Just at the end of summer in 1901, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa,
artist, roué, alcoholic and celebrated dwarf, died, a few months short of his
37th birthday. Since I was born in spring, something more than a half-century
later, I was nervous when I went to his
funeral, fearful that I’d strike a jarring, anachronistic note. I needn’t have
feared; no one even looked up when I entered and found a seat towards the back
of the church.
The
atmosphere, except for his mother who sat weeping at the very front, was
relaxed, and the general attitude seemed to be that a unique friend would be
sorely missed, but that it was astonishing that, given his health and his
habits, he’d lived as long as he had. Occasionally a snort would be heard from
one portion of the church or another, as someone tried to suppress a laugh from
a remembered story, or from hearing one in an undertone from his neighbor. The
whores – all quietly dressed – were mostly seated on the left side of the
church. Briand was seated among them, occasionally turning his head slowly to
the left and right, that more of the audience could have the chance to enjoy
his profile.
The man next to me,
who was wearing immaculate evening wear and a fresh flower in his lapel, at 10
in the morning, looked familiar, but so did many in the church. The artist had
populated his paintings with his friends and relatives. Although I normally
speak very poor French – the sort no one in Paris would ever admit to
understanding – I had been temporarily been granted the gift of tongues, and
understood my neighbor when he asked if I had been a friend of the deceased.
“No, monsieur,
simply an admirer. And you?”
“It’s hard to say,
exactly. Consider me a sort of relative.”
We sat, then, in
companionable silence, listening to a recitation of the deceased’s many virtues
– his kindliness, his wit, his devotion to his friends, his refusal to give in
to despair. While his artistic talent was praised, no mention was made of his
sexual prowess or his penchant for
inventing strange and wonderful cocktails. Perhaps to compensate, quite
a lot was said about the Counts of Toulouse and that sad
affair, the Albigensian Crusade, in which they had played an equivocal part.
This went on for
some while before I noticed that an elderly fat woman in front of me seemed to
be melting. Gradually, she grew slimmer, and her hair became red, and I
recognized – as what admirer of the artist would not? – La Golue, the Glutton,
as she had looked when she had danced with Valentin the Boneless at the Moulin
Rouge.
“I need some air.
Will you walk with me?” My neighbor put his request so courteously that I
couldn’t say no. Outside the church, the streets were filled with automobiles.
“Surely it’s too
early for there to be so many cars
about?” I said.
“Your pardon. This
is 1920; we have exited through La Golue’s entrance, which leads to and from
the day she died, collapsing onto a bed in a Marseille brothel. Sadly, she was
employed there only as a maid.”
“But is Lautrec’s
funeral still going on in 1920?”
“As far as I know,
it never ends. If it wasn’t sometimes so merry, if I couldn’t sometimes slip
out for a drink, if there wasn’t always money in my pocket, I would suspect it
was an aspect of Hell.” With these words, we entered a bar, dim and peaceful in
the late afternoon, where a few peaceful, dim men were drinking and a young
woman was talking in a quiet, intense voice to a parrot.
{{I may be gone a few days. As always, you are encouraged to leave comments and chat among yourselves until I get back. Or even afterwards}}
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