A prey to such thoughts, Porbus asked the old man, “But isn’t it one woman for another? Isn’t Poussin yielding his mistress to your eyes?”
“What mistress is that?” Frenhofer sneered. “She’ll betray him sooner or later. Mine will always be faithful!”
“All right,” Porbus resumed, “we’ll say no more about it. But before you find—even in Asia—a woman as beautiful, as perfect as the one I’m telling you about, you may die without finishing your picture.”
“Oh, it’s finished!” Frenhofer said. “Anyone seeing it would suppose he saw a woman lying on a velvet coverlet, her bed surrounded by draperies, and at her side, a golden tripod exhaling incense. You’d be tempted to seize the tassel of the cord tying back the draperies, and you’d believe you saw the breast of Catherine rising and falling with her breath. Yet I must be sure...”
“Then go to Asia,” Porbus replied, detecting a sort of hesitation in Frenhofer’s gaze. And he took a few steps toward the door of the room.
At that very moment, Gillette and Nicolas Poussin had reached Frenhofer’s house. About to go in, the girl released the painter’s arm and drew back as if seized by a sudden presentiment.
“What am I doing here?” she asked her lover in a hollow tone of voice, looking him straight in the eye.
“Gillette, I’ve left the decision up to you, and I’ll obey you, whatever you say. You’re my conscience and my glory. Let’s go back to the inn. I may be happier there than if you...”
“Am I my own mistress when you speak to me like that? Oh no, I’m just a child. Let’s go in,” she urged, seeming to make a violent effort. “If our love dies, if I’m opening my heart to eternal regret, won’t your glory be my reward for obeying your wishes? Let’s go in: being an eternal memory on your palette will still be a kind of life.”
Opening the door of the house, the two lovers almost bumped into Porbus who, astonished by this sudden encounter with Gillette, whose eyes were just then full of tears, took her, trembling, by the arm and led her into the old man’s presence. “Look here,” he said. “Isn’t she worth all the masterpieces in the world?”
Frenhofer gave a start. Gillette stood before him in the innocent posture of a terrified Circassian girl carried off by brigands to some slave dealer. A modest blush suffused her countenance, her eyes were lowered, her hands hung at her sides, her strength seemed to leave her, and tears protested against the violence done to her modesty. At this moment Poussin, in despair at having taken this lovely treasure out of his attic, cursed himself: once again he became more lover than artist, and a thousand scruples racked his heart when he saw the rejuvenated gaze of the old man who, in the fashion of all painters, undressed the girl with his eyes, divining her most secret forms. Poussin reverted then to the true lover’s fierce jealousy.
“Gillette, let’s leave!” he exclaimed.
At these words, spoken in that tone, his overjoyed mistress raised her eyes to her lover and flung herself into his arms.
“Oh, you do love me!” she cried, bursting into tears; having willed herself not to reveal her suffering, she had no strength left to conceal her joy.
“Oh, leave her with me, just for a moment,” the old painter pleaded, “and you can compare her to my Catherine. Yes, I consent.”
There was still something of love in Frenhofer’s plea. He seemed prey to a certain coquetry toward his painted lady, and to enjoy in advance the victory his artificial virgin’s beauty would gain over that of a real girl.
“Don’t let him go back on his word!” exclaimed Porbus, clapping Poussin on the shoulder. “The fruits of love wither quickly; those of art are immortal.”
“For him,” Gillette whispered, looking hard at Poussin and then at Porbus, “for him, then, I’m nothing more than a woman?” She raised her head proudly, but when, after darting a glance at Frenhofer, she saw her lover once again studying the portrait he had lately taken for a Giorgione, she continued, “Ah! let’s go upstairs. He’s never looked at me that way.”
“Old man,” Poussin continued, torn from his meditation by Gillette’s voice, “you see this sword? I’ll thrust it into your heart at the first word of complaint from this child, I’ll set fire to your house, and no one will get out alive. Do you understand?”
Nicolas Poussin was grim, and his words were terrible. This utterance, and especially the young painter’s gesture, consoled Gillette, who almost forgave him for sacrificing her to painting and to his glorious future. Porbus and Poussin remained at the studio door, staring at each other in silence. At first the painter of Mary of Egypt allowed himself a few exclamations—“Now she’s undressing... Now he’s telling her to stand where there’s daylight...Now he’s comparing her!” But Porbus fell silent at the sight of Poussin’s face, which expressed a terrible sadness, and although old painters no longer feel such petty scruples in the presence of art, he admired these two young people for being so naïve and so charming. Poussin kept his hand on his sword hilt, his ear pressed to the door. Standing there in the shadows, the two men looked like a pair of conspirators waiting for the moment to assault a tyrant.
“Come in, come in!” the old man called, radiant with joy. “My work is perfect, and now I can show it to you with pride. Never will painter, paintbrush, color, canvas, or light succeed in creating a rival to Catherine Lescault.”
Seized by the keenest curiosity, Porbus and Poussin rushed into the middle of a vast studio covered with dust, where everything was in chaos; here and there they caught sight of paintings and sketches on the walls, and suddenly stopped, both of them overcome with admiration, before a life-size figure of a half-naked woman.
“Oh, don’t bother with that!” Frenhofer said. “That’s just a study for a pose; as a picture it’s worth nothing at all. These are my mistakes,” he continued, gesturing at the ravishing compositions hung on the walls around them.
At these words, Porbus and Poussin, astonished by this disdain for such works, sought the portrait they had been promised, without managing to find it.
“Well, here it is,” the old man announced, his hair disheveled, his face inflamed by a preternatural exaltation, his eyes sparkling, and panting like a lovesick swain. “Aha! You weren’t expecting such perfection, were you? You’re in the presence of a woman, and you’re still looking for a picture. There’s such depth on this canvas, the air is so real you can no longer distinguish it from the air around yourselves. Where’s the art? Gone, vanished! Here’s true form—the very form of a girl. Haven’t I captured the color, the energy of the line that seems to bound her body? Isn’t this just the phenomenon presented by objects that live in air as fish live in water? Notice how the contours are silhouetted against the background! That back! Doesn’t it look as if you could run your hand down that? It took me seven years’ study to achieve such effects, the conjugation of objects with daylight! And that hair! You see how the light glows through it...But I do believe she’s breathing...You see that breast? Ah! Who could fail to worship her on his knees? The flesh throbs, she’s about to stand up, wait a moment...”
“Do you see anything?” Poussin whispered to Porbus.
“No. Do you?”
“Nothing.”
The two painters left the old man to his ecstasy and tried to see whether the light, falling directly on the canvas he was showing them, had neutralized its every effect. Then they peered at the picture by moving to the right, to the left, first crouching then straightening up again.
“Yes, yes, it really is a canvas,” Frenhofer assured them, mistaking the purpose of this scrutiny. “See, here’s the stretcher, there’s the easel, then here are my paints, my brushes.” And he took up a brush which he presented to them with a naïve gesture.
“The old fraud’s pulling our leg,” Poussin murmured, returning to face the so-called painting. “All I see are colors daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint.”
“We must be missing something,” Porb
us insisted.
Coming closer, they discerned, in one corner of the canvas, the tip of a bare foot emerging from this chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist; but a delightful foot, a living foot! They stood stock-still with admiration before this fragment which had escaped from an incredible, slow, and advancing destruction. That foot appeared there like the torso of some Parian marble Venus rising out of the ruins of a city burned to ashes.
“There’s a woman under there!” Porbus cried, drawing Poussin’s attention to the layers of color the old painter had superimposed, imagining he was perfecting his art.
The two painters spontaneously turned toward Frenhofer, beginning to realize, however vaguely, the state of ecstasy which imprisoned him.
“He means it,” Porbus said.
“Yes, my friend,” the old man replied as he wakened from his trance, “you must have faith, faith in art, and you must live a long time with your work to produce a creation like this. Some of these shadows cost me a lot of hard work. Look there—on that cheek, under the eyes—that faint shadow which you’d swear was untranslatable if you saw it in nature. Do you suppose an effect like that didn’t cost me incredible difficulties to reproduce? But also, my dear Porbus, consider my work closely, and you’ll understand something more of what I was telling you about the way I handle the modeling and the outlines. Look at the light on the breast and you’ll see how, by a series of brushstrokes and by accents applied with a full brush, I’ve managed to capture the truth of light and to combine it with the gleaming whiteness of the highlights, and how, by an opposite effort, by smoothing the ridges and the texture of the paint itself, by caressing my figure’s contours and by submerging them in halftones, I have eliminated the very notion of drawing, of artificial means, and given my work the look and the actual solidity of nature. Come closer, you’ll see better how it’s done. At a distance, it vanishes. You see? Here, right here, I believe it’s truly remarkable.”
And with the tip of his brush, he showed the two painters a patch of bright color.
Porbus clapped the old man on the shoulder, turning toward Poussin. “You know,” he said, “we have here a very great painter.”
“Even more of a poet than a painter,” Poussin replied gravely.
“Here,” continued Porbus, touching the canvas, “right here ends our art on earth.”
“Whereupon it vanishes in the heavens,” said Poussin.
“How many delights in this one bit of canvas!” Porbus exclaimed.
The old man, preoccupied, paid no heed to them and went on smiling at his imaginary woman.
“But sooner or later he’ll notice that there’s nothing on his canvas!” Poussin exclaimed.
“Nothing on my canvas?” echoed Frenhofer, looking back and forth between the two painters and his imagined picture.
“What have you done!” Porbus growled at Poussin.
The old man gripped the youth’s arm violently and cried, “You see nothing! Boor! Infidel! Catamite! What did you come up here for, anyway?— My good Porbus,” he broke off, turning toward the painter, “are you mocking me, too? I’m your friend, you can tell me the truth: Have I spoiled my picture?”
Porbus hesitated; he dared not speak, but the anxiety revealed in the old man’s features was so cruel that he could only point to the canvas and stammer, “See for yourself!”
Frenhofer stared at his picture for a moment and staggered as if from a blow. “Nothing, nothing! And after working ten years!” He sat down and wept. “I’m an imbecile then, a madman with neither talent nor ability. Just a rich man who makes no more than what he buys ...I’ve created nothing!” He studied his canvas through his tears, suddenly standing up with great pride and darting an angry glance at the two painters. “By the body and blood of Christ, the two of you are envious thieves who want me to believe I’ve spoiled her so you can steal her from me! But I can see her!” he exclaimed. “I see her, and she’s marvelously beautiful!”
At that moment, Poussin heard the sound of weeping—it was Gillette, forgotten in a corner.
“What’s the matter, angel?” the young painter asked, suddenly becoming a lover again.
“Kill me!” she cried. “I’d be vile to love you still—you fill me with contempt. I admire you, yet you horrify me. I love you, and I think I hate you already!”
While Poussin was listening to Gillette, Frenhofer again draped a green serge cloth over his Catherine, with the intent composure of a jeweler locking his velvet trays, imagining he is in the company of clever thieves. He cast a sly glance, full of suspicion and scorn, at the two painters, and without a word led them to his studio door. Then, at the bottom of the stairs, on the threshold of his house, he said to them, “Farewell, my little friends.”
That farewell made the two painters’ blood run cold. The next day, a worried Porbus visited Frenhofer again and was told that he had died during the night, after burning his canvases.
—Paris, February 1832
GAMBARA
To the Marquis of Belloy
It was during afternoon tea at the fireside of a mysterious retreat which no longer exists save as memory will preserve it, overlooking Paris from the hills of Bellevue to those of Belleville, from Montmartre to the Arc de Triomphe, that amid the myriad ideas which exploded and expired like rockets in your sparkling conversation, you offered my pen, with characteristic generosity, this character worthy of Hoffmann, a bearer of unknown treasures and a pilgrim at the gates of Paradise, endowed with ears to hear angelic harmonies yet no longer a tongue to repeat them, touching the keyboard with fingers deformed by the contractions of divine inspiration, under the illusion he was playing celestial music to stupefied listeners. You created Gambara, I merely costumed him. Let me render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, regretting you did not take up the pen at a period when noblemen might employ it as well as the sword in their country’s service. You may well take no thought for yourself, but your talents you owe to us.
New Year’s Day of the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty-one was emptying its packet of holiday sugarplums: four o’clock had struck, restaurants were beginning to fill, and there was a crowd in the Palais Royal. Presently a carriage stopped at the entrance and out of it stepped a young man of proud bearing, doubtless a foreigner or he would not have been attended by such an aristocratically plumed footman nor displayed on his carriage doors the quarterings still coveted by heroes of the July monarchy. The stranger entered the Palais Royal and joined the crowd under the arcades, patient with the slow pace to which the press of idlers condemned his progress. He appeared accustomed to the measured gait ironically known as “an ambassador’s walk,” though his dignity seemed a trifle theatrical: handsome and severe as his countenance was, his hat, beneath which emerged a tuft of curly black hair, tilted perhaps a little too far over his right ear, belying his gravity by a slightly roguish look; his inattentive, half-closed eyes cast disdainful glances at the crowd.
“Now there’s a really good-looking man,” murmured a shopgirl, stepping aside to let him pass.
“Who’s well aware of the fact,” her homely companion replied in a loud voice.
After a turn around the arcades, the young man glanced at the sky and then at his watch, made an impatient gesture, and entered a tobacconist’s shop where he lit a cigar and lingered in front of a mirror to inspect his clothes which were a little showier than the laws of French taste prescribe. He fiddled with his collar, tugged at a black velvet vest crisscrossed by one of those heavy gold chains made in Genoa, and, casually flinging over his left shoulder a velvet-lined cloak which he then rearranged with some care, the young man resumed his promenade without permitting himself to be distracted by the appraising glances that marked his progress. When lights began to appear in the shops and the evening seemed dark enough, he headed toward the Place du Palais Royal like a man afraid to be recognized, skirting the square till he reached the fountain where, shielded by the line of fiac
res, he entered the dark, dirty, and disreputable rue Froidmanteau, a sort of sewer the police tolerate near the well-swept Palais Royal, the way an Italian majordomo allows a careless footman to leave a pile of household trash in a corner of the staircase. The young man hesitated, for all the world like a suburban matron in her Sunday best anxiously peering across a rain-swollen gutter. Yet the hour was well chosen to satisfy even the most shameful fantasy: earlier one might be found out, later one might be forestalled. To have let himself be lured by one of those glances that prompt without being exactly provocative; to have followed for an hour, perhaps even a whole day, some lovely young woman idealized in his thoughts, her most trivial actions interpreted a thousand flattering ways; to have started believing in sudden, irresistible sympathies; to have imagined, in the heat of a passing exhilaration, an adventure in an age when romances are written precisely because they no longer occur; to have dreamed, wrapped in Almaviva’s cloak, of balconies and guitars, of stratagems and locks; to have written a rapturous poem and now be standing at an ill-famed door; and then—for a grand finale!—to discover his Rosina’s decorum to be no more than a precaution imposed by a police regulation—is not all this a disappointment many men have endured without admitting it? The most natural emotions are those we acknowledge with the most repugnance, and conceit is surely one of these. When the lesson stops there, a Parisian will profit by it or put it out of his mind, and no great harm is done; but this is scarcely the case for a foreigner about to discover how much his Parisian education may cost.
This stroller was a Milanese nobleman banished from his country, where several liberal escapades had rendered him persona non grata to the Austrian government. Count Andrea Marcosini had found himself welcomed to Paris with that entirely French enthusiasm invariably encountered by a lively wit and a resonant name accompanied by two hundred thousand francs a year and a charming presence. For such an individual, exile was a pleasure trip; his property was merely sequestrated, and his friends informed him that after an absence of two years at the most, he could reappear in his homeland without the slightest danger. After rhyming crudeli affanni with i miei tiranni in a dozen sonnets, after sharing his purse with a number of less fortunate Italian refugees, Count Andrea, who had the misfortune to be a poet, considered himself emancipated from his patriotic notions. Soon after his arrival, therefore, he surrendered without reservation to the various pleasures Paris offers gratis to anyone rich enough to purchase them. His talents and good looks had won him many successes among the female sex, whom he loved collectively as befitted his age, but among whom he as yet distinguished no one in particular. This taste, moreover, was subordinated in him to passions for music and poetry that he had cultivated since childhood; it struck him as more difficult and more glorious to succeed in these than in gallantry, since nature had spared him the obstacles other men are pleased to overcome. A complex man like so many others, he was easily seduced by the pleasures of luxury without which he could not have survived, just as he set great store by the social distinctions which his opinions rejected. Hence his theories as an artist, a thinker, and a poet were frequently inconsistent with his tastes, his sentiments, and his habits as a millionaire nobleman; but he consoled himself for these contradictions by discovering them in many Parisians who were similarly liberal in their interests, aristocratic by nature.