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June 2, 1900

Dear Mademoiselle Avril,

I was gratified to receive your letter, kind lady. Your condolences give me comfort, and your quick response lightens my heart. And thank you very much for returning Henri's letters to me. I found I missed them even more than I had predicted I would. To hold them in my hand again is a great solace.

I am flattered that you agree with Henri regarding my physical attributes. I had no idea you had studied me so closely during our brief encounters. He was often overwhelmed by what he saw as beauty, and I certainly overwhelmed him at first, but no more than he did me.

I agree with you that Henri could be a “difficult little man”. I believe his cantankerous disposition was, in part, a result of his suffering, not of any natural character defect. He carried the physical pain of his deformities and illnesses heavily. You and I can only imagine what his life was like. He grew up isolated and plagued by infirmity, rejected by his father, stifled by his mother, and scorned by strangers.

Art was an escape from a base and cruel reality for Henri. This world was not kind to him. I can only hope the next world appreciates him more.

How could it not? Henri always possessed a beautiful and free spirit. His unfortunate physical circumstances failed to entirely dim that blinding light; no gloom could ever hide it completely. Wherever he is, I am sure he is dazzling.

In my time with Henri, in my capacity as his apprentice, I learned much about the fundamentals of art. I applied myself diligently to lessons in drawing and painting, and lithography, as well as to reading and writing. I wanted to make myself better for him, to make myself good enough for him, if only to prove to him that he taught me well.

With his patient teachings, Henri gave me a trade. I can pass for respectable, and make a few sou painting an advertisement or a portrait. My feeble abilities will, I hope, be enough to make a humble wage, but they will never be art. I am a mere draftsman (as are many who call themselves artists.)

Henri had a way with line and colour that transcended the mechanics of painting or lithography. He knew the theories of colour and perspective well enough to reject them for a deeper truth.

I should not bore you with these second-hand academic appraisals of Henri’s work. You asked about beauty in your letter, not art. I am sure you could easily arrange for a much more articulate critique from Lawrence Binyon or Monsieur Fénéon, and they know far more about art than I.

But I know more of Henri than any other.

Henri’s gift was more than skill or talent; he saw beauty where no others could perceive it. Where others see beauty as mere ornament, Henri saw it as truth. He saw it where others were blind to it - in the wretched and forlorn, in the melancholy smile on a whore’s face, in the slope of a tired by determined shoulder, in the violent whirl of a petticoat as the dancers of the Moulin Rouge sought to chase away all thoughts of tomorrow.

But Henri could not see the beauty in himself. That ability had been beaten out of him by Fate long before that same Fate brought us together.

But he was beautiful. It was my gift to look beyond crippled legs and stunted growth, past features others saw as grotesque. I did not dwell on scars and pain; those I sought to soothe. We are not our exterior shell; we are what is inside. That may seem trite, coming from someone with an exterior shell such as mine. I am well aware of how others see me. Henri saw past my façade, as I saw past his. And there, deep inside, he far surpassed me.

In his art, Henri chose to unmask reality behind the façade of the stage and of society, not to glorify it. His goal was to show that the truth was more beautiful than artifice. This is what made him a genius

In our brief time together, we tried to live that goal.

Did you ever truly look into Henri’s eyes? Did you ever look past the pince nez and those formidable brows and the bloodshot whites? I did. I did from the first moment he laid them upon me. They overflowed with a raw hunger that could be felt across the room.

Lust, you say, carnal desire. Perhaps. It is true that he desired my body. There is no shame in that. And, after all, it was my job to make men desire me, and I accomplished that better than most. I had been subject to looks of pure lust, violent desire, and even tender yearning, but nothing compares to the way Henri devoured me at first glance. Those eyes looked beyond pretty features, and into my soul.

Do you think Henri actually saw differently than we do? Was his perception better than ours? More accurate or more discerning? How can you and I possibly understand the eyes of an artist?

I can only imagine, and even then I do a poor job of it, what the world must have looked like through his eyes. It must have been infinitely richer and more beautiful than what I see out my window

When I do look out my window, I see the stilled wings of the moulin, the dimmed halls that used to sparkle with life and electricity. It is fitting that the Moulin Rouge is dark and empty, when the world around me is dark and empty without Henri.

All is not deserted, though. From beneath me, through a poorly patched floor, I can hear the sad tapping of a typewriter. Another lonely soul sets his tale to paper? I do not know what he writes, but I know that a few days after I returned, Christian, the bereaved lover of the late Satine, the Sparkling Diamond, began to write.

I seems that all of Montmartre and half of Paris knew Satine, the star of the Moulin Rouge (after you left.) But few knew her as well as Henri did, and none knew her as Christian did.

Henri told me the story of their forbidden love. Her dramatic demise is as much a part of my story as my flight from London, for Satine and I were kindred spirits. We creatures of the night are all the same; we suffer the same heartbreaks; we share our pain as we share the night.

My night was darker than hers - cold shadows and deception and illicit moments of sordid passion, hidden in the gloom of alleys and back rooms. Her night glittered in a spotlight, full of bright smiles and faux jewels and even more faux illusions of love. But my subtle, knowing smirk and her blatant, smouldering seductions were not so different.

There are those, bereft of beauty, who would pay others for the honour of possessing it, if only for a fleeting moment.

Henri would have gladly paid for me, but I would not let him. You may hear mean gossip of how I took him for what little he had and abused his generous nature. It is true that his generosity provided for me, but he did not buy my affection, and our coupling was not one of commerce.

I am sure Christian would agree. He did not rent Satine; he won her heart. Or so I have been told. We have never spoken of it directly. We are little more than acquaintances, really, although I feel I know him better than that. I watched him on that terrible night last year, and at the funeral of Satine. I saw him grief-stricken, shortly after her death, as he wandered in the street, or stood, late at night, whenever it rained, in the courtyard of the dance hall, with his face turned toward the crying sky.

Henri told me Christian was very different when he arrived in this city. But then, I was very different when I arrived here with Henri. That was so few years ago, yet so much has changed.

I was not here the day Christian arrived in Montmartre. I had been banished to the countryside days before. By all accounts, Henri had been coping with the separation in his usual fashion, by throwing himself into his work and drinking far too much absinthe.

His new furia was the bohemian musical production. “Spectacular Spectacular”. We had discussed it before his mother’s untimely visit to the city, at which time I was hustled out the back door, hastily packed bag in hand and barely enough money to afford passage to the farm.

The Bohemian musical raged on in Paris while I was left to a far less spectacular fate. Less spectacular, but not entirely unpleasant. I enjoyed being outside in air fresher than any you could find on the streets of Montmartre. I grew up on a farm, so the chores came quite easily to me, and the end results of my labours were always welcomed. Henri would chide me upon my return, cooing over the darkness of my complexion and the size of my muscles. He loved to trace those muscles with his beautiful hands.

Though they were small, his fingers blunt, I saw nothing deformed about his hands. They were magic. They could drift almost endlessly over my skin, barely touching the surface, and set me afire. They were able to touch precisely, knowing every spot that made me moan, every movement that made me shudder. Whether they were on me or inside me, Henri’s fingers were as skilled as those of an angel playing a harp.

You may call it odd, the pairing of my long, sleek body with his. It was only his legs that were stunted, though. The rest of him was fully formed. His torso was not powerful; he suffered too many illnesses for that. He could be weakened at times, especially when he took too much absinthe. But his arms had some strength, gained from his vigorous painting. As I already wrote, his hands knew their tasks well.

And then there was his cock.

Henri mentioned it in his letters, and you mentioned it in your letter, so I will not by shy about mentioning it as well. I had heard him called “teapot”, but I had not heard “the coathanger” before. It’s an oddly appropriate name. It was, as you put it, ‘exceptional’.

I once called it ‘magnificent beast’. He laughed at that, and fought a mock duel with me, his cock against mine, slashing and parrying with shouts of mirth and ecstasy.

I lost the swordfight, of course. I lost with a helpless wail of completion, and then finished the battles with my own seed easing the glide of my hand over his hard member.

I can be honest with you about this because you understand these things, and you understood Henri. He did not shy from the truth. There was no deception with Henri.

He looked me in the eye, demanded that I look at him, and the entire world would collapse until nothing existed but his intense, dark gaze. Moments of truth and beauty I shall never forget. Moments we shared at every possible opportunity, as if we knew all along that our time together would be insufficient.

I can hear Christian beneath me, the staccato of the keys punctuated by his wracked sobs. I wonder that so long after Satine’s death, he can still feel such raw grief while I, with my loss so much more recent, feel only a cold, numb ache where my heart used to reside.

When I think of Henri, when I remember his hands on me, and his loving eyes, that void begins to tingle and warm at the very edges, and I can imagine, for moment, an ephemeral pulse.

It is fleeting. The dreariness of my surroundings, the silence of the mill, the whimpers of pain from below, they all bring my grief into focus.

Did you know, dear Jane, that under the influence of Henri, coloured with Henri’s spirit, painted with Henri’s magic, that even grief is beautiful?

Beautiful enough to shatter my soul.

Yours,
Orlando




Next: Seven - Freedom

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