Sacre Bleu (2012) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters edit see section history

• Vincent van Gogh: Dutch painter
• Adeline Ravoux: Innkeeper's daughter
• Millet: Painter; Vincent van Gogh's hero
• Georges Seurat: French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the technique of painting known as pointillism. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism. It is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting
• Émile Bastard - Profesor number 2: Gaston's son
• Madame Gachet: The doctor's wife
• Aristide Bruant: owner of Mirliton Cabaret in Montmartre
• Theo van Gogh: Vincent's brother
• Edgar Degas born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas: French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. A superb draftsman, he is especially identified with the subject of dance, and over half of his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and depiction of human isolation. The one impressionist who was not liked by the rest.
• Régine Lessard: Lucien's older sister
• Mère Lessard: Lucien's mother
• Père Lessard: Lucien's father
• St. Denis: Paris's first Bishop
• Mireille: A prostitute
• Camille Monet: Monet's first wife
• Mademoiselle Juliette: An old flame of Lucien's
• Cheesy Marie: A prostitute
• Carmen Gaudin: An old flame of Henri's; a laundress
• Madame Jacob: Owner of a cremerie in Paris
• Étienne: The Colorman's donkey
• Jeanne-Rachel "Minette" Pissarro: Daughter of Camille Pissarro; about Lucien's age
• Étienne: The Colorman's donkey
• Émile Bernard: A painter; took painting classes with Henri
• Alice Hoscedé: Monet's second wife
• Julie Pissarro: Camille's wife
• Adolphe Willette: Ran for mayor of Montmartre on an anti-semitic platform
• Frédéric Bazille: An artist in Monsieur Gleyre's studio
• Jemmie Whisler: An American painter
• Professeur Gaston Bastard: A retired teacher
• Père Tanguy: The “color man” for most of the Montmartre painters
• Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni: Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all time. A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Bleu tried to deduce him, but was unable because Michelangelo preferred men....
• Gustave Gourbet: Whistler's friend and mentor
• Diego Velázquez: Painter of Venus at her Mirror
• Vincent van Gogh: Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died aged 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found and record that after he shot himself he walked to a physician to seek treatment for his injuries.
• Michelangelo Buonarroti: Sculptor and painter
• Adolphe Willette: Henri's friend; an artist
• Aristide Bruant: Owner of a cabaret called Le Mirliton
• Aline Renoir: Renoir's wife
• Rodolpher Salis: Owner of Le Chat Noir
• Jane Avril: Frequent model for Toulouse-Lautrec
• Oscar Wilde: Author of The Picture of Dorian Grey
• Theo van Gogh: Dutch art dealer. He was the younger brother of Vincent van Gogh, and Theo's unfailing financial and emotional support allowed his brother to devote himself entirely to painting. Theo died at the age of 33, six months after Vincent died at the age of 37 from syphilitic complications.
• Johann Van Gogh: Theo's wife
• Adeline Ravoux: Innkeepers daughter in Auvers, France where Vincent was staying when he shot himself. Modeled for Vincent.
• Pierre August Renoir: French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau. He trained Lucien Lessard.
• Lucien Lessard: Protagonist of the story. Vincent's friend and owner of a bakery in Montmartre where all the Impressionists socialized - and were fed.
• Régine Lessard: Lucien's sister
• Monsieur Colorman: The antagonist of the story. He was born on 38,000 b. c. with lots of defects. He was able to survive by conjuring a spirit - Bleu - who became a muse and became immortal by gathering energy from the color blue; thus he became the Colorman - the provider of color for artists.
• Dr. Gauchet: Doctor to Van Gogh and all the impressionists.
• Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec: French painter, printmaker, draughtsman and illustrator whose immersion in the colorful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 1800s yielded a collection of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec, along with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, are among the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period. All are part of this story
• Mireille: Toulouse Lautrec's favorite prostitute
• Juliette: Lucien's girlfriend and muse
• Cheesy Marie: Another of Henri's prostitute
• Madame jacob: Owned the crémerie at the Montmartre
• Camille Pissarro: Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter. His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54. In 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the “pivotal” figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members.
• Lucien Pissarro: Camille's son
• Jean-Rachel (Minette) Pissarro: Camile's daughter
• Margot: Won Pissarro's painting at Lucien's bakery. Wanted bread instead
• Pere Tanguy: Sold color paints to the impressionists
• Aunt Cécile: Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's aunt
• Carmen Gaudin: Pissarro's muse
• Victorine: Manet's model and muse
• Julie Pissarro: Camille Pissarro's wife
• Édouard Manet: French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern and postmodern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) and Olympia, engendered great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.
• Suzanne Manet: Manet's wife
• Charles Pierre Baudelaire: French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience
• Frédéric Bazille: French Impressionist painter. Many of Bazille's major works are examples of figure painting in which Bazille placed the subject figure within a landscape painted en plein air
• James Abbott McNeill Whistler: American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo, "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol was apt, for it combined both aspects of his personality—his art was characterized by a subtle delicacy, while his public persona was combative.
• Joanna Hifferman: Whistler's White girl
• Professor Gaston Bastard 1st: An eccentric professor, Lucien's friend. He tried to train rats to race like the movie Ben-Hur
• Jacques: Lucien's friend
• Camille Doncilax: Monet's model and muse
• Victorine: Manet's model for his work Olympia
• Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet: French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement (characterized by the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix) with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social commentary in his work.
• Claude Monet: Founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant).
• Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin: French Post-Impressionist artist who was not well appreciated until after his death. Gauguin was later recognized for his experimental use of colors and synthetist style that were distinguishably different from Impressionism. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Gauguin’s art became popular after his death and many of his paintings were in the possession of Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer. His bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art, while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.<
• Mette-Sophie Gad: Gaugin's wife. Was abandoned by the artist
• Berthe Morisot: A painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt. In this story, Bleu inhabits her body
• Eugene Manet: Paul's brother and in this story, Berthe's husband

Quotes edit see section history

• “"As you know, in addition to my other studies, I am an amateur necrolinguist--""It means he likes to lick the dead," explained Henri."It means he studies dead languages," corrected Lucien."Are you sure?""Yes," said the Professeur."My education is shit," said Henri, "Lying Priests."”

  pg 341

• “That first class he saw form, line, light, shadow just long enough to get a bit of the drawing down, but then he'd be yanked ot of his work by nipples! No, not by the nipples, but by general nipples - of concept - the model's nipples, and his concentraion would collapse in a cascade of images and urges that had nothing whatever to do with art. For the first week, as the poor girl posed, Lucien battled the urge to stand up and yell, "For the love of God, she's naked over there, aren't any of you thinking about bonking her?" Of course they were, they were men, and except for the gay ones, they were only getting any art done at all if they managed to put that feeling to bed.”

  pg 96

• “"I'll have you know that if you hurt my son again, if he so much as sighs sadly over his coffee, I will hire a man, a Russian, probably, to hunt you down and rip all that shiny black hair from your head, then break your skinny arms and legs, and set you on fire, and then put you out with a hammer. And should there be children from your beastly rutting, I shall have the Russian man cut them into tiny pieces and feed them to Madame Jacob's dog. Because, although he many be only a worthless, simpleminded, libertine artist, Lucien is my favorite, and I will not have him hurt. Do you understand?" Juliette just nodded. "Good day, then," said Madame Lessard. "Go with God." And she glided across the bakery and up the stairs. "I'm her favorite," said Lucien with a big smile.”

  pg 54

• “Of course war had come to the butte before. In the first century BC the Romans had built a temple to Mars, the god of war, on the mount, and from that point forward, you couldn't catapult a cow at Paris without someone setting up for siege on Montmartre. With her seven freshwater wells, her windmills, her vegetable gardens, and her commanding view of the entire city, everyone agreed that there was no better butte on which to be besieged.”

  pg 76

• “He preferred not to think of his mother as having hips. He preferred to not think of her as a woman at all, more as a traveling mass of loving annoyance - a mother-shaped storm that inhabited the bakery and, in bringing rain for the growth of the living things over which she hovered, didn't mind scaring the piss out of them with a few thunderbolts from time to time.”

• “Papa, what is raping?"....."Lucien, you have heard the term 'making love'?""Yes, Papa, like when you and Maman are kissing and tickling and laughing. Regine said that is what you were doing."Pere Lessard swallowed hard. It was a small apartment, but he always thought the children were alseep when--That spiteful woman and her giggling. "Yes, that is right. Well, rape is the opposite. It is making hate.”

  Père Lessard

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Paris, France
• Montmartre
• Sacré Bleu
• London
• Rome
• Albi
• Spain
• Giverny
• Latin Quarter
• Brussels
• Moulin De La Galette
• Italy
• Notre-dame
• Europe
• Place Pigalle

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Christopher Moore (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Euan Morton (Narrator)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3563.O594 S23 2012
• Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Language; adult themes

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Amazon
• Audible
• Chapter Guide to Sacre Bleu

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history