 | II. Seven stories, with basement and attic |  |
2. II.
I HAD left Paris in the month of May; I came
back toward the end of August. The last is a
dull month for the capital; Parisians have not yet returned
from Baden, or the Pyrenees, or Dieppe. True,
the Boulevard is always gay; but it has its seasons of
exceeding gayety, and latter summer is by no means one
of them. The shopmen complain of the dulness, and
lounge idly at their doors; their only customers are
passing strangers. Pretty suites of rooms are to be had
at half the rates of autumn, or of opening spring. The
bachelor can indulge without extravagance in apartments
looking upon the Madeleine. The troops of children
whom you saw in the spring-time under the lee of
the terrace wall in the “little Provence” of the Tuileries
are all gone to St. Germain, or to Trouville. You
see no more the tall caps of the Norman nurses, or the
tight little figures of the Breton bonnes.
It is the season of vacation at the schools; and if
the streets have a deserted air; and the garden of the
Luxembourg is filled only with invalids and strolling
soldiers. The artists even, have mostly stolen away
from their easels in the galleries, and are studying the
live fish women of Boulogne or the bare-ankled shepherdesses
of Auvergne.
I soon found my way to all the old haunts of the
capital. I found it easy to revive my taste for the
coffee of the Rotonde, in the Palais Royal; and easy to
listen and laugh at Sainville and Grassot. I went, a
few days after my return, to the always charming salons
of the Louvre. The sun was hot at this season
upon that wing of the palace where hang the pictures
of Watteau; and the galleries were nearly deserted.
In the salon where I had seen so often the beaming admirer
of nymphs and shepherdesses, there was now only
a sharp-faced English woman, with bright erysipelas on
nose and cheeks, working hard at a Diana of Vanloo.
I strolled on carelessly to the cool corner room,
serving as antechamber to the principal gallery, and
which every visitor will remember for its great picture
of the battle of Eylau. There are several paintings
about the walls of this salon, which are in constant request
by the copyists; I need hardly mention that
favorite picture of Gerard, L'Amour et Psyché. There
was a group about it now; and in the neighborhood of
of the Watteau nymphs. But a sad change had
come over him since I saw him last. The gay humor
that shone in his face on my spring visits to the gallery
was gone. The openness of look which seemed to challenge
regard, if not conversation, he had lost utterly.
I was not surprised that he had deserted the smiling
shepherdesses of Watteau.
There was a settled and determined gloom upon his
face, which I was sure no painted sunshine could enliven.
He was not busy with the enamelled prettiness
of Gerard; far from it. His easel was beside him, but
his eye was directed toward that fearful melo-dramatic
painting—La Méduse of Géricault. It is a horrible
shipwreck story: a raft is floating upon an ocean waste;
dead bodies that may have been copied from the dissecting-halls,
lie on it; a few survivors, emaciated, and
with rigid limbs, cluster around the frail spar that
serves as mast, and that sways with the weight of a
tattered sail; one athletic figure rises above this dismal
group, and with emaciated arm held to its highest
reach, lifts a fluttering rag; his bloodshot eye, lighted
with a last hope, strains over the waste of waters
which seethe beyond him.
It was a picture from which I had always turned
away with a shudder. It may have truth and force;
but the truth is gross, and the force brutal. Yet upon
intensity. He had sketched only the principal figure of
the dying group—the athlete who beckons madly, whose
hope is on the waste. He had copied only a fragment
of the raft—barely enough to give foothold to the
figure; he had not even painted the sea, but had filled
his little canvas with a cold white monotone of color,
like a sleeted waste in winter.
I have already remarked the wonderful vitality
which he gave to mirth in his frolicsome pastorals; the
same power was apparent here; and he had intensified
the despair of the wretched castaway, shaking out
his last rag of hope,—to a degree that was painful to
look upon.
I went near him; but he wore no longer the old
tokens of ready fellowship. He plainly had no wish to
recognize, or be recognized. He was intent only upon
wreaking some bitter thought, or some blasted hope in
the face of that shipwrecked man. The despairing look,
and the bloodshot eye, which he had given to his copy
of the castaway, haunted me for days. It made that
kind of startling impression upon my mind which I was
sure could never be forgotten. I never think, even now,
of that painting in the Louvre, with the cold north light
gleaming on it, but the ghastly expression of the shipwrecked
man—as Emile Roque had rendered it in his
copy—starts to my mind like a phantom. I see the rag
pallid, pinched flesh; I see the starting eyes, bearing
resemblance,—as it seemed to me afterward, and seems
to me now,—to those of the distracted artist.
There was a cloud over the man; I felt sure of
that; I feared what might be the end of it. My eye
ran over the daily journals, seeking in the list of suicides
for the name of Emile Roque. I thought it
would come to that. On every new visit to the Louvre
I expected to find him gone. But he was there, assiduous
as ever; refining still upon the horrors of Géricault.
My acquaintance of the Luxembourg, De Courcy,
who had given me all the information I possessed about
the history and prospects of this artist, was out of the
city; he would not return until late in the autumn. I
dropped a line into the Poste Restante to meet him on
his return, as I was myself very shortly on the wing for
Italy. I can recall perfectly the expressions in my letter.
After intrusting him with one or two unimportant
commissions, I said: “By-the-by, you remember the
jolly-looking Emile Roque, who made such a frenzy
out of his love for Watteau and his shepherdesses, and
who was to come into possession of a pretty wife and a
pretty dot?
“Is the dot forthcoming? Before you answer, go
and look at him again—in the Louvre still; but he has
deserted Watteau; he is studying and copying the horrors
a honeymoon. If he were not an amateur, I should
charge you to buy for me that terrible figure he is
working up from the raft scene. The intensity he is
putting in it is not Géricault's—my word for it, it is
his own.
“When he is booked among the suicides (where
your Parisian forms of madness seem to tend), send
me the journal, and tell me what you can of the why.”
In the galleries of Florence one forgets the French
painters utterly, and rejoices in the forgetfulness.
Among the Carraccis and the Guidos what room is there
for the lover-like Watteau? Even Greuze, on the walls
of the Pitti Palace, would be Greuze no longer. It is
a picture-life one leads in those old cities of art, growing
day by day into companionship with the masters
and the masters' subjects.
How one hob-nobs with the weird sisters of Michael
Angelo! How he pants through Snyder's Boar-Hunt,
or lapses into a poetic sympathy with the marble flock
of Niobe!
Who wants letters of introduction to the “nice
people” of Florence, when he can chat with the Fornarina
by the hour, and listen to Raphael's Pope Julius?
Yesterday—I used to say to myself—I spent an
hour or two with old Gerard Douw and pretty Angelica
Kauffman—nice people, both of them. To-morrow I
of Carlo Dolci's. In such company one grows into a
delightful “Middle-Age” feeling, in which the vanities
of daily journals and hotel bills are forgotten.
In this mood of mind, when I was hesitating, one
day of mid-winter, whether I would sun myself in a
Claude Lorraine, or between the Arno and the houses,
the valet of the inn where I was staying, put a letter in
my hand bearing a Paris post-mark.
“It must be from De Courcy,” said I; and my
fancy straightway conjured up an image of the dapper
little man disporting among all the gayeties and the
grisettes of a Paris world; but I had never one thought
of poor Emile Roque, until I caught sight of his name
within the letter.
After acquitting himself of the sundry commissions
left in his keeping, De Courcy says:—
“You were half right and half wrong about the
jolly artist of Watteau. His suicide is not in the journals,
but for all that it may be. I had no chance of
seeing him at his new game in the corner salon, for the
bird had flown before my return. I heard, though, very
much of his strange copy of the crowning horror of
Géricault. Nor would you have been the only one in
the market as purchaser of his extravaganza. A droll
story is told of an English visitor who was startled one
day by, I dare say, the same qualities which you discovered
scruples, addressed himself, in the best way he could, to
the artist himself, requesting him to set a price upon his
work.
“The old Emile Roque whom I had known—in
fact, whom we had known together—would have met
such a question with the gayest and most gallant refusal
possible.
“But what did this bewitched admirer of Géricault
do?
“He kept at his work—doggedly, gloomily.
“The Englishman stubbornly renewed his inquiry—
this time placing his hand upon the canvas, to aid his
solicitation by so much of pantomime.
“The painter (you remember his stalwart figure)
brushed the stranger's hand aside, and with a petrifying
look and great energy of expression (as if the poor
Briton had been laying his hand on his very heart),
said: `C'est à moi, Monsieur—à moi—à moi!'—beating
his hand on his breast the while.
“Poor Emile! The jovial times of Watteau's
nymphs are, I fear, gone forever.
“But I forget to tell you what I chiefly had in mind
when I began this mention of him. Some say his love
has crazed him—some say no. The truth is, he is not
to marry the pretty Virginie C—, one time his
affianced.
“There are objections. Rumor says they come
from Monsieur C—, sous chef in the office of Finance,
and father of Virginie; and rumor adds that the objections
are insurmountable. What they are, Heaven only
knows. Surely a daintier fellow never sued for favor;
and as for scandal, Emile Roque was what you call, I
believe, a Puritan.” [I do not think it necessary to
correct De Courcy's strange use of an English term.]
“The oddest thing of all I have yet to tell you.
This broken hope diverted Emile from Watteau to the
corner salon of the Louvre; at least I infer as much,
since the two events agree in time. It is evident, furthermore,
that the poor fellow takes the matter bitterly
to heart; and it is perfectly certain that all the objection
rests with the father of the fiancée.
“So far, nothing strange; but notwithstanding this
opposition on the part of Monsieur C—, it is known
that Emile was in constant and familiar, nay, friendly
communication with him up to the time of his disappearance
from the capital, which occurred about the
date of my return.
“Read me this riddle if you can! Is the rendering
of the horrors of Géricault to restore Emile to favor?
Or shall I, as you prophesied four months ago (ample
time for such consummation), still look for his enrollment
among the suicides?”
With this letter in my hand (there were others in
Claude, and sunned myself instead along the Arno.
Beyond the houses which hang on the further bank of
the river, I could see the windows of the Pitti Palace
and the cypresses of the Boboli gardens, and above both,
the blue sky which arched over the tower of Galileo
upon the distant hills. I wished the distracted painter
might have been there on the sunny side of the houses,
which were full of memories of Angelo and Cellini, to
forget his troubles. If an unwilling father were all,
there might be no suicide. Still, the expression in his
copy of the castaway haunted me.
| II. Seven stories, with basement and attic | |