Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore Page B

What the hell have I gotten myself into! moment of flailing panic, akin to the feeling of falling from a great height. Lucien’s “merde” moment came when Juliette dropped the sheet she was using as a cover and said, “How do you want me?”
    And although every experience in his life had somehow added up to this moment, this very moment, and he was uniquely suited and chosen to be in this moment, he could think of nothing whatever to say.
    Well, he could think of something to say: On the divan, against the wall, on the floor, bent over, wrapped around, upside-down, downside-up, fast, slow, gentle, rough, deep, hard, loud, quiet, kicking over the lamps, wild, while Paris burns, again and again until there is no more breath in our bodies, that’s how I want you.
    But he didn’t say that. He didn’t need to. She knew.
    “To pose,” she said.
    “I’m thinking,” he said.
    Form. Line. Light. Shadow. He worked the words in his mind like clay. Form. Line. Light. Shadow.
    When he first walked into Cormon’s studio at age nineteen and took his seat at an easel among the other young men, the master had told them, “See form, see line, see light, see shadow. See relationships of lines. The model is a collection of these elements, not a body.”
    At the master’s signal, a young woman in a robe who had been sitting quietly next to the stove in the back of the room climbed up on the platform and dropped her robe. There was collective intake of breath; the newcomers, like Lucien, stopped breathing altogether for a second. She wasn’t a beauty. In fact, in her shopgirl clothes, he might not have given her a second look, but she was there, nude, in a fully lit room, and he was nineteen and lived in a city where a woman was not allowed to ride on the top level of the omnibus streetcars lest someone catch a glimpse of her ankle as she climbed the steps and thus compromise her modesty. True, he had taken an apartment only a block away from a licensed brothel, and the girls danced bare breasted in the back rooms of the cabarets, and every gentleman had a mistress from the demimonde, who was kept in some apartment across the city, hidden behind a wink and the selective vision of his wife. But hidden.
    That first class he saw form, line, light, and shadow, just long enough to get a bit of the drawing down, but then he’d be yanked out of his work by nipples! No, not by the nipples, but by general nipples—of concept—the model’s nipples, and his concentration would collapse in a cascade of images and urges that had nothing whatever to do with art. For the first week, as the poor girl posed, Lucien battled the urge to stand up and yell, “For the love of God, she’s naked over there, aren’t any of you thinking about bonking her?” Of course they were, they were men, and except for the gay ones, they were only getting any art done at all if they managed to put that feeling to bed.
    The second week, the model was an old man, who tottered up to the stage, sans robe, his sagging sack nearly dragging the ground, his withered haunches quivering under the weight of his years. Strangely enough, the figure was easily interpreted as form, line, light, and shadow from then on for Lucien. And when they were, once again, working with a female model, he only needed to conjure up the image of the old man to put him back on the straight and narrow path to form, line, light, and shadow.
    Sure, you allowed yourself a brief moment when the model first disrobed— Oh, yes, she’d do. And it turned out that nearly every one of them would do, even if the imaginary circumstances in which she would do had to be constructed. Well, yes, desert island, drunk, one hour until you’re hanged, sure, she’d do. But he had never encountered anything like Juliette, not as a painter, anyway, because he had encountered her as a man, had had numerous tumbles with her, in fact, as new lovers they’d been ecstatic with discovery, in his little apartment, in