“Mon Dieu, you must be dazed not to notice,” Auguste said.
“I hope you don’t want to go back and get them,” Pierre said.
“Are you crazy? I never want to go near that bloody place.”
Fournaise refilled his glass. Pierre shoved his forward too.
“It’s a deadly relic of Romanticism,” Jules said. “A…a pernicious vice that makes for…a horrible frolicking. It’s…it’s downright Greek.”
There were a few feeble chuckles at the poet struggling for words.
“Italian,” Antonio corrected.
“It’s wrong that people think manhood requires such irrational displays,” Gustave said.
“Was he dark, hairy, hot, impetuous?” Jules asked. “Did he have a deep voice, a ruddy complexion above a healthy beard? Those are the clichéd expectations of the bourgeois taking on the comportment of the aristocracy of former times. Or was he attempting to compensate for their lack? Was he puny?”
Pierre snorted. “Not puny at all.”
“As big as Alphonse,” Auguste said.
Père Fournaise stood up and laid his hands on Paul’s shoulders. Alphonse leaned across the table and grasped Paul’s forearm in his big hand. Aline held her dog to her chest and stared at Paul.
After a while of just sitting, Alphonsine said quietly, “We’re going to pose for the last time Saturday morning if you can come.”
Paul raised both arms above his head. “I’ll be here!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Deal
Gustave rearranged the apples and peaches in his large, stemmed compote. He could build a revealing still life with them. His brother’s compote sat far away on the vast ebony dining table. A quirk of Martial’s, to keep their fruit separate. Martial had been gone for nearly a week. Gustave didn’t know where, or when he’d be back. Typical of their bizarre brotherhood, each of them rowing his own boat, neither one exchanging thoughts about painting or music, yet living in harmony next to each other. Vacancy hung in the air.
He filled two faceted crystal carafes with water and set them diagonally. They reflected brilliantly on the polished wood. He set down two bottles of wine, wine glasses, and water glasses, asymmetrically, as far apart as the table would allow. They had touched them, his other brother, René, and his mother, with their hands and with their lips. He set out no plates or silverware to suggest a meal to come.
He had painted a similar arrangement a few years earlier with René and his mother absorbed in their food. Something about the silent apartment urged him to revisit the theme. This would be his own luncheon painting, different than his first, different than Auguste’s. Their places would be empty. Only their glasses existed now. Gone. René at a young age, a premonition of his own future. He bent down to pet Inès, and set up his easel.
His mood paralyzed him. He often suffered in composing until the painting was under way, but this time was worse. He couldn’t paint this today. He went into his bedroom to change clothes and gazed at his Floor Scrapers, indulging himself. Such fineness in other male bodies. He lusted to have that kind of beauty himself. He put on a cravat and a cream-colored summer jacket to try to feel jaunty, fed Inès and Mame, his cat and dog siblings, and left for Gare Saint-Lazare to take the train to Chatou.
He found Auguste on the terrace painting the railroad bridge in the rear of the boating party. He had adjusted the angle of the opposite bank to get in a couple of inns with red-tiled roofs.
“All it needs is the Inès heeling to starboard,” Gustave said. “When Paul Durand-Ruel sees this he’s going to hock his furniture in order to snatch it up.”
“My, my, look at you all decked out. Going to a garden party?”
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? You act like I hadn’t told you anything yesterday. The group. I’m so heartsick I can’t even paint.”
“Then row, or sail, or keep me company while I paint.”
Gustave slumped in a chair. That was one thing about Auguste. No matter what was happening, he worked. As for himself, he allowed for distractions of sailing, boat design, stamp collecting, long dinners out.
“I wouldn’t say this to anybody,” Auguste said, “but I think someday I will have wrung Impressionism dry. I’m beginning to see that if a painter works only in these wispy strokes, eventually he’d have nothing more than momentary effects, and would lose the ability to convey subject matter.”
“You’re talking like Zola.”
“You won’t run that risk of losing definition, but I might.”
“So might Claude.” Gustave lit a cigarette. “I don’t know if I can organize another show next spring.” He tried to say it casually, but it came out pinched.
“Do you have to know now, on a day as beautiful as this? Autumn is almost here. You ought not to waste a day.”
“I’m not. I’m going to see Durand-Ruel.”
Auguste chortled. “You must be misinformed. His gallery’s only five blocks from your house. What are you doing here?”
“I want you to go with me.”
“Why?”
“To see if he has any interest in putting together the next group show. To feel him out about Degas’ cronies.”
“Why do I need to go with you if I’m not going to exhibit in it?”
“Because he’s the most important dealer in Paris. It’s time he knew about your painting. And because you understand the problem and can express it in a logical way. You’re smart, if you haven’t noticed.”
“You’re joking. I need a Larousse encyclopedia on my lap in order to keep up with you when you’re expounding,” Auguste said. “But I’m not a fighter.”
“That’s just it. You’re not as likely to get emotional as I am. You’re unflappable and I’m irascible.”
“Well, that last is true.”
Auguste used up the paint on his brush and began cleaning it.
He felt better just being with Auguste. At the station, he pulled out two tickets from his pocket, first class, to keep his jacket clean.
“You were pretty sure of yourself. Two tickets,” Auguste said.
“I was prepared to make an ass of myself pleading until you agreed.”
On the train, Gustave asked, “Did you have a nice time with Aline in the boat yesterday?”
“Just a little too cozy.”
“You have your hands full with two women all of a sudden.”
“Feast or famine. You wouldn’t consider taking one, would you?”
Gustave chuckled. “You’ve got to handle it on your own, I think.”
“Time will do that for me. In a couple weeks I’ll be back at my studio. Until then, it could get downright complicated.”
Gustave saw nothing new on the walls of Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery. Delacroix, Daubigny, Corot, Millet, as usual. But the second room surprised him. “Ho-ho! Look at this. Sisley on all four walls. Good for Alfred!”
As soon as Durand-Ruel saw them, he broke away from a conversation and held out both arms. “My friends! Welcome.”
To Gustave, Durand-Ruel’s skin looked pink against his stiff white shirt collar and his precisely trimmed mustache. He was shortish, like him, but unlike him, heading toward stout. They shook hands. He smelled of cologne.
“I hear you’re at Chatou painting a gigantic thing,” he said to Auguste.
Auguste snapped his head sideways at him. “Gustave, did you tell him?”
He held up his palms.
“Charles Ephrussi, I think it was,” said Durand-Ruel.
“How have you been getting along?” Auguste asked.
“To be candid, if I hadn’t grown up in the trade, I wouldn’t have survived the battle against public taste. In some circles, I’m still considered a madman. But the climate is improving. And both of you?”
“The group’s in trouble,” Gustave blurted.
“I’m somewhat aware.” He ushered them into his private office
hung with drawings by Delacroix. Tufted velvet chairs were set in a half circle around a carved easel for private showings.
Durand-Ruel offered them cigarettes from an ornate silver box. He took one, but Auguste said, “Ready-made cigarettes? That’s a little like a kept woman. No, thanks.”
“Then a cognac for both of you?” Durand-Ruel poured from a cut crystal decanter that reminded Gustave of his abandoned still life.
“Gustave means there is new contention in the group.”
He let Auguste explain the split and the impasse about the next show, but he couldn’t keep silent.
“Degas is the crux of it. He insists on bringing in his gang of camp followers. More than a dozen. He sent me this list.” Gustave handed it to him.
Durand-Ruel looked it over. “Nearly the same as the list he sent me.”
“We’ve actually splintered three ways,” Gustave said. “The original group intent on exhibiting in an Impressionist show, as before—Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Guillaumin, and if you wish, Gauguin. And the originals who have submitted or will submit to the Salon—Auguste, Monet, Sisley, and Cézanne. And now Degas’ string of quasi-Impressionists—Forain, Raffaëlli, Tillot, Vidal, Zandomeneghi, the Bracquemonds, and Mary Cassatt, together with the rest of his list. If they’re admitted as participants in an Impressionist show, that will outnumber the original group. Raffaëlli flooded our last exhibition with thirty-seven paintings to the ten or fifteen by each of the rest of us. It will only get worse next year.”
“You haven’t placed yourself,” Durand-Ruel said.
“I will when I know how you stand,” Gustave said. “Degas has immense talent and I admire his work as much as ever, but I’m less and less able to cooperate with him to keep the group cohesive.”
“There’s been some name-calling,” Auguste explained, his shoulder jerking. “And arguments over whom to admit and what to call themselves now on the posters.”
Hearing it that way, Gustave felt ridiculous.
Durand-Ruel put his elbows on his ostentatious Louis XIV desk. “Someday, it won’t be important that you get along. You won’t have to organize your own exhibitions. That’s not your job. Your job is to paint.”
“But for now I need to know how to proceed with the next group show, or whether to proceed at all,” Gustave said, massaging his damp palms against the carved arm of the chair. “How do you stand? Don’t feel pressed to include me. I know I provoked public outrage in the last show.”
Durand-Ruel snorted. “All of you have at one time or another.” He aligned the inkwell, the rolling blotter, the small clock on his desk. “I’ll help Degas with a sixth Impressionist show if he wants my help. My salons are committed, but I can get exhibit space on the boulevard des Capucines.”
“Following his list?” Gustave asked.
“Yes.”
That landed like a cannonball in his gut. He couldn’t believe it had come to this. A troupe of toadies sucking away their most enthusiastic dealer.
Gustave leaned forward, squeezing both arms of the chair. “Tell us honestly. What do you think about their work, these disciples of Degas?”
“Not scintillating.”
“Then why support them?” His voice rose to an embarrassing squeak.
“Call it self-interest. Degas will sell.”
“And his tag-alongs? Do you really think they’ll sell?”
“They offer a combination of some Impressionist characteristics with sharp realism and anecdotal subjects. To some, it will appeal.”
“It will dilute pure Impressionism,” Gustave said.
“Is that so important? So does your work, at times. But Monet will hold up that end.”
“No, he won’t,” Gustave retorted. “He’s given up the group shows. He told an interviewer that the little band became a banal sprawl when it opened its doors to first-time daubers. Do you want to be seen as representing them? That does us no favors. Being hung alongside them doesn’t either.” He felt feverish, and Auguste had been cool as a clam. “Say something, Auguste.”
“Cézanne thinks that hanging our work with theirs will halve our prices,” Auguste ventured.
“Do you?” Durand-Ruel asked.
“I hold with Cézanne. I’m out of it.” Auguste lifted his hand. “I took a big step forward as a result of showing at the Salon. It’s a matter of not losing what I’ve gained.”
“Understood,” said Durand-Ruel.
Auguste went right on. “There are scarcely fifteen collectors in Paris who appreciate a painter who isn’t in the Salon. There are eighty thousand who won’t buy even a nose if the painter hasn’t shown in the Salon. I’ve got to live. That’s why I send two every year.”
“Two a year aren’t enough to live on.”
“That’s why we need a show,” Gustave said. “I’ll give my all to mount and fund it, only if the participants are selected on the basis of proven artistic merit in line with our original goals. If Degas wants to take part, I say let him, but without the crowd he drags along.”
“He won’t agree to that.”
“No, I daresay he won’t.”
“You have to face it, Gustave. There’s every sign that Zola was right in saying that a cohesive Impressionist group no longer exists.”
He felt a twinge in his chest, and wondered if Auguste did too. “Then a tragedy has happened right under our noses.”
“No tragedy,” Durand-Ruel said. “The time will come when you won’t need the group. Your styles are diverging anyway. You won’t need the Salon either.”
Auguste guffawed, but Durand-Ruel ignored it.
“There’s a better way. For Monet and Pissarro and Sisley too.”
“Which is?” Auguste prompted.
“First, listen to my reasoning. Your boldest work hasn’t been shown at the Impressionist shows, and can’t be shown at the Salon, so the most innovative work being done in France is either sold among yourselves or to a few friendly buyers or not sold at all, and that does nothing for the ultimate acceptance of the new art.”
“Are you saying I’m wrong to buy up the choice pieces?” Gustave asked.
“No. I’m just saying that the time for independent group exhibitions and Salon validation is over. The manner of exchange of art is in the throes of a huge change. As important as the change from aristocratic patronage to the bourgeois Salon.” Durand-Ruel laid his palms on his desk, fingers splayed. “And we’re in the middle of it.
“In this change the dealer is essential. Not just as a marchand de tableaux as if paintings were shoes or hardware. As I see it, the dealer is a guide to aesthetic taste for the uninformed, a mentor to artists, a banker if need be, an uncle in affection, a publicist, and somewhat of an impresario.”
“That’s a hefty handful,” Auguste said, crossing his legs. “Especially when you haven’t bought anything to speak of recently.”
“You don’t know how I’ve suffered in not being able to. But the nation is finally crawling out of recession, and more and more people are coming in ready to buy. I must have stock—1881 will be a year of acquisition for me.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” Auguste asked.
“Here’s how I see it. If I consider your current work salable, and I have no reason to doubt otherwise, I will soon be prepared to enter into a relationship, not picking and choosing individual paintings, but buying all a painter’s output, as I did with Manet years ago when I could afford to.”
“How soon?” Auguste asked.
Durand-Ruel raised an index finger as though asking for patience. “I have a new friend, a new player in art circles named Feder who has made a good amount of money available to me, so I immediately bought Sisley, whom I thought needed it the most.”
“That’s good,” Gustave said.
“Each year the authority of the Salon is undermined more and more, thanks to the general dissatisfaction with government institutions exposed by the war and the Commune. It’s not in the Salon, it’s in the marketplac
e that your names will be writ in gold. The franc spent at a dealer’s gallery will be the arbiter of taste.”
Gustave felt queasy in the stuffy room and needed a glass of water.
“What my father did for Delacroix, I can do for you. Under this arrangement…”
Durand-Ruel stopped abruptly and poured another round of cognac, as if to dramatize what he was about to say. Oh, he was a master showman, all right.
“You’ll have to commit all of your works to me.”
Durand-Ruel leaned on his desk toward Auguste and poked at the air in his direction with a silver pen. “Case in point. You did an oval portrait of Marie Murer, and her brother only paid you a hundred francs. That’s shameful. Vastly less than what I could have gotten if you would have gone through me.”
“But she promised to put it in a Louis XV frame from Grosvalet’s.”
Durand-Ruel rolled his eyes. He was right to. It was a ridiculous reason, but so like Auguste.
“Irrelevant. With proper management, which you obviously don’t know a thing about, Auguste, your paintings will become prime investments. But it won’t work without total commitment.”
“Would we have the right to accept commissions for portraits and room decorations?” Auguste asked.
“Yes.”
“What if I want to keep something? Or give it away?” Auguste asked.
“Let’s say, five a year, but without the right to sell them.”
“And the Salon?” Auguste asked.
“The Salon’s a dying institution. Your group gave it its coup de grâce.”
“That doesn’t answer his question,” Gustave said.
“You can continue to submit two, as you’ve been doing. And I can exhibit yours that I buy wherever I see opportunity. Don’t you see? That means all over France, and Belgium too. I’ve got contacts in England, and I’m working toward getting the financial backing and influence of Mary Cassatt to hold an exhibition in New York someday.”
“Some year, you mean,” Auguste said.
“Granted, it will take time. I have a feeling the American public won’t laugh. They’ll buy, moderately at first, but it will grow. And here’s another idea—single-artist exhibitions. The day will come when they’ll throng to my gallery to see a whole show of you, another of Monet, another of Pissarro. Can’t you see that?”