“Ah! did he work the infallible pistol trick on you?” Jacques said with a burst of his loudest laughter when we met the following day. “That is very good. He looked you in the face to make you understand that if you court Madam de Bonnivet, you run the risk of getting in your head one of the bullets with which the husband every day salutes the sheet-iron man at the range. He did better with me. He took me to see the targets.”
This conversation took place at the breakfast-table, for Jacques had called on the following morning as soon as his four pages were finished to ask for the classic egg and cutlet, a thing he had never done before. This curious haste proved to me how interested he was in the success of his man?uvre in diplomatic gallantry. I had not received him very cordially.
“Tricks like that are not very attractive,” I said to him; “you force me to accept an invitation to dinner which is odious to me, on purpose to meet you there, and then you do not turn up.”
“But you must admit that it was very jolly!” he replied in such a gay tone that I had not the 150heart to be angry any more. After he had very minutely questioned me as to the diverse attitudes of different persons, concluding with the ridiculous warning of Senneterre the Jealous, he said seriously—
“You noticed nothing in particular then, even you who know how to see? Yes, you painters do not understand, but you know how to see. Nothing in the intercourse of Machault and Queen Anne, for instance?”
“Stop,” I replied; “certainly when he warned me that Senneterre had met you, Machault gave me a singular look. Why do you ask me that? Is he paying court to her too?”
“I think, if she has already risked a false step, it is with Machault.”
“With Machault?” I cried. “With Machault, the drunken colossus, the gladiator in black, the fencing machine, while she herself is such a fine woman, though a little too angular for my taste, and so aristocratic? It is not possible. The other day, too, you told me that you thought she was true to her husband.”
“Ah, my dear fellow!” he said with a nod, “you do not know that when one wishes to find out of whom an ideal woman, a siren, a madonna, an angel, is the mistress, one must first think of the most vulgar person of her own circle. There has been a good deal of gossip about her, I know, and she knows that I know. I have not concealed the fact from her. Consequently, the presence of Machault last evening was designed to produce 151upon me exactly the same effect which I produced upon her by my absence. I took the initiative, and I was right. Besides,” he added with almost hateful acrimony in his voice, “one of two things, either she has already had lovers and she is a jade. In that case I should be the greatest of fools if I did not have her in my turn. Or else she has not had lovers and is a coquette who will not make me go the same way as the others.”
“If you are not wasting your time,” I replied to him, “I shall be very surprised. I studied her yesterday, and as you admit the eagle eyes of our profession, let me tell you that I have diagnosed in her the signs of the most complete absence of temperament, which are a little throat, small hips, skin without down, thin lips, the lower one receding a little, hard and lean nostrils, and metallic voice. I would wager that she has no palate, and that she does not know what she eats or drinks. She is a creature all intellect without a shadow of sensuality.”
“But these cold women have just as many intrigues as the others!” he interrupted. “You do not know that class then? They give themselves, not to surrender themselves, but to take others. When it is necessary for them to grip a lover tightly, a lover they need, they do so with their person the more easily since the pleasure of it is a matter of indifference to them. They know that possession detaches some men and attaches others. It is simply a question of persuading them that one is of the kind who become attached 152in this way, when one is not. Then, too, there are cold women who are hunters, and then! Sometimes I place Madam de Bonnivet in the first group, sometimes in the second. I do not pretend to solve the riddle of this sphinx. But failing the answer to the riddle of this sphinx, I will have the sphinx in person, or my name is not Jacques Molan. Then, as you have helped me and are just, you shall have a reward. You will no longer reproach me with that dinner in the Rue des écuries d’Artois. You shall be paid for your unpleasant task. What time is it? Half-past one. Prepare to see in ten minutes Mademoiselle Camille Favier herself enter with her respectable mother to arrange about the portrait. Is not that good of me? But I have been better still, and I have not told her where you dined yesterday.”
He had hardly told me of this visit, so disturbing to me, in his joking way, when the servant said that two ladies were waiting for me in the studio. God! how my heart beat when I was about to enter the presence of the woman I had sworn to avoid! How my heart beats even now at my vivid and precise recollection of this meeting long ago! I believe that I can see the two of them, mother and daughter, in the crude light of that bright January day which filled, by means of the large glass bay, the studio with a cold pale light. Madam Favier, more placid and smiling than ever, walked from canvas to canvas, looking at them with her great laughing eyes. She would suddenly ask me what was the net cost of a picture, and what 153did it fetch, with as much simplicity as if it were a question of a dress or a curio. Camille sat down opposite a copy of “L’Allégorie du Printemps,” which I had made in Florence so lovingly. In the long and supple dancers of the divine Sandro, who lent with tender grace their blonde and dreamy though bitter faces, the little Blue Duchess could recognize her sisters. She did not see them, absorbed as she was in a memory, the nature of which I could easily guess, seeing that she had not acted the previous evening, and had found a way to spend that free evening with Jacques, thanks to a complaisant cousin. It hurt me to detect around her tender, almost blood-shot eyes a pearly halo of lassitude, and on her mouth tremors which told of happiness. But what made me feel worse still was that Jacques, directly he came in, copied the photographs I had used to make my dream-picture of her—that chimerical picture of my week of folly, which happily I had put aside and well concealed; and at the moment Camille was greeting me with a slightly embarrassed smile, he displayed those instructive pictures and said maliciously—
“You can see, mademoiselle, that if Vincent has not been to see you again as he promised, he has not forgotten you.”
“It was to better prepare the studies for my future picture,” I stammered. “The great painter Lenbach does so.”
“Who contradicted you?” Molan went on even more maliciously.
154“Oh! you have not picked out the best ones,” the mother interrupted as she showed her daughter the photograph I loved best. “You see,” she said, “that in spite of your prohibition, this picture which is such a bad likeness of you is still being sold. Come, now, is it anything like her? I ask you to decide the point, M. La Croix.”
“I was three years younger,” Camille said, “and he did not know me then.” Taking the photograph she looked at it in her turn. Then putting it by the side of her face so that I could see the model and the portrait at the same time, she asked me: “Have I changed very much?”
Poor little Blue Duchess, the sincere lover of the least loving of my friends, romantic child stranded by an ironical caprice of fate in the profession most fatal to mystery, silence and solitude, when the pretty, delicate flowers of your woman’s soul needed a warm atmosphere of protective intimacy, say, did you suspect my emotion when I looked at your face, paled by the pleasures of the previous evening, smiling at me thus by the side of another face, the face of the innocent child you were once, when I might have loved you as my betrothed wife? No, certainly you did not. For you were good; and if you had guessed what I suffered, you would not have imposed upon me this useless ordeal. You would not on that visit have arranged with me the details of that series of sittings which began the following day and were for me a strange and sorrowful Calvary! Yes, however, perhaps you did guess, for there was sadness 155and pity in your smile—sorrow for yourself and pity for me. You saw so clearly from that moment that I bore an affection for you which was too quickly awakened to be the reasonable and simple friendship of a comrade! You saw it without wishing to admit it, for love is an egoist. Yours had need of being related, to be encouraged in its hopes, comforted in its doubts, and pitied in its grief. Who would have rendered you the service of lending himself as a complaisant echo of your passion like I did? If it cost me my rest for weeks and weeks; if on your departure from my studio after each sitting, just as after your first visit, I remained for hours struggling against the bitterness of which I have not yet emptied my heart, you did not wish to know, and I had not the strength to condemn you to do so. After all, you made me feel, as Jacques used to say, and there will come a time perhaps when, passing my memories in review, I shall bless you for the tears I shed, sometimes as if I were no more than eighteen, on your account, who did not see them. Had you seen them, you would have refused to believe in them, to preserve the right to initiate me into the inner tragedy in which you then lived, and which by a counter stroke, alas! was not spared me.
If I allowed these impressions to go on, I should fill the pages with groans like this, and never reach the tragedy itself, or rather the tragic comedy, in which I played the part of the ancient Chorus, the ineffectual witness of catastrophies, who deplored them without preventing them. Let us 156employ the only remedy for this useless elegy. Let us note the little facts clearly. I have mentioned that this visit of mother and daughter had as its object the arrangement of a series of sittings. I have also mentioned that the first of these sittings was placed for the following day.
On the following day Camille arrived, not accompanied by her mother, but alone. It was so almost always during the four weeks which this painting lasted, but during the whole of this time the work did not succeed in interesting the artist in me, for my attention was too much absorbed by the adorable child’s confidences, confidences which were ceaselessly interrupted, repeated and prolonged by the interruptions till the details were multiplied and complicated to infinity. Yes, many little facts come into my mind in trying to recall these private sittings which were always somewhat bitter to me. This liberty proved to me how many favourable opportunities her intrigue with Jacques had obtained. Too many little scenes recur to me, and too many multiple and over-lapping impressions which my memory is apt to confuse. It is like a tangled skein of thread I am trying in vain to unravel. Let us see if I can reduce them to some kind of order in classifying them.
These recollections, which are so numerous and so similar that they become mixed, are distributed, when I reflect, into three distinct groups; and these groups mark the stages of this purely moral drama, in which Camille, Jacques and Madam de 157Bonnivet were engaged, in its progress to a real and terrible drama. When I reflect again, it was the difference between these three groups of emotions which justified me in not making a success of this portrait. Had I been an artist who was an imperturbable master of execution, in place of being what I am, half an amateur, always uncertain, and a sort of “Adolphe” of the brush, all intention and touches, all scratching out and alteration, I should not have been able to execute a unique canvas under such conditions. It was not a woman I had before me during these too long and too short sittings, it was three women.
One after the other I will resuscitate these three women, I will make them pose before my eyes, according to the taste of my memory, as if the irreparable, and such an irreparable, were not between us! One after the other they come back to sit in this studio where I am writing these lines. One after the other I listen to them telling me, the first her joy, the second her sorrow, and the third the fury of her jealousy and the fever of her indignation; and yet to-day I do not know before which of the three women, and during which of the three periods I suffered the most, my suffering being the greater because I was obliged to be silent; and behind each of the confidences little Favier gave me, whether she were happy, melancholy, or angry, I could see the hard silhouette of the elegant rival, to whose caprices this joy, sorrow or anger were subordinated. Oh, God! what punishment for hybrid sentiments, those 158sentiments which have not the courage to go to the end in the logic of sacrifice or gratification, I experienced during those sittings! But still I would like to begin them again. I am writing of misery again and composing more elegies. Let me get on with the facts, facts, facts!
The first period, that of joy, was not of long duration. The scene which marked its culminating point took place on the fourth of these sittings. The scene, though a fine expression, merely consisted of a conversation without any other incident than Camille’s entry into the studio with a bunch of roses—large, heavy roses of all shades—some pale with the dewy pallor of her face, others blonde and almost of the same golden tint as her beautiful hair, others as red as her pretty mouth with its lower lip so tightly rolled, others dark, which by contrast appeared to light up her bloodless colour that morning. The question was, which of these flowers I should choose for her to hold in her hand. I wished to paint her in an absolute unity of tone, like Gainsborough’s blue boy. She had to stand wearing a dress of blue gauze, that of her part, with blue silk mittens, blue velvet at the neck, blue ribbons at the sleeves, her feet in blue satin shoes, with no jewels but sapphires and turquoises on a ground of peacock blue velvetine, with no head-dress but the blonde cloud of her fine hair, with the back of one of her hands resting upon her supple hip, while she offered a rose with her other hand.
“It is my youth that I will offer Jacques,” she 159said to me that morning while we studied the pose together; “my twenty-two years and my happiness. I am so happy now!”
“You don’t experience any more evil temptations, then?” I asked.
“Do you remember?” she replied, laughing and blushing at the same time. “No, I don’t feel them now. I turned Tournade out of my dressing-room, and pretty quickly, I can assure you. But do you know what pleases me most? I never see that ugly woman now; you remember, Madam de Bonnivet. She does not come to the theatre, and the other day Jacques ought to have dined with her, but he did not go. I am quite sure of that, for he wrote his letter of excuse in my presence. It was the evening Bressoré could not act: there was a change of bill and I was free for the evening. I wanted so badly to ask him if we could spend it together, but I did not............