Artists' Wives 1

Artists' Wives 1

Artists' Wives: Alphonse Daudet PROLOGUE. _Stretched at full length, on the great divan of a studio, cigar in mouth, two friends--a poet and a painter--were talking together one evening after dinner_. _It was the hour of confidences and effusion. The lamp burned softly beneath its shade, limiting its circle of light to the intimacy of the conversation, leaving scarcely distinct the capricious luxury of the vast walls, cumbered with canvases, hangings, panoplies, surmounted by a glass roof through which the sombre blue shades of the night penetrated unhindered. The portrait of a woman, leaning slightly forward, as if to listen, alone stood out a little from the shadow; young with intelligent eyes, a grave and sweet mouth and a spirituel smile which seemed to defend the husband's easel from fools and disparagers. A low chair pushed away from the fire, two little blue shoes lying on the carpet, indicated also the presence of a child in the house; and indeed from the next room, within which mother and child had but just disappeared, came occasional bursts of soft laughter, of childish babble; the pretty flutterings of a nest going off to sleep. All this shed over the artistic interior a vague perfume of family happiness which the poet breathed in with delight:_ "_Decidedly, my dear fellow?" he said to his friend, "you were in the right. There are no two ways of being happy. Happiness lies in this and in nothing else. You must find me a wife!_" THE PAINTER. _Good Heavens, no! not on any account. Find one for yourself, if you are bent upon it. As for me, I will have nothing to do with it._ THE POET. _And why?_ THE PAINTER. _Because--because artists ought never to marry._ THE POET. _That's rather too good. You dare to say that, and the lamp does not go out suddenly, and the walls don't fall down upon your head! But just think, wretch, that for two hours past, you have been setting before me the enviable spectacle of the very happiness you forbid me. Are you by chance like those odious millionaires whose well-being is in-creased by the sufferings of others, and who better enjoy their own fireside when they reflect that it is raining out of doors, and that there are plenty of poor devils without a shelter?_ THE PAINTER. _Think of me what you will. I have too much affection for you to help you to commit a folly--an irreparable folly._ THE POET. _Come! what is it? You are not satisfied? And yet it seems to me that one breathes in happiness here, just as freely as one does the air of heaven at a country window._ THE PAINTER. _You are right, I am happy, completely happy, I love my wife with all my heart. When I think of my child, I laugh aloud to myself with pleasure. Marriage for me has been a harbour of calm and safe waters, not one in which you make fast to a ring on the shore, at the risk of rusting there for ever, but one of those blue creeks where sails and masts are repaired for fresh excursions into unknown countries, I never worked as well as I have since my marriage. All my best pictures date from then._ THE POET. _Well then!_ THE PAINTER. _My dear fellow, at the risk of seeming a coxcomb, I will say that I look upon my happiness as a kind of miracle, something abnormal and exceptional. Yes! the more I see what marriage is, the more I look back with terror at the risk I ran. I am like those who, ignorant of the dangers they have unwittingly gone through, turn pale when all is over, amazed at their own audacity._ THE POET. _But what then are these terrible dangers?_ THE PAINTER. _The first and greatest of all, is the loss or degradation of one's talent. This should count, I think, with an artist. For observe that at this moment, I am not speaking of the ordinary conditions of life. I grant you, that in general marriage is an excellent thing, and that the majority of men only begin to be of some account when the family circle completes them or makes them greater. Often, indeed, it is necessary to a profession. A bachelor lawyer cannot even be imagined. He would not have the needful air of weight and gravity. But for all of us, painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, who live outside of life, wholly occupied in studying it, in reproducing it, holding ourselves always a little remote from it, as one steps back from a picture the better to see it, I say that marriage can only be the exception. To that nervous, exacting, impressionable being, that child-man that we call an artist, a special type of woman, almost impossible to find, is needful, and the safest thing to do is not to look for her. Ah! how well our great Delacroix, whom you admire so much, understood that! What a fine existence was his, bounded by his studio wall, devoted exclusively to Art! I was looking the other day at his cottage at Champrosay and the prim little garden full of roses, where he sauntered alone for twenty years! It has the calm and the narrowness of celibacy. Well now! think for a moment of Delacroix married, father of a family, with all the preoccupations of children to bring up, of money matters, of illnesses; do you believe his work would have been the same?_ THE POET. _You cite Delacroix, I reply Victor Hugo. Do you think that marriage hampered him for instance, while writing so many admirable books?_ THE PAINTER. _I think as a matter of fact, that marriage did not hamper him in anything. But all husbands have not the genius that obtains pardon, nor a halo of glory with which to dry the tears they cause to flow. It cannot be very amusing to be the wife of a genius. There are plenty of labourers' wives who are happier._ THE POET. _A curious thing, all the same, this special pleading against marriage, by a married man, who is happy in being so._ THE PAINTER. _I repeat that I don't give myself as an example. My opinion is formed by all the sad things I have seen elsewhere; all the misunderstandings so frequent in the households of artists, and caused solely by their abnormal life. Look at that sculptor who, in full maturity of age and talent, has just exiled himself, leaving wife and children behind him. Public opinion condemns him, and certainly I offer no excuse for him. And, nevertheless, I can well understand how he arrived at such a point! Here was a fellow who adored his art, and had a horror of the world, and society. The wife, though amiable and intelligent, instead of shielding him from the social obligations he loathed, condemned him for some ten years to all the exactions they involved. Thus she induced him to undertake a lot of official busts, horrible respectabilities in velvet skull caps, frights of women utterly devoid of grace; she disturbed him ten times a day with importunate visitors, and then every evening laid out for him a dress suit and light gloves, and dragged him from drawing-room to drawing-room. You will tell me he could have rebelled, could have replied point-blank: "No!" But don't you know that the very fact of our sedentary existences leaves us more than other men dependent on domestic influence? The atmosphere of the home envelopes us, and if some touch of the ideal does not lighten it, soon wearies and drags us down. Moreover, the artist as a rule puts what force and energy he has into his work, and after his solitary and patient struggles, finds himself left with no will to oppose to the petty importunities of life. With him, feminine tyrannies have free play. No one is more easily conquered and subdued. Only, beware! He must not be made to feel the yoke too heavily. If one day the invisible bonds with which he is surreptitiously fettered are drawn too tight and arrest the artistic effort, he will all at once tear them asunder, and, mistrusting his own weakness, will fly like our sculptor, over the hills and far away._ _The wife of this sculptor was astounded at his flight. The unhappy creature is still wondering: "What can I have done to him?" Nothing. She simply did not understand him. For it is not enough to be good and intelligent to be the true helpmate of an artist, A woman must also possess infinite tact, smiling abnegation; and all this is found only by a miracle in a young creature, curious though ignorant as regards life. She is pretty, she has married a well-known man, received everywhere; why should she not wish to show herself a little on his arm? Is it not quite natural? The husband, on the contrary, growing intolerant of society as his talent progresses, finding time short, and art engrossing, refuses to be exhibited. Behold them both miserable, and whether the man gives in or resists, his life is henceforward turned from its course, and from its tranquillity. Ah! how many of these ill-matched couples have I known, where the wife was sometimes executioner, sometimes victim, but more often executioner, and nearly always unwittingly so! The other evening I was at Dargenty's, the musician. There were but a few guests, and he was asked to play. Hardly had he begun one off those pretty mazurkas with a Polish rhythm, which make him the successor of Chopin, when his wife began to talk, quite low at first, then a little louder. By degrees the fire of conversation spread. At the end of a minute I was the only listener. Then he shut the piano, and said to me with a heart-rent smile: "It is always like this here--my wife does not care for music." Can you imagine anything more terrible than to marry a woman who does not care for your art? Take my word for it, my friend, and don't marry. You are alone, you are free; keep as precious things, your liberty and your loneliness._ THE POET. _That is all very well! You talk at your ease of solitude. Presently, when I am gone, if some idea occurs to you, you will gently follow it by the side of your dying embers, without feeling around you that atmosphere of isolation, so vast, so empty, that in it inspiration evaporates and disperses. And one may yet fear to be alone in the hours of work; but there are moments of discouragement and weariness, when one doubts oneself ones art even. That is the moment when it must be happiness to find a faithful and loving heart, ever ready to sympathize with one's depression, to which one may appeal without fearing to disconcert a confidence and enthusiasm that are, in fact, unalterable. And then the child. That sweet unconscious baby smile, is not that the best moral rejuvenescence one can have? Ah! I have often thought over that. For us artists, vain as all must be who live by success, by that superficial esteem, capricious and fleeting, that we call the vogue; for us, above all others, children are indispensable. They alone can console us for growing old. All that we lose, the child gains. The success we have missed, we think: "He will have it" and in proportion as our hair grows thin, we have the joy of seeing it grow again, curly, golden, full of life, on a little fair head at our side._ THE PAINTER. _Ah, poet! poet! have you thought also of all the mouthfuls by which with the end of pen or brush we must nourish a brood?_ THE POET. _Well! say what you like, the artist is made for family life, and that is so true, that those among us who do not marry, take refuge in temporary companionships, like travellers who, tired of being always home-less, end by settling in a room in some hotel, and pass their lives under the hackneyed notice of the signboard: "Apartments by the month or night?"_ THE PAINTER. _Such are all in the wrong. They accept the worries of wedlock and will never know its joys._ THE POET. _"You acknowledge then that there are some joys?"_ _Here the painter, instead of replying, rose, searched out from among drawings and sketches a much-thumbed manuscript, and returning to his companion:_ _"We might argue like this," said he, "for ever so long without either convincing the other. But since, notwithstanding my observations, you seem determined to try marriage, here is a little work I beg you to read. It is written--I would have you note--by a married man, much in love with his wife, very happy in his home, an observer who, spending his life among artists, amused himself by sketching one or two such households as I spoke of just now. From the first to the last line of this book, all is true, so true that the author would never publish it. Read it, and come to me when you have read it. I think you will have changed your mind."_ _The poet took the manuscript and carried it home with him; but he did not keep the little book with all the needful care, for I have been able to detach a few leaves from it and boldly offer them to the public._ [Illustration: p023-034] MADAME HEURTEBISE. She was certainly not intended for an artist's wife, above all for such an artist as this outrageous fellow, impassioned, uproarious and exuberant, who, with his nose in the air and bristling moustaches, rushed through life defiantly flaunting the eccentric and whirlwind-like name of Heurtebise,* like a challenge thrown down to all the absurd conventionalities and prejudices of the _bourgeois_ class. How, and by what strange charm had the little woman, brought up in a jeweller's shop, behind rows of watch chains and strings of rings, found the means of captivating this poet? * Hit the blast (literally). Picture to yourself the affected graces of a shopwoman with insignificant features, cold and ever-smiling eyes, complacent and placid physiognomy, devoid of real elegance, but having a certain love for glitter and tinsel, no doubt caught at her father's shopwindow, making her take pleasure in many-coloured satin bows, sashes and buckles; and her hair glossy with cosmetic, stiffly arranged by the hairdresser over a small, obstinate, narrow forehead, where the total absence of wrinkles told less of youth than of complete lack of thought. Such as she was, however, Heurtebise loved and wooed her, and as he happened to possess a small income, found no difficulty in winning her. What pleased her in this marriage was the idea of wedding an author, a well-known man, who would take her to the theatre as often as she wished. As for him, I verily believe that her sham elegance born of the shop, her pretentious manners, pursed up mouth, and affectedly uplifted little finger, fascinated him and appeared to him the height, of Parisian refinement; for he was born a peasant and in spite of his intelligence remained one to the end of his days. [Illustration: p025-036] Tempted by a quiet happiness and the family life of which he had been so long deprived, Heurtebise spent two years far from his friends, buried in the country, or in out-of-way suburban nooks, within easy distance of that great city Paris, which overexcited him even while he yet sought its attenuated atmosphere, just like those invalids who are recommended sea air, but who, too delicate to bear it in all its strength, are compelled to inhale it from a distance of some miles. From time to time, his name appeared in a newspaper or magazine at the end of an article; but already the freshness of style, the bursts of eloquence, were lacking by which he had been formerly known. We thought: "He is too happy! his happiness has spoilt him." However, one day he returned amongst us, and we immediately saw that he was not happy. His pallid countenance, drawn features contracted by a perpetual irritability, the violent manners degenerated into a nervous rage, the hollow sound of his once fine ringing laugh, all showed that he was an altered man. Too proud to admit that he had made a mistake, he would, not complain, but the old friends who gathered round him were soon convinced that he had made a most foolish marriage, and that henceforth his life must prove a failure. On the other hand, Madame Heurtebise appeared to us, after two years of married life, exactly the same as we had beheld her in the vestry on her wedding day. She wore the same calm and simpering smile, she had as much as ever the air of a shopwoman in her Sunday clothes, only she had gained self-possession. She talked now. In the midst of artistic discussions into which Heurtebise passionately threw himself, with arbitrary assertions, brutal contempt, or blind enthusiasm, the false and honeyed voice of his wife would suddenly make irruption, forcing him to listen to some idle reasoning or foolish observation invariably outside of the subject of discussion. Embarrassed and worried, he would cast us an imploring glance, and strive to resume the interrupted conversation. Then at last, wearied out by her familiar and constant contradiction, by the silliness of her birdlike brain, inflated and empty as any cracknel, he held his tongue, and silently resigned himself to let her go on to the bitter end. But this determined silence exasperated Madame, seemed to her more insulting, more disdainful than anything. Her sharp voice became discordant, and growing higher and shriller, stung and buzzed, like the ceaseless teasing of a fly, till at last her enraged husband in his turn, burst out brutal and terrific. She emerged from these incessant quarrels, which always ended in tears, rested and refreshed, as a lawn after a watering, but he remained broken, fevered, incapable of work, Little by little his very violence was worn out One evening when I was present at one of these odious scenes, as Madame Heurtebise triumphantly left the table, I saw on her husband's face bent downwards during the quarrel and now upraised, an expression of scorn and anger that no words could any longer express. The little woman went off shutting the door with a sharp snap, and he, flushed, with his eyes full of tears, and his mouth distorted by an ironical and despairing smile, made like any school-boy behind his master's back, an atrocious gesture of mingled rage and pain. After a few moments, I heard him murmur, in a voice strangled by emotion: "Ah, if it were not for the child, how I would be off at once!" For they had a child, a poor little fellow, handsome and dirty, who crawled all over the place, played with dogs bigger than himself, with the spiders in the garden, and made mud-pies. His mother only noticed him to declare him "disgusting" and that she had not put him out to nurse. [Illustration: p029-040] She clung in fact to all the little shopkeeper traditions of her youth, and the untidy home in which she went about from early morn in elaborate costumes and astonishingly dressed hair, recalled the back-shops so dear to her heart, rooms black with filth and want of air, where in the short intervals of rest from commercial life, badly cooked meals were hurriedly eaten, at a bare wooden table, listening all the while for the tinkle of the shop-bell. With this class, nothing has importance but the street, the street with its passing purchasers and idlers, and its overflowing holiday crowd, that on Sundays throng the side walks and pavements. And how bored she was, wretched creature, in the country, how she regretted the Paris life! Heurtebise, on the contrary, required the country for his mental health. Paris still bewildered him like some countrified boor on his first visit. His wife could not understand it, and bitterly complained of her exile. By way of diversion she invited her old acquaintances, and when her husband was absent they amused themselves by turning over his papers, his memoranda, and the work he was engaged upon. "Do look, my dear, how funny it is. He shuts himself up to write this. He paces up and down, talking to himself. As for me, I understand nothing of what he does." And then came endless regrets, and recollections of her past life. "Ah! if I had known. When I think that I might have married Aubertot and Fajon, the linen-drapers." She always spoke of the two partners at the same time, as though she would have married the firm. Neither did she restrain her feelings in her husband's presence. [Illustration: p031-042] She disturbed him, prevented all work, settling down with her friends in the very room he was writing in, and filling it with the silly chatter of idle women, who talked loud, full of disdain for a literary profession which brought in so little, and whose most laborious hours always resemble a capricious idleness. From time to time Heurtebise strove to escape from the life which he felt was daily becoming more dismal. He rushed off to Paris, hired a small room at an hotel, tried to fancy he was a bachelor; but suddenly he thought of his son, and with a desperate longing to embrace him hurried back the same evening into the country. [Illustration: p032-043] On these occasions, in order to avoid the inevitable scene on his return, he took a friend back with him and kept him there as long as he could. As soon as he was no longer alone face to face with his wife, his fine intellect awoke and his interrupted schemes of work little by little and one after the other came back to him. But what anguish it was when his friends left! He would have kept his guests for ever, clinging to them by all the strength of his _ennui_. With what sadness would he accompany us to the stand of the little suburban omnibus which bore us back to Paris! and when we left, how slowly he turned homewards over the dusty road, with rounded shoulders and listless arms, listening to the vanishing wheels. In truth their _tete-a-tete_ life had become unbearable, and to avoid it, he tried always to keep his house full. With his easy goodnature, his weariness and indifference, he was soon surrounded by a lot of literary starvelings. A set of scribblers, lazy, cracked day-dreamers, settled down upon him and became more at home than himself; and as his wife was but a fool, incapable of judging, because they talked more loudly, she found them charming and very superior to her husband. The days were spent in idle discussions. There was a clash of empty words, a firing of smallest shot, and poor Heurtebise, motionless and silent in the midst of the tumult, merely smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Sometimes, however, towards the end of an interminable repast, when all his guests, elbows on table, began around the brandy flasks one of those lengthy maundering conversations, benumbing like clouds of tobacco smoke, an immense feeling of disgust would seize hold of him, and not having the courage to turn out all these poor wretches, he would himself disappear and remain absent for a week. [Illustration: p034-045] "My house is full of imbeciles," he said one day to me. "I dare not return." With this kind of existence, he no longer wrote. His name was never seen, and his fortune, squandered in a perpetual craving to have people in his house, disappeared in the outstretched hands around him. [Illustration: p035-046] It was a long time since we had met when I received one morning a line of his dear little handwriting, formerly so firm, now trembling and uncertain. "We are in Paris. Come and see me. I am so dull." I found him with his wife, his child and his dogs, in a lugubrious little apartment in the Batignolles. The disorder which in this narrow space could not be spread about, seemed more hideous even than in the country. While the child and dogs rolled about in rooms the size of a chessboard compartment, Heurtebise; who was ill, lay with his face to the wall, in a state of utter prostration. His wife, dressed out as usual, and ever placid, hardly looked at him. "I don't know what is the matter with him," she said to me with a gesture of indifference. On seeing me he had for a moment a return of gaiety, and a minute of his old hearty laugh, but it was soon stifled. As they had kept up in Paris all their suburban habits, there appeared at the breakfast hour, in the midst of this household disorganized by poverty and illness, a parasite, a seedy looking little bald man, cranky and peevish, of whom they always spoke as "the man who has read Proudhon." It was thus that Heurtebise, who probably had never known his name, introduced him to everybody. When he was asked "Who is that?" he unhesitatingly replied, "Oh! a very clever fellow, who has thoroughly studied Proudhon." His knowledge was certainly not very apparent, for this deep thinker rarely made himself heard except to complain at table of an ill-cooked roast or a spoilt sauce. On this occasion, the man who had read Proudhon declared that the breakfast was detestable, which however did not prevent his devouring the larger half of it himself. How long and lugubrious this meal by the bedside of my sick friend appeared to me! The wife gossiped as usual, with a tap now and then to the child, a bone to the dogs, and a smile to the philosopher. Not once did Heurtebise turn towards us, and yet he was not asleep. I hardly know whether he thought. Dear, valiant fellow! In those paltry and ceaseless struggles, the mainspring of his strong nature had broken, and he was already beginning to die. The silent death agony, which however was rather an abandonment of life, lasted several months; and then Madame Heurtebise found herself a widow. Then, as no tears had dimmed her clear eyes, as she always bestowed the same care on her glossy locks, and as Aubertot and Fajon were still available, she married Aubertot and Fajon. Perhaps it was Aubertot, perhaps it was Fajon, perhaps even both of them. In any case, she was able to resume the life she was fitted for, and the voluble gossip and eternal smile of the shopwoman. [Illustration: p038-049] [Illustration: p041-052] THE CREDO OF LOVE. To be the wife of a poet! that had been the dream of her life! but ruthless fate, instead of the romantic and fevered existence she sighed for, had doomed her to a peaceful, humdrum happiness, and married her to a rich man at Auteuil, gentle and amiable, perhaps indeed a trifle old for her, possessed of but one passion,--perfectly inoffensive and unexciting--that of horticulture. This excellent man spent his days pruning, scissors in hand, tending and trimming a magnificent collection of rose trees, heating a greenhouse, watering flower beds; and really it must be admitted that, for a poor little heart hungering after an ideal, this was hardly sufficient food. Nevertheless for ten years her life remained straightforward and uniform, like the smooth sanded paths in her husband's garden, and she pursued it with measured steps, listening with resigned weariness to the dry and irritating sound of the ever-moving scissors, or to the monotonous and endless showers that fell from the watering pots on to the leafy shrubs. The rabid horticulturist bestowed on his wife the same scrupulous attention he gave to his flowers. He carefully regulated the temperature of the drawing-room, overcrowded with nosegays, fearing for her the April frosts or March sun; and like the plants in pots that are put out and taken in at stated times, he made her live methodically, ever watchful of a change of barometer or phase of the moon. She remained like this for a long time, closed in by the four walls of the conjugal garden, innocent as a clematis, full however of wild aspirations towards other gardens, less staid, less humdrum, where the rose trees would fling out their branches untrained, and the wild growth of weed and briar be taller than the trees, and blossom with unknown and fantastic flowers, luxuriantly coloured by a warmer sun. Such gardens are rarely found save in the books of poets, and so she read many verses, all unknown to the nurseryman, who knew no other poetry than a few almanac distichs such as:      Quand il pleut a la Saint-Medard,      Il pleut quarante jours plus tard.*      * When it rains on Saint Medard's day,      It rains on for forty more days. At haphazard, the unfortunate creature ravenously devoured the paltriest rhymes, satisfied if she found in them lines ending in "love" and "passion"; then closing the book, she would spend hours dreaming and sighing: "That would have been the husband for me!" It is probable that all this would have remained in a state of vague aspiration, if at the terrible age of thirty, which seems to be the decisive critical moment for woman's virtue, as twelve o'clock is for the day's beauty, the irresistible Amaury had not chanced to cross her path. Amaury was a drawing-room poet, one of those fanatics in dress coat and grey kid gloves, who between ten o'clock and midnight, go and recite to the world their ecstasies of love, their raptures, their despair, leaning mournfully against the mantel-piece, in the blaze of the lights, while seated around him women, in full evening dress, listen entranced behind their fans. This one might pose as the very ideal of his kind; with his vulgar but irresistible countenance, sunken eye, pallid complexion, hair cut short and moustaches stiffly plastered with cosmetic. A desperate man such as women love, hopeless of life but irreproachably dressed, a lyric enthusiast, chilled and disheartened, in whom the madness of inspiration can be divined only in the loose and neglected tie of his cravat. But also what success awaits him, when he delivers in a strident voice a tirade from his poem, the _Credo of Love_, more especially the one ending in this extraordinary line:      Moi, je crois a l'amour comme je crois en Dieu! *      * I believe in love as I believe in God. [Illustration: p045-56] Mark you, I strongly suspect the rascal cares as little for God, as for the rest; but women do not look so closely. They are easily caught by a birdlime of words, and every time Amaury recites his _Credo of Love_, you are certain to see all round the drawing-room rows upon rows of little rosy mouths, eagerly opening, ready to swallow the taking bait of mawkish sentimentality. Just fancy! A poet who has such beautiful moustaches and who believes in love as he believes in God. For the nurseryman's wife this proved indeed irresistible. In three sittings she was conquered. Only, as at the bottom of this elegiac nature there was some honesty and pride, she would not stoop to any paltry fault. Moreover the poet himself declared in his _Credo_, that he only understood one way of erring: that which was openly declared and ready to defy both law and society. Taking therefore the _Credo of Love_ for her guide, the young woman one fine day escaped from the garden at Auteuil and went off to throw herself into her poet's arms.--"I can no longer live with that man! Take me away!" In such cases the husband is always _that man_, even when he is a horticulturist. For a moment Amaury was staggered. How on earth could he have imagined that an ordinary little housewife of thirty would have taken in earnest a love poem, and followed it out literally? However he put the best face he could on his over-good fortune, and as the lady had, thanks to her little Auteuil garden, remained fresh and pretty, he carried her off without a murmur. The first days, all was delightful. They feared lest the husband should track them. They thought it advisable to hide under fictitious names, change hotels, inhabit the most remote quarters of the town, the suburbs of Paris, the outlying districts. [Illustration: p047-058] In the evening they stealthily sallied forth and took sentimental walks along the fortifications. Oh the wonderful power of romance! The more she was alarmed, the more precautions, window blinds and lowered veils, were necessary, the greater did her poet seem. At night, they opened the little window of their room and gazing at the stars rising on high above the signal lights of the neighbouring railway, she made him repeat again and again his wonderful verses:      Moi, je crois a l'amour comme je crois en Dieu. And it was delightful! [Illustration: p048-059] Unfortunately it did not last. The husband left them too much undisturbed. The fact is, _that man_ was a philosopher. His wife gone, he had closed the green door of his oasis and quietly set about trimming his roses again, happy in the thought that these at least, attached to the soil by long roots, would not be able to run away from him. Our reassured lovers returned to Paris and then suddenly the young woman felt that some change had come over her poet. Their flight, fear of detection, and constant alarms,--all these things which had fed her passion existing no longer, she began to understand and see the situation clearly. [Illustration: p049-060] Moreover, at every moment, in the settling of their little household, in the thousand paltry details of every day life, the man she was living with showed himself more thoroughly. The few and scarce generous, heroic or delicate feelings he possessed were spun out in his verses, and he kept none for his personal use. He was mean, selfish, above all very niggardly, a fault love seldom forgives. Then he had cut off his moustaches, and was disfigured by the loss. How different from that fine gloomy fellow with his carefully curled locks, as he appeared one evening declaiming his _Credo_, in the blaze of two chandeliers! Now, in the enforced retreat he was undergoing on her account, he gave way to all his crotchets, the greatest of which was fancying himself always ill. Indeed, from constantly playing at consumption, one ends by believing in it. The poet Amaury was fond of decoctions, wrapped himself up in plaisters, and covered his chimney piece with phials and powders. For some time the little woman took up quite seriously her part of a nursing sister. Her devotion seemed to excuse her fault and give an object to her life. But she soon tired of it. In spite of herself, in the stuffy room where the poet sat wrapped in flannel, she could not help thinking of her little garden so sweetly scented, and the kind nurseryman seen from afar in the midst of his shrubs and flowerbeds, appeared to her as simple, touching and disinterested, as this other one was exacting and egotistical. At the end of a month, she loved her husband, really loved him, not with the affection induced by habit, but with a real and true love. One day she wrote him a long letter full of passion and repentance. He did not vouchsafe a reply. Perhaps he thought she was not yet sufficiently punished. Then she despatched letter after letter, humbled herself, begged him to allow her to return, saying she would die rather than continue to live with that man. It was now the lover's turn to be called "that man." Strange to say, she hid herself from him to write; for she believed him still in love, and while imploring her husband's forgiveness, she feared the exaltation of her lover. "He will never allow me to leave," she said to herself. Accordingly, when by dint of supplications she obtained forgiveness and the nurseryman--I have already mentioned that he was a philosopher,--consented to take her back, the return to her own home bore all the mysterious and dramatic aspect of flight. She literally eloped with her husband. It was her last culpable pleasure. One evening as the poet, tired of their dual existence, and proud of his regrown moustaches, had gone to an evening party to recite his _Credo of Love_, she jumped into a cab that was awaiting her at the end of the street and returned with her old husband to the little garden at Auteuil, for ever cured of her ambition to be the wife of a poet. It is true that this fellow was not much of a poet! [Illustration: p055-066] THE TRANSTEVERINA. The play was just over, and while the crowd, with its many varied impressions, hurried away and poured out under the glare of the principal portico of the theatre, a few friends, of whom I was one, awaited the poet at the artists' entrance in order to congratulate him. His production had not, indeed, been very successful. Too powerful to suit the timid and trivial imagination of the public of our day, it was quite beyond the range of the stage, limited as that is by conventionalities and tolerated traditions. Pedantic criticism declared: "It is not fit for the stage!" and the scoffers of the boulevards revenged themselves for the emotion these magnificent verses had given them by repeating: "It won't pay!" As for us, we were proud of the friend who had dared to roll forth in a ringing peal, his splendid golden rhymes, flashing the best product of his genius beneath the artificial and murderous light of the lustres, and presenting his personages in life-like size, heedless of the optical illusion of the modern stage, of the dimness of opera-glass and defective vision. Amid a motley crowd of scene shifters, firemen, and _figurants_ muffled up in comforters, the poet approached us, his tall figure bent double, his coat collar chillily turned up over his thin beard and long grizzled hair. He seemed depressed. The scant applause of the hired claque and literary friends confined to a corner of the house foretold a limited number of representations, choice and rare spectators, and posters rapidly replaced without giving his name a chance of being known. When one has worked twenty of talent and life, this obstinate refusal of the public to comprehend is wearying and disheartening, and one ends by thinking: "Perhaps after all they are right." Fear paralyses and words fail. Our acclamations and enthusiastic greetings somewhat cheered him. "Really do you think so? Is it well done? 'Tis true I have given all I knew." And his feverish hands anxiously clutched ours, his eyes full of tears sought a sincere and reassuring glance. It was the imploring anguish of the sick person, asking the doctor: "It is not true, I'm not going to die?" No! poet, you will not die. The operettas and fairy pieces that have had hundreds of representations and thousands of spectators will be long since forgotten, scattered to the winds with their last playbills, while your work will ever remain fresh and living. As we stood on the now deserted pavement, exhorting and cheering him, a loud contralto voice vulgarised by an Italian accent burst upon us. "Hullo, artist! enough _pouegie_. Let's go and eat the _estoufato!_" [Illustration: p058-069] At the same moment a stout woman wrapped up in a hooded cape and a red tartan shawl linked her arm in that of our friend, in a manner so brutal and despotic that his countenance and attitude became at once embarrassed. "My wife," he said, then turning towards her with a hesitating smile: "Suppose we take them home and show them how you make an _estoufato?_" Flattered in the conceit of her culinary accomplishments, the Italian graciously consented to receive us, and five or six of us started off for the heights of Montmartre where they dwelt, to share their stewed beef. I confess I took a certain interest in the artist's home life. Since his marriage our friend had led a very secluded existence, almost always in the country; but what I knew of his life whetted my curiosity. Fifteen years before, when in all the freshness of a romantic imagination, he had met in the suburbs of Rome a magnificent creature with whom he immediately fell desperately in love. Maria Assunta, her father, and a brood of brothers and sisters inhabited one of those little houses of the Transtevera with walls uprising from the waters of the Tiber, and an old fishing boat rocking level with the door. One day he caught sight of the handsome Italian girl, with bare feet in the sand, red skirt tightly pleated around her, and unbleached linen sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, catching eels out of a large gleaming wet net. The silvery scales glistening through the meshes full of water, the golden river and scarlet petticoat, the beautiful black eyes deep and pensive, which seemed darkened in their musing by the surrounding sunlight struck the artist, perhaps even rather trivially, like some coloured print on the titlepage of a song in a music-seller's window. [Illustration: p060-071] It so chanced that the girl was heart-whole, having till now bestowed her affections on a big tom-cat, yellow and sly, also a great fisher of eels, who bristled up all over when anyone approached his mistress. [Illustration: p061-072] Beasts and men, our lover managed to tame all these folk, was married at Santa-Maria of the Transtevera and brought back to France the beautiful Assunta and her _cato_. Ah! poor fellow, he ought also to have brought away at the same time some of the sunlight of that country, a scrap of the blue sky, the eccentric costume and the bulrushes of the Tiber, and the large swing nets of the _Ponte Rotto_; in fact the frame with the picture. Then he would have been spared the cruel disenchantment he experienced when, having settled in a modest flat on the fourth storey, on the heights of Montmartre, he saw his handsome Transteverina decked out in a crinoline, a flounced dress, and a Parisian bonnet, which, constantly out of balance on the top of her heavy braids, assumed the most independent attitudes. Under the clear cold light of Parisian skies, the unfortunate man soon perceived that his wife was a fool, an irretrievable fool. Not a single idea even lurked in the velvety depths of those beautiful black eyes, lost in infinite contemplation. They glittered like an animal's in the calm of digestion, or in a chance gleam of light, nothing more. Withal the lady was common, vulgar, accustomed to govern by a slap all the little world of her native hut, and the least opposition threw her into uncontrollable rages.