Little French Masterpieces

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"The matter – the matter – " he cried, choking with joy; "the matter is that I have come to feel that I am a painter. I have always doubted myself before, but this morning I believe in myself! I tell you, Gillette, we shall be rich, happy! There is gold in these brushes."

But suddenly he ceased to speak. His strong and serious face lost its joyous expression when he compared the vastness of his hopes with the paucity of his resources. The walls were covered with pieces of common paper on which were sketches in pencil. He owned no clean canvases. Paints commanded a high price in those days, and the poor young man's palette was almost bare. In the depths of his poverty he possessed and was conscious of an incredible store of courage and a superabundance of all-consuming genius. Brought to Paris by a gentleman who was a friend of his, or perhaps by his own talent, he had almost immediately fallen in with a mistress, one of those noble and devoted souls who suffer beside a great man, espouse his troubles, and try to understand his caprices; strong in poverty and love, as other women are fearless in bearing the burden of luxury and in parading their lack of feeling. The smile that played about Gillette's lips diffused a golden light through that garret, and overspread the sky with brightness. The sun did not always shine, whereas she was always there, sedate in her passion, clinging to her happiness and her suffering, encouraging the genius which overflowed in love before seizing upon art.

"Listen, Gillette – come here."

The light-hearted, obedient girl jumped upon the painter's knees. She was all grace, all beauty, lovely as a spring day, adorned by all womanly charms, and illumining them with the glow of a lovely soul.

"O God!" he cried, "I shall never dare to tell her."

"A secret?" said she; "I insist upon knowing it."

Poussin seemed lost in thought.

"Speak, I say."

"Gillette – poor, beloved darling!"

"Ah! you want something of me, do you?"

"Yes."

"If you want me to pose for you as I did the other day," she said, with a little pout, "I shall never consent; for at those times your eyes have nothing at all to say to me. You forget all about me, and yet you look at me."

"Would you prefer to see me painting another woman?"

"Perhaps so," she said, "if she was very ugly."

"Well," rejoined Poussin, in a serious tone, "suppose that, for any future glory, to make me a great painter, it were necessary for you to pose for another artist?"

"You can test me all you choose," she replied. "You know that I would not go."

Poussin let his head fall on his breast, like one who surrenders to a joy or a sorrow that is too great for his heart.

"Listen," said she, plucking at the sleeve of Poussin's threadbare doublet, "I have told you, Nick, that I would give my life for you; but I never promised to give up my love while I am alive."

"Give it up?" cried the young artist.

"If I should show myself like that to another man, you would cease to love me, and I should deem myself unworthy of you. Is it not a most simple and natural thing to obey your whims? In spite of myself, I am happy, aye, proud, to do your dear will. But for another man – ah, no!"

"Forgive me, my Gillette," cried the painter, throwing himself at her feet. "I prefer to be beloved rather than famous. In my eyes you are fairer than wealth and honours. Go, throw away my brushes, burn these sketches. I have made a mistake. My vocation is to love you. I am no painter, I am a lover. Away with art and all its secrets!"

She gazed admiringly at him, happy, overjoyed. She was queen; she felt instinctively that art was forgotten for her, and cast at her feet like a grain of incense.

"And yet it is only an old man," continued Poussin. "He could see only the woman in you – you are so perfect!"

"One must needs love," she cried, ready to sacrifice the scruples of her love to repay her lover for all the sacrifices that he made for her. "But," she added, "it would be my ruin. Ah! ruin for you – yes, that would be very lovely! But you will forget me! Oh! what a wicked idea this is of yours!"

"I conceived the idea, and I love you," he said with a sort of contrition; "but am I for that reason a villain?"

"Let us consult Father Hardouin," she said.

"Oh, no! let it be a secret between us."

"Very good, I will go. But do not be there," she cried. "Stay at the door, with your dagger drawn; if I cry out, come in and kill the painter."

With no eyes for aught but his art, Poussin threw his arms about Gillette.

"He no longer loves me!" thought Gillette, when she was alone.

Already she repented her decision. But she was soon seized by a terror more painful than her regret; she strove to drive away a shocking thought that stole into her mind. She fancied that she already loved the painter less, because she suspected that he was less estimable than she had hitherto believed.

II

CATHERINE LESCAULT

Three months after the meeting of Poussin and Porbus, the latter went to see Master Frenhofer. The old man was then in the depths of one of those periods of profound and sudden discouragement, the cause of which, if we are to believe the mathematicians of medicine, consists in bad digestion, the wind, the heat, or some disturbance in the hypochondriac region; and, according to the spiritualists, in the imperfection of our moral nature. The good man had simply tired himself out in finishing his mysterious picture. He was languidly reclining in an enormous chair of carved oak, upholstered in black leather; and without changing his depressed attitude, he darted at Porbus the glance of a man who had determined to make the best of his ennui.

"Well, master," said Porbus, "was the ultramarine, that you went to Bruges for, very bad? Haven't you been able to grind our new white? Is your oil poor, or are your brushes unmanageable?"

"Alas!" cried the old man, "I thought for a moment that my work was finished; but I certainly have gone astray in some details, and my mind will not be at rest until I have solved my doubts. I have almost decided to travel, to go to Turkey, to Greece, and to Asia, in search of a model, and to compare my picture with nature in different climes. It may be that I have up-stairs," he continued with a smile of satisfaction, "Nature herself. Sometimes I am almost afraid that a breath will awaken that woman and that she will disappear."

Then he rose abruptly, as if to go.

"Ah!" replied Porbus; "I have come just in time to save you the expense and the fatigue of the journey."

"How so?" asked Frenhofer in amazement.

"Young Poussin is loved by a woman whose incomparable beauty is absolutely without a flaw. But, my dear master, if he consents to lend her to you, you must at least let us see your picture."

The old man stood, perfectly motionless, in a state of utter stupefaction.

"What!" he cried at last, in a heartrending voice, "show my creation, my spouse? Tear away the veil with which I have modestly covered my happiness? Why, that would be the most shocking prostitution! For ten years I have lived with that woman; she is mine, mine alone, she loves me. Does she not smile at every stroke of the brush which I give her? She has a soul, the soul with which I have endowed her. She would blush if other eyes than mine should rest upon her. Show her! Where is the husband, the lover, base enough to lend his wife to dishonour? When you paint a picture for the court, you do not put your whole soul into it, you sell to the courtiers nothing more than coloured mannikins. My painting is not a painting; it is a sentiment, a passion! Born in my studio, it must remain there unsullied, and can not come forth until it is clothed. Poesy and women never abandon themselves naked to any but their lovers! Do we possess Raphael's model, Ariosto's Angelica, or Dante's Beatrice? No! We see only their shapes. Very well; the work which I have up-stairs under lock and key is an exception in our art. It is not a canvas, it is a woman; a woman with whom I weep, and laugh, and talk, and think. Do you expect me suddenly to lay aside a joy that has lasted ten years, as one lays aside a cloak? Do you expect me suddenly to cease to be father, lover, and God? That woman is not a creature, she is a creation. Let your young man come – I will give him my wealth; I will give him pictures by Correggio, Michelangelo, or Titian; I will kiss his footprints in the dust; but make him my rival? Shame! Ah! I am even more lover than painter. Yes, I shall have the strength to burn my Belle Noiseuse when I breathe my last; but to force her to endure the glance of a man, of a young man, of a painter? No, no! I would kill to-morrow the man who should sully her with a look! I would kill you on the instant, my friend, if you did not salute her on your knees! Do you expect me now to subject my idol to the insensible glances and absurd criticisms of fools? Ah! love is a mystery, it lives only in the deepest recesses of the heart, and all is lost when a man says, even to his friend: 'This is she whom I love!'"

The old man seemed to have become young again; his eyes gleamed with life; his pale cheeks flushed a bright red, and his hands shook. Porbus, surprised by the passionate force with which the words were spoken, did not know what reply to make to an emotion no less novel than profound. Was Frenhofer sane or mad? Was he under the spell of an artistic caprice, or did the ideas which he had expressed proceed from that strange fanaticism produced in us by the long gestation of a great work? Could one hope ever to come to an understanding with that extraordinary passion?

Engrossed by all these thoughts, Porbus said to the old man:

"But is it not woman for woman? Will not Poussin abandon his mistress to your eyes?"

"What mistress?" rejoined Frenhofer. "She will betray him sooner or later. Mine will always be faithful to me!"

"Very well!" said Porbus, "let us say no more about it. But, perhaps, before you find, even in Asia, a woman so lovely, so perfect as is she of whom I speak, you will die without finishing your picture."

"Ah! it is finished," said Frenhofer. "Whoever should see it would think that he was looking at a woman lying upon a velvet couch, behind a curtain. Beside her is a golden tripod containing perfumes. You would be tempted to seize the tassel of the cords which hold the curtain, and you would fancy that you saw the bosom of Catherine Lescault, a beautiful courtesan called La Belle Noiseuse, rise and fall with the movement of her breath. However, I should like to be certain – "

"Oh! go to Asia," Porbus replied, as he detected a sort of hesitation in Frenhofer's expression.

And Porbus walked towards the door of the room.

At that moment Gillette and Nicolas Poussin arrived at Frenhofer's house. When the girl was about to enter, she stepped back, as if she were oppressed by some sudden presentiment.

"Why have I come here, pray?" she asked her lover in a deep voice, gazing at him steadfastly.

"Gillette, I left you entirely at liberty, and I mean to obey you in everything. You are my conscience and my renown. Go back to the house; I shall be happier perhaps than if you – "

"Do I belong to myself when you speak to me thus? Oh no! I am nothing more than a child. Come," she added, apparently making a mighty effort; "if our love dies, and if I plant in my heart a never-ending regret, will not your fame be the reward of my compliance with your wishes? Let us go in; it will be like living again to be always present as a memory on your palette."

As they opened the door of the house, the two lovers met Porbus, who, startled by the beauty of Gillette, whose eyes were then filled with tears, seized her, trembling from head to foot as she was, and said, leading her into the old man's presence:

"Look! is she not above all the masterpieces on earth?"

Frenhofer started. Gillette stood there in the ingenuous and unaffected attitude of a young Georgian girl, innocent and timid, abducted by brigands and offered for sale to a slave-merchant. A modest flush tinged her cheeks, she lowered her eyes, her hands were hanging at her side, her strength seemed to abandon her, and tears protested against the violence done to her modesty. At that moment Poussin, distressed beyond words because he had taken that lovely pearl from his garret, cursed himself. He became more lover than artist, and innumerable scruples tortured his heart when he saw the old man's kindling eye, as, in accordance with the habit of painters, he mentally disrobed the girl, so to speak, divining her most secret forms. Thereupon the young man reverted to the savage jealousy of true love.

"Let us go, Gillette," he cried.

At that tone, at that outcry, his mistress looked up at him in rapture, saw his face and ran into his arms.

"Ah! you do love me then?" she replied, melting into tears.

Although she had mustered energy to impose silence upon her suffering, she lacked strength to conceal her joy.

"Oh! leave her with me for a moment," said the old painter, "and you may compare her to my Catherine. Yes, I consent."

There was love in Frenhofer's cry, too. He seemed to be acting the part of a coquette for his counterfeit woman, and to enjoy in advance the triumph which the beauty of his creation would certainly win over that of a girl of flesh and blood.

"Do not let him retract!" cried Porbus, bringing his hand down on Poussin's shoulder. "The fruits of love soon pass away, those of art are immortal."

"In his eyes," retorted Gillette, looking earnestly at Poussin and Porbus, "in his eyes am I nothing more than a woman?"

She tossed her head proudly; but when, after a flashing glance at Frenhofer, she saw her lover gazing at the portrait which he had formerly mistaken for a Giorgione, she said:

"Ah! let us go up! He never looked at me like that."

"Old man," said Poussin, roused from his meditation by Gillette's voice, "look at this sword: I will bury it in your heart at the first word of complaint that this girl utters; I will set fire to your house and no one shall leave it! Do you understand?"

Nicolas Poussin's face was dark, and his voice was terrible. The young painter's attitude, and above all his gesture, comforted Gillette, who almost forgave him for sacrificing her to painting and to his glorious future. Porbus and Poussin remained at the door of the studio, looking at each other in silence. Although, at first, the painter of Mary the Egyptian indulged in an exclamation or two: "Ah! she is undressing; he is telling her to stand in the light; now he is comparing her with the other!" he soon held his peace at the aspect of Poussin, whose face was profoundly wretched; and although the old painters had none of those scruples which seem so trivial in the presence of art, he admired them, they were so attractive and so innocent. The young man had his hand on the hilt of his dagger and his ear almost glued to the door. The two men, standing thus in the darkness, resembled two conspirators awaiting the moment to strike down a tyrant.

"Come in, come in," cried the old man, radiant with joy. "My work is perfect, and now I can show it with pride. Never will painter, brushes, colours, canvas, and light produce a rival to Catherine Lescault, the beautiful courtesan!"

Impelled by the most intense curiosity, Porbus and Poussin hurried to the centre of an enormous studio covered with dust, where everything was in disorder, and where they saw pictures hanging on the walls here and there. They paused at first in front of a life-size figure of a woman, half nude, which aroused their admiration.

"Oh, don't pay any attention to that," said Frenhofer; "that is a sketch that I dashed off to study a pose; it is worth nothing as a picture. There are some of my mistakes," he continued, pointing to a number of fascinating compositions hanging on the walls about them.

At those words, Porbus and Poussin, thunderstruck by his contempt for such works, looked about for the famous portrait, but could not discover it.

"Well, there it is!" said the old man, whose hair was dishevelled, whose face was inflamed by superhuman excitement, whose eyes sparkled, and who panted like a young man drunk with love. "Aha!" he cried, "you did not expect such absolute perfection! You are before a woman, and you are looking for a picture. There is so much depth on this canvas, the air is so real, that you cannot distinguish it from the air that surrounds us. Where is art? Lost, vanished! Behold the actual form of a young girl. Have I not obtained to perfection the colour, the sharpness of the line which seems to bound the body? Is it not the same phenomenon presented by objects in the atmosphere, as well as by fishes in the water? Observe how the outlines stand out from the background! Does it not seem to you that you could pass your hand over that back? Why, for seven years I studied the effects of the conjunction of light and of objects. And that hair, does not the light fairly inundate it? Why, she actually breathed, I believe! – Look at that bosom! Ah! who would not adore her on his knees? The flesh quivers. She is going to rise – wait!"

"Can you see anything?" Poussin asked Porbus.

"No. And you?"

"Nothing."

The two painters left the old man to his dreams, and looked to see whether the light, falling straight upon the canvas to which he was pointing, did not efface all the lines. They examined the picture from the right, from the left, and in front, alternately stooping and rising.

"Yes, yes, it's really canvas," said Frenhofer, mistaking the purpose of that careful scrutiny. "See, here is the frame and the easel, and here are my colours and my brushes."

And he seized a brush and handed it to them with an artless gesture.

"The old villain is making sport of us," said Poussin, returning to his position in front of the alleged picture. "I can see nothing but a confused mass of colours, surrounded by a multitude of curious lines which form a wall of painting."

"We were mistaken; look!" replied Porbus.

On going nearer, they saw in the corner of the canvas the end of a bare foot emerging from that chaos of vague colours and shades, that sort of shapeless mist; but a most lovely, a living foot! They stood speechless with admiration before that fragment, which had escaped a slow, relentless, incomprehensible destruction. That foot was like a bust of Venus in Parian marble, rising amid the ruins of a burned city.

"There is a woman underneath!" cried Porbus, calling Poussin's attention to the coats of paint which the old painter had laid on one after another, thinking that he was perfecting his work.

The two artists turned impulsively towards Frenhofer, beginning to understand, although but vaguely, the state of ecstasy in which he lived.

"He acts in perfect good faith," said Porbus.

"Yes, my friend," said the old man, rousing himself, "one must have faith, faith in art, and must live a long while with his work, to produce such a creation. Some of those shadows have cost me many hours of toil. See, on the cheek, just below the eye, there is a faint penumbra, which, if you notice it in nature, will seem to you almost beyond reproduction. Well, do you think that that effect did not cost me unheard-of trouble? But look closely at my work, my dear Porbus, and you will understand better what I said to you as to the method of treating modelling and outlines. Look at the light on the breast, and see how, by a succession of strongly emphasised touches and retouches, I have succeeded in reproducing the real light, and in combining it with the polished whiteness of the light tones; and how by the opposite means, by effacing the lumps and the roughness of the colours, I have been able, by softly retouching the outline of my figure, drowned in the half-tint, to take away even a suggestion of drawing and of artificial means, and to give it the aspect and the roundness of nature itself. Go nearer, and you will see the work better. At a distance it is imperceptible. Look, just here it is very remarkable, I think."

And with the end of his brush he pointed out to the two painters a layer of light paint.

Porbus laid his hand on the old man's shoulder and said, turning to Poussin:

"Do you know that we have before us a very great painter?"

"He is even more poet than painter," replied Poussin, gravely.

"Here," rejoined Porbus, pointing to the canvas, "here ends our art on earth."

"And from here it soars upwards and disappears in the skies," said Poussin.

"How much pleasure is concentrated on this piece of canvas!" cried Porbus.

The old man, completely distraught, did not listen to them; he was smiling at that ideal woman.

"But sooner or later he will discover that there is nothing on his canvas!" exclaimed Poussin.

"Nothing on my canvas!" cried Frenhofer, gazing at the two painters and at his alleged picture in turn.

"What have you done?" whispered Porbus to Poussin.

The old man grasped the young man's arm violently, and said to him:

"You see nothing, you clown! you boor! you idiot! you villain! Then why did you come up here? – My dear Porbus," he continued, turning towards the painter; "is it possible that you too would mock at me? I am your friend; tell me, have I spoiled my picture?"

Porbus hesitated, not daring to say anything; but the anxiety depicted on the old man's pale face was so heartrending that he pointed to the canvas, saying:

"Look!"

Frenhofer gazed at his picture for a moment, and staggered.

"Nothing! nothing! and after working ten years!"

He sat down and wept.

"So I am an idiot, a madman! I have neither talent nor capacity! I am nothing more than a rich man, who, when I walk, do nothing but walk! So I have produced nothing!"

He gazed at his canvas through his tears; suddenly he rose with a gesture of pride and cast a flashing glance at the two painters.

"By the blood, by the body, by the head of the Christ! you are jealous hounds who wish to make me believe that it is spoiled, in order to steal it from me! But I can see her!" he cried, "and she is wonderfully lovely!"

At that moment, Poussin heard Gillette crying in a corner where she was cowering, entirely forgotten.

"What is the matter, my angel?" asked the painter, suddenly become the lover once more.

"Kill me!" she said. "I should be a shameless creature to love you still, for I despise you. I admire you and I have a horror of you! I love you, and I believe that I hate you already."

While Poussin listened to Gillette. Frenhofer covered his Catherine with a green curtain, with the calm gravity of a jeweller closing his drawers when he thinks that he is in the company of clever thieves. He bestowed upon the two painters a profoundly cunning glance, full of contempt and suspicion, and silently ushered them out of his studio, with convulsive haste; then standing in his doorway, he said to them:

"Adieu, my little friends."

That "adieu" horrified the two painters. The next day Porbus, in his anxiety, went again to see Frenhofer, and learned that he had died in the night, after burning all his pictures.

1831.

A Seashore Drama

To

MADAME LA PRINCESSE CAROLINE GALITZIN DE

GENTHOD, NÉE COMTESSE WALEWSKA:

The author's homage and remembrances.

Young men almost always have a pair of compasses with which they delight to measure the future; when their will is in accord with the size of the angle which they make, the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of moral life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which in the case of all men comes between the years of twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the age of noble thoughts, the age of first conceptions, because it is the age of unbounded desires, the age at which one doubts nothing; he who talks of doubt speaks of impotence. After that age, which passes as quickly as the season for sowing, comes the age of execution. There are in a certain sense two youths: one during which one thinks, the other during which one acts; often they are blended, in men whom nature has favoured, and who, like Caesar, Newton, and Bonaparte, are the greatest among great men.

I was reckoning how much time a thought needs to develop itself; and, compasses in hand, standing on a cliff a hundred fathoms above the ocean, whose waves played among the reefs, I laid out my future, furnishing it with works, as an engineer draws fortresses and palaces upon vacant land. The sea was lovely; I had just dressed after bathing; I was waiting for Pauline, my guardian angel, who was bathing in a granite bowl full of white sand, the daintiest bath-tub that Nature ever designed for any of her sea-fairies. We were at the extreme point of Le Croisic, a tiny peninsula of Brittany; we were far from the harbour, in a spot which the authorities considered so inaccessible that the customs-officers almost never visited it. To swim in the air after swimming in the sea! Ah! who would not have swum into the future? Why did I think? Why does evil happen? Who knows? Ideas come to your heart, or your brain, without consulting you. No courtesan was ever more whimsical or more imperious than is conception in an artist; it must be caught, like fortune, by the hair, when it comes. Clinging to my thought, as Astolphe clung to his hippogriff, I galloped through the world, arranging everything therein to suit my pleasure.