madam’s unscientific objection to the stench.

The stalker watched from an unlit passageway between two houses across the street. As Lautrec entered the brothel, the stealthy observer made a mental note of the time and address.

Nine years earlier, during the hot months of August and September, Paris experienced the Great Stink, a foul, putrid odor that pervaded the entire city. Many Parisians feared the “miasma,” which they believed was the source of typhoid and cholera. The bacteriologists, led by Pasteur, pointed to the microscopic source of the stench as the cause of epidemic diseases. There was a fuss in the press and the harried government formed a commission to study the matter, raising a debate about the sewer system and the methods of waste disposal. In the end, with cooler weather the stink disappeared, the feared epidemic never materialized, and the city’s methods of dealing with human excreta remained, for the most part, unchanged. In the early morning hours, hundreds of foul-smelling sewer wagons rumbled through the streets of Paris, cleaning out cesspools and cesspits and emptying waste receptacles in thousands of cellars.

This night, the two night soil collectors finished pumping, closed the pipe, mounted their wagon and moved on. Dressed in their typical workers’ blouse and cap, incessantly puffing on clay pipes to mask the stench of their trade, the collectors bantered and cracked jokes to break the monotony. The older man managed the reins and the brake; their powerful gray horse strained against its leather traces, pulling the heavy load uphill. The young man connected the hose and worked the pneumatic pump at each stop.

They were nearing the end of their run on the Rue Tourlaque. Soon, they would journey through the city to a central collection point on the Seine embankment, where the waste would be emptied into tanker barges for transport to a suburban sewage farm. The senior man, Papa Lebæuf, a burly fellow of fifty with a grizzled beard flowing halfway down his chest, halted the wagon. “All right Jacques, last call for this morning.”

“Thank God,” the younger man said as he sprang from his perch onto the pavement. A wiry fellow with thick, brawny arms and powerful hands, Jacques un-reeled the rubber hose, connected the nozzle to a pipe, and returned to the wagon to work the pump. After a moment he growled, “Damn! It’s stuck; something must be clogging the pipe.”

“Bloody hell!” cried Lebæuf. “That’s just our luck; trouble on the last damned job on our route. Well, I guess you better pull up the manhole cover and we’ll take a look.” He grabbed a long pole with a hook and held a lantern while Jacques tied a handkerchief over his face and opened the cesspool.