 The youth wrote below the sketch: "Nicolas Poussin." "That is not bad for a beginner," said the strange personage who harangued so wildly. "I see that we can talk painting before you. I do not blame you for admiring Porbus' saint. It is a masterpiece in the eyes of the world, and only those who are admitted to the deepest secrets of art can discover wherein it sins. But, since you are deserving of the lesson and are capable of understanding it, I am going to show you how little is needed to complete the work. Be all eyes and all attention, for such an opportunity to learn may never be offered you again. Porbus, your palette!" Porbus produced palette and brushes. The little old man turned up his sleeves with a quick, convulsive movement, passed his thumb through the palette. daubed and covered with colors, which Porbus handed to him; he snatched rather than took from his hands a handful of brushes of all sizes, and his pointed beard twitched sharply with the restless efforts that betrayed the passionate concupiscence of an amorous imagination. As he dipped his brush in the paint, he muttered between his teeth: "These colors are good for nothing but to be thrown out the window with the man who made them; they are disgustingly crude and false! How can one paint with such stuff?" Then, with feverish animation, he dipped the end of the brush in the different mounds of color, sometimes running over the whole assortment more rapidly than a cathedral organist runs his fingers over his whole keyboard in the O Filii at Easter. Porbus and Poussin stood like statues beside the canvas, absorbed in the most intense contemplation. "You see, young man," said the old man, without turning his head, "you see how, with three or four strokes and a touch of bluish varnish, we can make the air circulate around the head of the poor saint, who must have felt as if she were stifling and unable to move in that dense atmosphere! See how the drapery flutters now, and how readily you understand that the breeze is raising it! It seemed before like starched cloth held up by pins. Do you see how well the satiny polish I have given the breast represents the smooth softness of a young girl's skin, and how the mixture of red-brown and burnt ochre warms up the gray coldness of that place in the shadow where the blood formed in clots instead of flowing? Young man, young man, no master could teach you what I am showing you now. Mabuse alone possessed the secret of imparting life to figures. Mabuse had but one pupil, myself. I have had none, and I am an old man! You have enough intelligence to divine the rest from the glimpse I give you." As he talked, the singular old man touched all the different parts of the picture: here two strokes of the brush, there a single one, but always so aptly, that the result was a new painting, but a painting dipped in light. He worked with such passionate ardor that the perspiration stood on his bald head; all his motions were so impatient and abrupt, that it seemed to young Poussin that there must be a devil in his body, acting through his hands and forcing them to perform all sorts of fantastic antics against the man's will. The supernatural brilliancy of his eyes, the convulsive movements which seemed to be the effect of resistance to something, gave to that idea a semblance of truth well calculated to act upon a youthful imagination. He worked on, saying: "Paf! paf! paf! this is the way we do it, young man! Come, my little strokes, come and brighten up this frigid tone for me! Well, well! Pon! pon! pon!" he continued, giving a warming tone to the parts in which he had pointed out a lack of life, making differences of temperament disappear beneath a few daubs of color and producing the requisite unity of tone to depict a hot-blooded Egyptian. "You see, my boy, it's only the last stroke of the brush that counts. Porbus has made hundreds, I add but one. No one gives us any credit for what is underneath. Understand that!" At last the demon paused, and said, turning to Porbus and Poussin, who were struck dumb with admiration: "That is not equal to my Belle Noiseuse (Beautiful Annoyance) yet; however, a man could afford to put his name at the bottom of such a work. Yes, I would sign it," he added, rising to get a mirror in which he looked at it. "Now, let us go to breakfast," he said. "Come to my house, both of you. I have some smoked ham and some good wine! Yes! yes! bad as the times are, we will talk painting! We are strong men. Here is a little fellow," he added, laying his hand on Nicolas Poussin's shoulder, "who has facility of execution." Noticing the Norman's shabby cap, he drew a leather purse from his girdle, took two gold pieces from it, and said, as he handed them to him: "I will buy your sketch." "Take them," said Porbus to Poussin, seeing that he started and blushed with shame, for the young adept had a poor man's pride. "Take them, he has the ransom of two kings in his wallet!" All three left the studio, and walked along together, conversing upon art, until they reached a fine wooden house near Pont Saint Michel, the decorations of which, the carvings around the windows, the arabesques and the knocker, filled Poussin with admiration. The would-be painter suddenly found himself in a room on the ground-floor, in front of a rousing fire, beside a table laden with appetizing dishes, and, by incredible good-fortune, in the company of two great artists overflowing with good-humor. "Young man," said Porbus, noticing that he was gazing in rapt admiration at a picture, "do not look too closely at that canvas, or it will drive you to despair." It was the Adam which Mabuse painted to obtain his release from the prison in which his creditors kept him for so long a time. The face was so strikingly lifelike, that Nicolas Poussin began at that moment to understand the real meaning of the old man's confused words. The latter glanced at the picture with a gratified air, but without enthusiasm, as if to say: "I have done better!" "There is life there," he said, "my poor master surpassed himself; but still there is a lack of truth in the background of the picture. The man is thoroughly alive, he rises and seems to walk towards us. But the air, the sky, the wind, which we breathe and see and feel, are not there. Again, there is nothing there but a man! Now, the only man who ever came forth directly from the hands of God should have a something divine, which is lacking in that picture. Mabuse himself said so with vexation, when he was not drunk." Poussin looked from the old man to Porbus with restless curiosity. He walked toward the latter as if to ask him their host's name; but the painter put his finger to his lips with a mysterious air, and the young man, intensely interested, held his peace, hoping that some word would fall, sooner or later, which would enable him to discover the name of his host, whose wealth and talent were sufficiently attested by the respectful demeanor of Porbus, and by the treasures heaped up in that room. Poussin, spying a magnificent portrait of a woman on the dark oak wainscoting, cried out: "What a beautiful Giorgione!" "No," replied the old man, "that is one of my earliest daubs." "Tudieu! then I must be in the presence of the god of painting!" exclaimed Poussin, artlessly. The old man smiled like one long accustomed to such praise. "Master Frenhofer!" said Porbus, "could you not order a drop of your good Rhenish wine for me?" "Two pipes!" replied the old man. "One to pay for the pleasure I enjoyed this morning of seeing your lovely sinner, and the other as a friendly gift." "Ah! if I were not always ill," said Porbus, "and if you would let me see your Belle Noiseuse, I might paint a broad, high, deep picture with life-size figures." "Show my work!" exclaimed the old man, excitedly. "No, no! I have still to put some finishing touches to it. Yesterday, toward evening, I thought that it was done. The eyes seemed moist to me, the flesh rose and fell. The locks of hair moved. It breathed! Although I have found a way to represent upon a flat canvas the relief and rounded forms of Nature, this morning, by daylight, I realized my error. Ah! to attain that glorious result, I studied with the utmost care the great masters of coloring, I analyzed and dissected, layer by layer, the pictures of Titian, that king of light; like that monarch of painters, I sketched my figure in a light tone with soft, thick color - for shadow is only an incident, remember that boy! Then I returned to my work, and, by means of half-tones and varnish, making the latter less and less transparent, I made the shadow more and more pronounced, even to the deepest black; for the shadows of ordinary painters are of a different nature from their light tones; they are wood, brass, whatever you choose, except flesh in shadow. You feel that, if their figures should change their positions, the shaded places would not brighten and become light. I have avoided that fault, into which many of the illustrious painters have fallen, and in my work the light can be felt under the opacity of the deepest shade! I have not, like a multitude of ignorant fools who imagine that they draw correctly because they make a sharp, smooth stroke, marked the outlines of my figure with absolute exactness, and brought out in relief every trifling anatomical detail, for the human body is not bounded by lines. In that respect, sculptors can approach reality more nearly than we painters. Nature provides a succession of rounded outlines which run into one another. Strictly speaking, drawing does not exist! Do not laugh, young man! Strange as that statement may appear, you will someday realize its justice. The line is the method by which man expresses the effect of light upon objects; but there are no lines in Nature, where everything is rounded; it is in modeling that one draws, that is to say, one takes things away from their surroundings; the distribution of light alone gives a lifelike appearance to the body! Wherefore, I have not sharply defined the features, I have enveloped the outlines in a cloud of warm, half-light tones which make it impossible to place your finger on the precise spot where the outline ends and the background begins. Near at hand, the work looks downy and seems to lack precision; but at a distance of two yards it all becomes distinct and stands boldly forth; the body turns, the shape becomes prominent, you can feel the air circulating all about. But I am not content at yet, I have my doubts. It may be that we ought not to draw a single line, perhaps it would be better to attack a figure in the middle, giving one's attention first to the parts that stand out most prominently in the light, and to pass thence to the darker portions. Is not such the method of the Sun, the divine painter of the universe? O Nature, Nature! who has ever followed thee in thy flight? Observe that too much knowledge, like ignorance, leads to a negation. I doubt my own work!" The old man paused, then continued: "Young man, for ten years I have been at work; but what are ten short years when one is struggling with Nature? We know not how much time Seigneur Pygmalion consumed in making the only statue that ever walked!" The old man fell into a profound reverie, and sat with staring eyes, playing mechanically with his knife. "He is conversing with his spirit!" said Porbus in an undertone. At that word, Nicolas Poussin was conscious of the pressure of an inexplicable artist's curiosity. That white-eyed old fellow, alert, yet torpid, had become something more than a man to him, and assumed the proportions of a supernatural genius, living in an unknown sphere. He aroused a thousand confused ideas in his mind. The moral phenomenon of that species of fascination can no more be defined than you can translate the emotion aroused by a song that recalls his fatherland to the exile's heart. The contempt that the old man affected to feel for the most beautiful examples of art, his wealth, his manners, Porbus' deference to him, this work of his so long kept secret, a work of untiring patience, doubtless, and of genius, if one might judge from the head of the Virgin, which young Poussin had so frankly admired, and which, beautiful even beside Mabuse's Adam, attested the imperial workmanship of one of the princes of art - everything about the old man went beyond the bounds of human nature. The one point that was clearly perceptible to Nicolas Poussin, as he contemplated the supernatural being, was a complete image of the artist's nature, of that riotous nature to which so many powers are entrusted, and which too often misuses them, leading cold reason, and bourgeois intellects, and even some connoisseurs, through innumerable stony paths where, to their apprehension, there is nothing; whereas, the white-winged maiden, in her sportive fantasy, discovers epics there, and castles, and works of art. A mocking, yet kindly nature, fruitful, yet barren! Thus, to the enthusiastic Poussin, the old man had become, by a sudden transformation, the personification of art, art with its secrets, its impulses, its reveries. "Yes, my dear Porbus," continued Frenhofer, "thus far I have never fallen in with an absolutely perfect woman, a body whose contours are flawlessly beautiful, and whose coloring - but where is she to be found in life," he said, interrupting himself, "that undiscoverable Venus of the ancients, so often sought, some of whose charms we find now and then scattered among different persons? Oh! to see for a moment, for a single time, divine, complete, ideal Nature, I would give my whole fortune. Aye, to the abode of the departed I would go to seek thee, O celestial beauty! Like Orpheus, I would go down into the hell of art, to bring back life therefrom." "We may go now," Porbus said to Poussin; "he no longer hears us or sees us!" "Let us go to his studio," suggested the wondering youth. "Oh! the old fox allows no one to enter. His treasures are too well guarded for us to obtain a glance at them. I have not awaited your suggestion and your whim before making an assault upon the mystery." "There is a mystery, then?" "Yes," Porbus replied. "Old Frenhofer is the only pupil Mabuse ever taught. Having become his friend, his savior, his father, Frenhofer sacrificed the greater part of his treasures to gratify Mabuse's passions; in exchange, Mabuse bequeathed to him the secret of relief, the power of imparting to figures that extraordinary life, that flower of Nature, which is our never-ending despair, but of which he was such a perfect master that, one day, when he had sold and drunk the flowered damask he was to wear on the occasion of the reception of Charles V, he attended his master in a paper costume painted in imitation of damask. The peculiar splendor of the stuff worn by Mabuse surprised the Emperor, who, upon undertaking to compliment the old drunkard's patron, discovered the fraud. Frenhofer is a man passionately devoted to our art, who looks higher and further than other painters. He has meditated deeply on coloring, on the absolute accuracy of the line; but he has investigated so much that he has at last reached the point of doubting the very object of his investigations. In his moments of despair he insists that there is no such thing as drawing, and that only geometrical figures can be made with lines; that goes beyond the truth, for a figure can be made with lines and with black, which is not a color; which tends to prove that our art is, like Nature, composed of an infinitude of elements: drawing gives us a skeleton, color is life, but life without the skeleton is less complete than a skeleton without life. In fine, there is something truer than all of this; namely, that practice and observation are everything to a painter, and that, if rhetoric and poetry quarrel with the brush, we reach the doubting stage like the good man here, who is as much a madman as a painter. Sublime painter that he is, he was unfortunate enough to be born rich, which has made it possible for him to go astray; do not imitate him! Work! painters ought to meditate only with brush in hand." "We will find our way!" cried Poussin, no longer listening to Porbus, and fearing nothing. Porbus smiled at the young stranger's enthusiasm and left him, after inviting him to repeat his visit. Nicolas Poussin returned slowly toward Rue de la Harpe, and passed, without noticing it, the modest hostelry at which he was lodged. Ascending the wretched staircase with anxious speed, he reached at last a room on the upper floor beneath a roof with columnar supports, whose interstices were closed with plaster, a simple and airy style of architecture common in the houses of old Paris. Beside the single grimy window of the room sat a young girl, who sprang to her feet with a loving impulse as she heard the painter's hand upon the door, recognizing him by his touch upon the knob. "What is the matter?" she said. "Why - why - " he cried, choking with pleasure, "why, I have a feeling that I am a painter! I had always doubted myself hitherto, but this morning I believe in myself! I may be a great man! I tell you, Gillette, we shall be rich and happy! There is gold in these brushes - " But suddenly he held his peace. His grave, strong face lost its joyous light when he compared the vastness of his hopes with the paucity of his resources. The walls were covered with bits of paper on which were sketches in pencil. He did not own four clean canvases. Colors were expensive in those days, and the poor fellow saw that his palette was almost bare. Amid all that destitution, he possessed and was conscious of boundless wealth of heart and a superabundance of consuming genius. Brought to Paris by a nobleman who was a friend of his family, or perhaps by his own talent, he had suddenly fallen in with a mistress there, one of those noble and generous souls whose destiny it often is to suffer beside a great man, espousing his cares and struggling to understand his caprices; strong to endure poverty and love, as others are bold to carry the burden of luxury and to parade their lack of feeling. The smile playing about Gillette's lips illumined that garret and rivalled the sky in brilliancy. The Sun was not always shining, while she was always at hand, absorbed in her passion, clinging to her happiness and her suffering, comforting the genius that overflowed in love before seizing upon art. "Come, Gillette, and listen." The glad-hearted girl obediently jumped upon the painter's knee. She was all grace, all beauty, pretty as the springtime, arrayed in all womanly charms, and brightening them with the flame of a lovely soul. "Oh! God," he cried, "I shall never dare to tell her." "A secret?" she rejoined; "I insist upon knowing it." Poussin was lost in thought. "Speak, I beg you." "Gillette - poor, beloved heart!" "Oho! do you want something of me?" "Yes." "If you want me to pose for you, as I did the other day," she rejoined, with a little pout, "I will never consent, for at those times your eyes no longer say aught to me. You no longer think of me, and still you look at me." "Would you prefer to see me copying another woman?" "Perhaps," said she, "if she were very ugly." "But," continued Poussin, in a serious tone, "suppose that, in the interest of my future renown, to help to make me a great painter, it were necessary for you to pose for another person?" "You are trying to test me," she replied. "You know that I would not go." Poussin let his head fall forward on his breast, like a man who succumbs to a joy or a sorrow that is too intense for his strength. "Listen," said she, plucking at the sleeve of Poussin's threadbare doublet, "I have told you, Nick, that I would give my life for you; but I never promised you that I would renounce my love while I live." "Renounce it?" cried the young artist. "If I should exhibit myself so to another, you would no longer love me; and I myself should consider myself unworthy of you. Is it not a natural and simple thing to obey your wishes? Do what I may, I am happy, aye, and proud, to do your dear will. But for another, nay! nay!" "Forgive me, dear Gillette!" said the painter, throwing himself at her feet. "I prefer to be loved rather than to be glorious. To me, you are fairer than wealth or honors. Go, throw away my brushes, burn yonder sketches. I have gone astray. My true calling is to love you. I am no painter, I am a lover. A fig for art and all its secrets!" She was overjoyed and charmed, she admired him! She was queen, she felt instinctively that the arts were forgotten for her, and cast at her feet as a grain of incense. "And yet he is only an old man," continued Poussin. "He can see naught but the woman in you. You are so perfect!" "One must love with all one's heart," she cried, ready to sacrifice the scruples of her love to reward her lover for all the sacrifices he was making for her. "But," she added, "it would be my ruin. Ah! to ruin myself for you - that would be very sweet! but you would forget me. Oh! how unfortunate it is that you had such a thought!" "I did have it, and I love you," he said, with something like contrition; "but does that make me an infamous creature?" "Let us consult Père Hardouin," she said. "Oh! no; let it be a secret between us." "Very well, I will go; but do not be in the room," she said. "Remain at the door, armed with your dagger. If I cry out, rush in, and kill the painter." No longer conscious of aught but his art, Poussin folded Gillette in his arms. "He does not love me now!" she thought, when she was alone. She already repented of her resolution. But she soon fell a victim to a terror more painful than her repentance: she strove to banish a ghastly thought that crept into her mind. She fancied that she already loved the painter less, suspecting him of being less worthy of her esteem than she had believed.    All rights reserved. |