Fragments Of An Autobiography Part 9

He took it kindly; the two green and gold ones were amazed and indignant, but too well trained to lynch me, and so I galloped on till once more my quadruped stopped and again became absorbed in thought.

When my companions came up, they gave expression to their unbounded delight at my discomfiture, and generally treated me, their appointed leader, with every mark of disrespect. This time the horse must have mistaken their vociferous hooting for a signal to return home, for it started off in that direction, and took me back without once indulging in the usual hiatus.

I dismounted, and whilst, on the one hand, I was glad to be now able to regulate my own movements, on the other I was smarting under the recollection of my ignominious failure, and the jeering and hooting still rang in my ears.

A couple of _sergents de ville_ were on duty close by, a circ.u.mstance which suggested to me the opportunity of getting even with my insubordinate men.

"Well, Messieurs," I said to the policemen, "I think there might be a few more of you along the princ.i.p.al avenues. It is positively disgraceful. I don't mind a bit of a joke myself, but in my country we don't play practical jokes on royalty, as that young chap with the brown felt hat did on your Prince President."

"What he did?"

"Why, ride alongside the prince's carriage, giving himself airs and posing for _son Altesse's_ aide-de-camp. And, following him as fast as they could get along, a band of a.s.ses on donkeys, braying like _imbeciles_. Well, _bon jour_, Messieurs; after all, it's no business of mine. I only thought you might care to know."

On the arrival of the band, I learnt afterwards, they were confronted by four _sergents de ville_, the two original ones having been reinforced.

Gobelot, the man with the brown felt hat, was asked for his pa.s.sport, and, not being able to produce it, was looked upon with suspicion and closely cross-questioned. Dupont rather entered into my joke and let things go wrong, till it was high time to set them right. Then I was denounced, and it was not without some difficulty made clear to the authorities that the informer was the real culprit. So Gobelot the innocent was only warned to be more careful another time, and my name is probably inscribed on some black list at the _Prefecture_.

Claude was a most indefatigable worker; as an artist ever severe and uncompromising, studying on the lines of Ingres and Flandrin, loving a bird, a stone, a woman for the sake of the outline they imprinted on his mind, and ever seeking an ideal contour, whether he held the pencil or the brush. His enthusiasm was quite catching; so under his influence I soon began to love drawing for its own sake, and we spent many an evening together studying Dante's stern features from the cast or working from the living model.

He had inherited his cla.s.sical predilections from his father, who himself had started life as an artist, but had found that large historical landscapes _a la_ Poussin were not easily convertible into bread and b.u.t.ter, and had therefore wisely abandoned art as a profession, and had embraced the administrative career, in which he rose and prospered. His leisure hours he still spent at the easel, but his canvases were not as large as formerly; in his productions he always gave me the impression that he could use more emerald and olive greens, to the exclusion of other colours, on a given s.p.a.ce, than any man I had ever known.

He was quite touching in his love for Claude.

"What I have dreamed of and struggled for in vain," he would say, "that boy is going to realise. He is born with _du style_. Believe me, my child, outside _le style_ there is no art. From the time of Raphael down to the present day, nothing is worth recording, nothing remains or will remain, that is not _de l'ecole_. _La grande ecole_, my child, _le style, la ligne, voila le salut_, believe me."

I winced, for I loved, above all the colourists, the Spaniards, the Dutch; but he was so sincere, so convincing, that for the time being I felt as if I could have sold my birthright for a line of beauty.

"He is quite right," Claude would afterwards say to me, "but he puts his finger in his eye, if he thinks he can flatten your b.u.mp of colour.

Every man is born with his own b.u.mps, and they are bound to grow with him just as his hair does."

And with that we would plunge headlong into the famous discussion _sur la forme et la couleur_, each doing battle for his G.o.d with the energy of youthful fanaticism, and feeling all the while that we would have given anything to be able to exchange b.u.mps with one another. How much further his b.u.mp would lead him, I thought, and how admirably he was organised to use it in the service of high art! And he, on the other hand, would say--

"What am I, my dear fellow, as compared to you, born in the purple of art as you are? You hold the trump cards, and will," &c. &c.

Then there was an uncle of Claude's, _l'oncle Auguste_, whose views clashed fearfully with the artistic aspirations of my friend and of his father. He was a tanner, at the head of a large establishment which he had founded--a self-made man, with a lot of cleverly-grabbed money. In his social intercourse he had so carefully surrounded himself with inferior intellects, that he could not but s.h.i.+ne as a bright light amongst them--a circ.u.mstance which led him to form a most exaggerated estimate of his own wisdom and mental powers.

"My dear Jean," he would say to his brother, "I should really have thought your own experiences with those blessed paints would have made a wiser man of you. Surely one victim to the mania in the family should have been enough, without dragging that poor boy into it; a splendid fellow, sane and sound, if it weren't for the rubbish you put into his head. He was cut out for the business; never happier than when he was pottering about at the works. Why, when he was a mere child, he very nearly got drowned in the tan vat." And turning to Claude: "What have you to say to it, you young rascal? Ah well, I know you are hopelessly lost, since you got out of those plaster casts and those bones and muscles into that--What do you call that place, where able-bodied young men, strong and fit for work, sit all day drawing mannikins! _Une vraie fabrique de bonshommes! En voila un metier!_"

The same evening l'oncle Auguste was holding forth to some friends he had invited to sit at his feet and at his whist-table--

"Now mark my words, messieurs; we are going to make an artist of that nephew of mine, and one who will surprise the world. He has been received first on a list of I don't know how many hundreds of students at the Life Cla.s.s of the ecole des Beaux Arts. _Oui, messieurs_, art is an heirloom in our family; we hand it down from generation to generation."

But differences of opinion on the merits of the artistic career led to no more than skirmishes; the real tug-of-war between the Duponts, father and son on the one hand, and l'oncle Auguste on the other, came when they exchanged their views on matrimonial alliances. The former to be sure looked upon the tying of the nuptial knot from the ideal point of view; the latter very strongly held the belief that a young man should marry money, and should do so early in life.

"Suppose now," he would argue, "you mean to marry 100,000 francs, why put it off till you are twenty-six or twenty-eight? Why lose the interest of your money for so many years?"

"But perhaps, uncle, my lady-love is still in the nursery, and I must wait awhile till I can declare my undying affection. Yes, I believe she is only just beginning to play the piano, and I really cannot take her till she has done practising her scales, you know. Besides, her father has only lately started collecting the 100,000 francs, and I think he has not got further than 3500."

"G.o.d forbid, unhappy boy, that you should be led away to paint one of your cla.s.sical haloes round the head of some such unfledged chicken, blessed with a fond and shabby father. Remember, young man, you have two things to look forward to that can set you up in this world--matrimony and expectations; expectations and matrimony--and don't forget that in my mind they are very closely connected."

"Don't be angry, my dear uncle, and don't worry till there is cause. As for the 'dot,' I suppose I could do with 100,000 francs as well as any other fellow who has got to take a _bel appartement orne de glaces_, and to put himself into his furniture. But surely you, who know the value of skins, you wouldn't want me to sell mine, with what is inside in the way of body and soul, for that price!"

"See that you get 200,000 then, or three or four; you're worth all that.

Lady-love, indeed! _so_ beautiful, I suppose! Sentiment--romance--eternal love! Eternal fudge! Remember this, Uncle Auguste's fortune was not made to encourage tomfoolery."

Now there was really no reason why Uncle Auguste should deliver himself of that speech. There was no lady-love, no cla.s.sical halo, and no centime-grabbing father. But the fact was, the uncle trembled lest he should be disappointed in the boy he loved so well. He was already scheming for him, and telling one or two friends of his confidentially, that it was quite worth while treating Claude with respect, as he was the nephew of a very rich uncle. It was not to be long before the uncle was deemed well worthy of respect, as being able to boast of a very clever nephew.

Whilst he was still painting studies at the Atelier Gleyre, and attending cla.s.ses and lectures at the ecole des Beaux Arts, Claude started a picture in a queer little studio he had taken for the purpose, at the top of a very tall house in the Rue de Seine, Quartier Latin.

Somebody, with an eye to artistic possibilities, must have converted what was originally a garret into a studio by adding a big projecting window. It had a top light into which all the prying cats of the neighbourhood used to peer, whilst the less inquisitive ones merely made the loose tiles rattle as they prowled along the roof.

There was a second studio of the same kind up there, which was occupied by Giacomo Irmanno, an Italian boy of about seventeen years, with jet-black curly hair. That peculiar underglow of rich bronze colour, so characteristic of the Southern type, lit up Irmanno's perfectly chiselled features. Dupont and I made great friends with him, and I often enjoyed helping him with his work. He could be very morose and look Italian daggers, but that was probably because in his desire to become an artist he was waging war at fearful odds against poverty. He was quite out of his element under northern skies, and spoke French in a way that taught me much Italian.

His only means of support were derived from painting what is called "Les Stations de la Croix." These pictures, destined to decorate the village churches in France and generally in Catholic countries, are produced in a more matter-of-fact than artistic way. The employer with an eye to the advantages of division of labour, has the subjects printed on canvas.

Then a batch of Station No. 1, perhaps some six or eight canvases at a time, are given out to artist No. 1, who puts in the landscape and surroundings; from there they go to artist No. 2, who paints the draperies, and finally to No. 3, who fills in heads, hands, and feet.

Irmanno was No. 2. We placed the pictures ready for treatment all round the room. Then we started with one colour, say dark red, for the shade of a certain drapery; when that had been repeated on all the canvases, came the turn of the middle tint, and finally of the light red. Then came the next colour--I need not say they were all prescribed--and when we had made the round with that, the next, and so on until all the draperies were satisfactorily disposed of.

The proceedings were only varied when Irmanno lay down on the red brick floor and groaned, and pretended to have a sort of attack. I did not mind, because when the evil spirit was upon him, he always looked particularly interesting.

Next door, in the twin garret, Dupont was putting heart and soul into the production of his first picture; it was still in its initial stages, but studies small and large, in pencil and in chalks, were gradually covering the walls. His subject was "The raising of the daughter of Jairus," and he would never tire of talking to me about the grand opportunities it afforded to the artist. He would question me too on things connected with mesmerism (I was mesmerising in those days), and would want to know all about the first symptoms of awaking from a trance, of the action of the hand as it makes pa.s.ses, and the dictates of the eye as it bids the subject sleep or wake. "Christ, the G.o.d," he wrote to me in a letter of a later date, "can never be depicted, translated into human forms, but Christ the Healer, Christ the Helper, and He, the lover of children, is perhaps approachable. Give me a lifetime, and possibly I may decipher a little of what is to be read between the lines of the New Testament."

The summer had set in early and rather savagely, as it will do sometimes in Paris, and the heat in those ex-garrets of the Rue de Seine was stifling.

Rosa Bonheur Sinel did what she could to mitigate the evil. Rosa Sinel was her real name, but somebody had nicknamed her Rosa Bonheur, and in course of time her father had worked himself into the belief that the great artist had been her G.o.dmother. She was a precocious little woman, somewhere between the age of ten and fifteen--who can tell the real age of a Parisian child? _Le pere_ Sinel was one of the best known models in Paris. He was a living _ecorche_, a creature designed for the study of anatomy, for he had a most extraordinary faculty of showing the action of any and every muscle; in fact he could, if the circ.u.mstances required, give himself the appearance of having been skinned, scalped, or flayed alive. He was ever boasting of his partic.i.p.ation in the great pictorial and plastic works that had made a mark in his days, and always claiming his full share of the laurels awarded to them.

"It is not so much my exceptional figure that has inspired my friends, as it is my experience that has guided them," he told us. "Did not the great Monsieur Delacroix say with his characteristic modesty, when his plafond in the Galerie d'Apollon was uncovered: 'Where should I be without the a.s.sistance of my friend Sinel?' _Oui_, messieurs, he was right, and such a plafond is not produced in a day. 'Art is short and sittings are long,' as the poet says; _Voyez_, Monsieur Ingres! Many an hour was I nailed to the cross as a thief, before we could get the true agony. I well remember his saying 'Sinel, _mon ami_, till I knew you, I had no idea what the flexor of a third and fourth toe could do, nor did I know what acting was till I heard you.'"

"Allons donc, blagueur"--from the students--"what do you know about acting?"

"Moderate your language if you please, messieurs. You would not laugh if you knew the position I hold in the theatrical world--" With much dignity--"I am of the Theatre Francais."

"Shut up, _tais toi_" cries one.

"To be sure you play the fool," shouts another.

"_Il n'y a pas de tais toi_, messieurs; but I must be off and study my part. To-night I am on with Mademoiselle Rachel. I am cast for 'Le peuple murmure.'"

To return to the daughter, I must say she was the most useful little studio drudge I ever knew. Her appearance was against her, for she was plain and generally unkempt and untidy; the cleanest parts of her ap.r.o.n were the holes, but for all that she was an ever-handy little monkey of all work. She would roast chestnuts on the stove according to her own particular system, and would feed that stove with heterogeneous fuel that it would not have taken from another hand. She would water the garden--a sort of shelf suspended outside the window--would drench unsuspecting but indiscreet cats, and was generally of an aquatic turn of mind. One very hot day we came upon her unexpectedly, and found her perched upon a high stool, her dress tucked up, and her bare feet on the chair rail. She was contemplating with evident satisfaction what she called _le reservoir_. It looked very much as if she had been utilising it as a footbath, by way of refres.h.i.+ng herself, but that may or may not have been the case. There was an empty pail that told the story of the reservoir. She had sprinkled part of its contents over the studio floor, forming a quant.i.ty of little quivering black pearls, as the water licked up the dust; the rest she reserved to make a pool where the hand of time, or the foot rather, had produced a deep hollow in the red brick floor. The cement of time must have been at work too, to weld the bricks into a compact ma.s.s, for the water did not seem to percolate through to the neighbour's ceiling, but stood its ground to bear witness to Rosa Bonheur's aquatic genius.

After this success she had visions of gold-fish and fountains and of _les grandes eaux de Versailles_, and she wanted more snubbing than ever.

But water or no water, the heat in the studio remained intolerable. It soon began to tell on Claude, who was not of the most robust, and who was simply overworking himself. He did not like being told so--artists never do; he had got into difficulties with his picture, and now that it was in distress he would not leave it.

It really needs as much patience and perseverance to mature a picture as to rear a child. All goes smoothly for a while, and one's offspring, picture or baby, is a source of happiness. Then comes a hitch, an illness, and everything seems darkness. But just as a father does not give in and say, "Oh, this baby is no use, pitch it aside," so a true picture parent does not gash the canvas of his own painting with a knife, or cast it away because it has the scarlet or yellow fever, or because it tells of a crooked leg or a deformed limb. On the contrary, he sets to work and tends the patient with soothing oils, and with the whole a.r.s.enal of remedies his palette affords. Wonderful are the cures that have been effected on canvas, and little does the public know, when it admires the completed work, how desperately the artist has had to struggle at times to preserve even a spark of vitality in it, and how narrowly it escaped destruction at his hands.

Claude had got into a phase of despair. Several studies he had made lately, especially some for the head of the daughter of Jairus, he considered absolute failures.

"Those blessed models," he said, "drive me wild. The rubbish that girl talks whilst I am trying to raise her from the dead, would make a saint swear."