Read The Prisoner of the Riviera (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) for Free Online Page B

My drawing of the false Madame Renard had been good enough to put the wind up the inspector. How much worse could I be than the wretched caricaturist who sat outside the casino? Remember Monet, I told myself, who earned his pocket money doing caricatures as a boy; remember the great Daumier, who satirized the great and the corrupt! I packed a kit, took my collapsible easel, and went to the front.
    Do you think there are deep roots to one’s choice of profession? I have a certain pictorial taste for pain and humiliation that anticipate the seaside portraitist’s life. One sits, one waits, one hopes. One is rejected. One gets a client. The client is uninspiring, the work goes badly, the client refuses to pay, perhaps a gendarme becomes involved.
    Within a few hours, I gained a new respect for the facile draftsman to the south of me, whose big scrawling strokes elicited wonder and whose subtle flattery disarmed the young women and their cretinous boyfriends. A lovely liar, really. Now, I lie easily in life, but not on canvas or paper. I find it hard to reduce a bulbous nose or raise a low forehead or trim protruding ears even in the interests of profit.
    After eight hours in the sun, I had done three sketches, been paid for two, and had just enough for a fish soup and a chunk of bread; the artist’s life is not always a happy one. Still, I figured things could only get better. I set up my easel the next day within sight of my competitor’s drawings, and when I wasn’t working myself, I watched his every move.
    The one great product of a neglected childhood and an irregular education is the ability to learn on the fly. Within three days, I was turning out creditable sketches and, by dint of some shading in charcoal, offering an alternative to the rapid pen work of my nearest competitor. I’d developed a patter, too; I can be amusing when I want, and I really think I might have lasted the summer if I hadn’t met the Chavanel ladies.
    Anastasie arrived first. She appeared out of the sun, as the pilots say, a tall, lean figure in a long black skirt, a black sunhat, sturdy heels, and a black-and-white polka-dot blouse, an ensemble from before the war, incongruous amid the bare, tanned limbs of the sun-drenched Riviera.
    “Bonjour, monsieur . ” She tipped her head slightly, and the light caught her face, which was thin, brown, and lined like parchment. She was old and interesting, and her name was Anastasie Chavanel.
    “Bonjour, madame . ” I made a bow to this courtly apparition.
    “I see that your business is thriving.” She nodded toward my metal till box.
    “As much as these ever thrive,” I said.
    “Just so.”
    With modest prosperity I had acquired two folding stools. I gestured toward the client’s seat and asked if Madame wished a drawing. “A portrait drawing would perhaps be more suitable than a caricature?”
    She remained standing. “I have something else in mind,” she said. She looked at my price list. “Thirty francs? I can offer you better than that.”
    This was music to my ears.
    “You are, I believe, a painter?”
    “My fame has preceded me.” I wondered exactly how that had happened, and I couldn’t help remembering that the last time an elderly lady wanted a painter, I’d spent a couple of weeks on a scaffold with extremely depressing colors.
    “In a manner of speaking. Could we go somewhere to talk? This is a confidential matter.”
    “I am at your service.” I collapsed the stools and folded up my easel, tied them together with my drawing pad and my box of pencils and charcoal, and hoisted the whole contraption on my back. I felt like Van Gogh, who did a picture of a painter burdened just so with all his equipment in the burning Provençal light.
    In recompense, I anticipated a café, where she would treat me to good coffee or a glass of wine and a dish of ice cream. Instead, we took the steep hill past the hôtel de ville and the police station. I was sweating in the afternoon heat