After the night in question, Marc Chagall started behaving oddly. They were petty details that no one would have noticed unless he was a very close friend of him or his irreconcilable enemy Nestor. (Nestor Kaltenbrunner was deeply aggrieved that Chagall was Jewish.) He began to snag flies with his tongue, which he projected out of the mouth as if it was a whip. He also moved from place to place crawling like a snake. Flying wagons and green colored peasants suddenly began to frequent his paintings. When André Salmon asked him why that color, he replied that he had run out of flesh-colored paint. And when Salmon suggested he mix colors, Chagall was horrified, accusing his friend of being a sadist. “I would rather mate with a human female than mix colors!” he said. Later, however, Salmon caught him painting himself with flesh-colored paint that he kept hidden under the parquet in his room. Marc Chagall had been among the first to be sucked through the roof of Le-Bateau-Lavoir on the night of June 7, 1909.
SILLY HUMOR FOR SMART PEOPLE 