“What is this? The question-Teddy petite dejeuner?” Barrow laughed and tore off a piece of country bread and studied it intently. “I was ten years old when my mother took me to the Louvre for the first time. She was often on location for photo shoots, and by this time she and my father had divorced, so I was raised by the nanny. Time with my mother… well… it was precious to me, and anything associated with it was heightened, special. At the Louvre, I spied this hulking canvas in front of me with these green skin tones and this yellow-orange haze. It was his painting of the Devil, but the Devil as Giroux saw him was not the standard depiction with horns and pitchforks and hooves. Instead it was the most magnificent woman in red, blood dripping from her fingertips and from her chin, but she was stunning and ravenous. It was a violent painting, yet sexual. The Spanish painters did works like this, but not the French. Giroux used some kind of melting technique with it that became his signature; the work just looked like it was dripping. He returned to this technique for your painting. I had never seen anything like it. That I was so attracted to this dark work seemed to unnerve my mother, who steered me away from it. And so I forgot about it until years later, when I was in Milan and it happened to be on loan there. To see it again, I felt a destiny with both the painting and the man. It had stirred feelings in me and made me want to know more about art—about him. Of course, I was to learn that the painting was not of the Devil.”

“The Vampire,” said Lara.

“Indeed.” He smiled. “The most beautiful painting I had ever seen.”

On cue, Gaston started. “You have to understand, Lara, that artists in 1925 had largely rejected painterly, beautiful art. Art was political—they believed that the colonial, bourgeois tastes had led to the events surrounding the Great War, so the entire premise of art was being challenged. Paris at the time was surrounded by Dadaists, surrealists, and futurists all trying to set the course for what art would be next,” said Gaston. “And yet here is Giroux sitting in the cafés beside them still painting largely beautiful paintings.”

“And getting away with it,” Barrow chimed in, not wanting Gaston to have too much expertise. “Had he lived, he would have been as famous as Salvador Dalí or Picasso. I’m sure of it.”

“And he wasn’t using everyday materials like pens and doors to create art, like Man Ray,” added Gaston, his espresso cup hitting his saucer loudly.