He pointed through the doorway to the adjoining gallery. The two paintings rested in the far corner, leaning against adjacent walls. Madame Clergue shuffled toward them, her feet—in slippers, Descartes noticed for the first time—rasping across the varnished floor.
“So, Madame Director,” he said coldly. “Which is your original, and which is the copy?” Standing wide-eyed before them, she looked from one painting to the other, back and forth, back and forth, as if the Madonnas were engaged in a tennis match. “Well? Which is which?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a choked sob. Madame Madeleine Clergue wept, burying her face in her hands. When at last she looked up, her face had aged another ten years. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “God damn that son of a bitch.”
Chapter 2
Dubois
Jacques Dubois dips a clean cloth in turpentine and drapes it across the painting, stretching and smoothing the fabric to remove all wrinkles. The white cloth—cut from an expensive linen bedsheet—is virtually transparent. Through the fine weave of fabric, as if behind a veil, a homely Virgin Mary cradles an even homelier Jesus. The baby’s head is far too small for his body, his face more like a middle-aged man’s than an infant’s, his body bizarrely muscled like a miniature weightlifter’s. Dubois smiles at the pair and murmurs, “Soon you will be so much prettier. You’ll thank me.”
In his early years, Dubois felt guilty about taking solvents or a heat gun to ancient paintings simply so that he could recycle an old canvas or wooden panel for his own works. By now, though, he knows he’s performing a service: ridding the world of mediocrities and replacing them with masterpieces. It’s as if he’s buying up dreadful shacks on spectacular lots, then knocking them down and erecting architectural gems in their stead.
After washing his hands in the paint-stained sink, he leaves the studio, crossing his backyard through clouds of blossoming plum and pear trees. In the kitchen of the old farmhouse, he assembles a simple lunch: fresh goat cheese, briny black olives, baby arugula drizzled with olive oil and lemon, a crusty baguette, and a glass—then another—of a delicate, apricot-hued rosé from a nearby vineyard. He eats slowly, savoring both the food and the latest auction catalog from Sotheby’s of London, which includes one of his works, a “Gainsborough” landscape he painted two years ago. “A previously unknown work, this is a particularly fine example of the simple style Thomas Gainsborough favored in his later period,” the catalog informs him. Once Dubois has finished with his modest portions of food, wine, and triumph, he washes, dries, and puts away the dishes before recrossing the backyard.
When Dubois bought the farm—what was it, twenty years ago? no, my God, nearly thirty!—the studio was a roofless set of walls, crammed with broken-down tractors, rusted plows, and God-knows-what-other ruined implements. The house was no prize, either, but Dubois focused solely on the barn for the first year, transforming the cavernous ruin into a bright, airy workspace.
For years now, every morning he’s brought his coffee out here, gazing across the Rh?ne as the rooftops of Avignon catch fire in the rising sun. The light paints the grim gray towers of the Palace of the Popes a delicate shade of pink and sets the cathedral’s towering gold statue of the Virgin blindingly ablaze. Dubois has tried to capture this magical morning alchemy of light and stone in paint on canvas, but even his prodigious skills are not up to the challenge.
Inside the studio, Dubois inspects the Madonna and the Christ-child. Their features have softened, as if the two glasses of wine are blurring Dubois’s vision. Folding back one corner of the turpentine-soaked cloth, he presses a thumbnail to the paint and feels it yield. “Perfect,” he purrs. He puts a CD into the Bose player and presses Play, and Mick Jagger laments, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Nodding his head in time to the beat, Dubois begins to deconstruct the ancient painting.