Chapter 16
16
It is August, so the Louvre is crowded everywhere and packed around the usual suspects—the Venus de Milo, works by Italian Renaissance old masters, and of course, the most popular resident of any museum anywhere, the Mona Lisa . It is always a zoo around her, with visitors holding their phones above the crowd to take pictures of the woman behind the glass, like it’s some kind of Paris scavenger hunt.
Fortunately, none of the greatest hits are on my agenda. I head straight for the Interiors exhibit to check out the vanishing act pulled off by de Heem’s lemon.
I locate the small frame quickly because I know what I’m looking for—it’s a pint-size postcard of a painting that’s easy to miss. And Gustave’s buddy told a true tale—the painting is missing a lemon. Usually, it’s perched near the edge of a table, the rind half peeled and the insides glistening tartly. It’s as if it was never there at all.
I turn to a pair of travelers standing next to me—two older women, American by their accents, possibly sisters by their matching brown hair and straight noses. “Excuse me. This may seem like a strange question, but do you see a lemon right there?”
I point to the spot where the lemon used to be, and one of the ladies laughs. “Is that a trick question? There’s no lemon in that painting at all.”
That’s different since the last time I was here. Something has changed, making the alterations now visible to anyone. But still only I can see Clio—and it’s the same when the other paintings come alive at the Musée d’Orsay.
But what has changed? Why can the visitors see the mutations of the art in the Louvre, and Adaline and the other curators see the fading of the Renoirs?
I hurry to the other galleries and reach the Ingres first. The drooping feathers in the odalisque’s peacock fan aren’t hanging out of the canvas anymore. Most are missing, like a rat tore them out, leaving behind a fan half the size. I locate the Titian next, with the woman looking at her reflection. What was a tiny fissure in her mirror is now an ugly crack down the middle.
The woman next to me is studying the painting thoughtfully, and I use the opportunity to say, as if it’s a casual observation, “Funny, how she’s looking at herself in a broken mirror, isn’t it?”
Cocking her head, she considers it a moment more while I hold my breath. “It is. Like ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ but cracked up and down instead of side to side.”
Bathsheba is next, and the change there is dramatic. Where her stomach had bulged out of the canvas before, now that belly is just gone, her stomach flatter, as if a plastic surgeon stopped by and gave the fleshy figure a nip tuck.
“That’s one sexy biblical figure.” The remark comes from a young German guy ogling the Rembrandt. “I don’t remember her being such a babe, but she’s got a rocking bod.”
I run both my hands through my hair, pushing my palms hard against my scalp. Bathsheba has a rocking bod?
Regardless, I’ve discovered that other people can now see what I see, but they have no idea that they’re gazing at art that’s turning ill.
And I have no idea either how sick the art can get. Or whether I can do anything about it.