III.
Bastien did not allow himself to be spoiled by success, but continued his life of assiduous labour and conscientious research. He divided his time between Paris and Damvillers, giving the larger part to his village.
We have a long list of his works done in 1878 and 1879. Portraits of M. and Mme. Victor Klotz and of their children, of MM. de Gosselin, of M. A. Lenoir, of M. de Tinan, of the publisher George Charpentier, of Emile Bastien, of Sarah Bernhardt, and lastly that Saison d’Octobre, or, Recolte des Pommes de terre (October, or The Potato Harvest) which is the companion picture to Les Foins (Hay). This was in a graver key, with warm yet sober colours, and an exquisite savour of the country in the late summer; it was powerfully executed and full of health and serenity.
The portrait of Sarah Bernhardt and The Potato Harvest, less discussed than The Hay, made a deep impression on the mass of the public.
Dating from this time, Bastien’s success, both artistic and monetary, was secure.
His first care was to let his friends at Damvillers join in his good fortune.
They had been with him in his difficulties, they should now share his pleasure, and he brought them to Paris in the summer of 1879. He was happy to return to them, in all sorts of kind attentions, a little of what he owed them for so much affectionate devotion. He was grateful to them for having believed in him in his time of difficulty as a beginner, and he experienced a tender pride in being able to show them that they had not been mistaken.
When he received his first important gains he took his mother to a large shop and had silks for dresses spread out before her. “Show some more,” cried he. “I want Mama to choose the best.” And the poor little mother, frightened at the sight of black satin that could stand upright of itself, in vain protested that “she would never wear that.” She was obliged to give way.
He took his grandfather through the avenues of the Bois and the principal boulevards, expecting that he would be delighted; but in this direction his zealous efforts failed utterly. The old man remained indifferent to the splendours of Parisian luxury and to the scenery in the theatres. At the opera he yawned openly, declaring that all this commotion was deafening, and he went back to Damvillers determined that they should never take him away again.
After having seen his people into the train for their return, he set out for England, where he painted the Prince of Wales.
Decorated in the following July, he hastened to Damvillers to show his red ribbon to his friends, and also to go on with the work he loved best.
He had managed to arrange a studio in the spacious and lofty granaries of the paternal house, and there he worked hard.
He hoped at last to realize his dream, so long deferred, of painting a Jeanne d’Arc. He had meditated much on this subject, and we have often spoken of it.
His idea was to paint Jeanne in the little orchard at Domrémy at the moment when she hears, for the first time, the mysterious voices sounding in her ears the call to deliver her country.
To give more precision to the scene, Bastien wished to show, through the branches of the trees, the “blessed saints,” whose voices encouraged the heroic shepherdess.
In this I differed from him. I maintained that he ought to suppress these fantastic apparitions, and that the expression of Jeanne’s face alone should explain to the spectator the emotion caused by the hallucination to which she was a prey. I reminded him of the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth: the doctor and the chamber-woman, I said, do not see the terrible things that dilate the pupils of Lady Macbeth, but from her face and gestures they know that there is something terrible; the effect is only the greater, because, after having perceived this, the imagination of the spectator increases it. Suppress your phantoms and your picture will gain in sincerity and dramatic intensity.
But Jules held to the personification of the voices, and our discussions ended without either the one or the other being convinced. Nevertheless, my objection had impressed him, and he wanted to show his work to his friends before it was quite finished.
“Come,” he wrote to me, about the 15th of September, “F. is quite disposed to come; he really wants to come to Damvillers. Everything will go beautifully. You will see my picture of Jeanne d’Arc well advanced, and somebody coming from Paris will do me no harm….”
“If you knew how I work (letter to Ch. Baude) you would be less surprised. My picture is getting on, and getting on well; all, except the voices, is sketched, and some parts are begun. I think I have found a head for my Jeanne d’Arc, and everybody thinks she expresses well the resolution to set out, while keeping the charming simplicity of the peasant. Also, I think the attitude is very chaste and very sweet, as it ought to be in the figure that I want to represent; … but if I am to see you soon, I prefer to leave you the pleasure of surprise and of the first impression of the picture; you will judge of it better, and you will be able to say better what you think of it….”
Jeanne d’Arc appeared in the Salon of 1880, with the portrait of M. Andrieux. It did not produce all the effect that Jules expected. The picture had its enthusiastic admirers, but also passionate detractors. The critics attacked first the want of air and of perspective; then, as I had foreseen, the voices, represented by three symbolical personages, too slightly indicated to be understood, and yet too precise for apparitions. But the public did not do justice to the admirable figure of Jeanne, standing, motionless, quivering, her eyes dilated by the vision, her left hand extended, and mechanically fingering the leaves of a shrub growing near.
Never had Bastien-Lepage created a figure more poetically true than this Lorraine shepherdess, so pure, so human, so profoundly absorbed in her heroic ecstasy.
The rapid and brilliant success of the young master had ruffled the amour propre of many; they made him pay for these precocious smiles of glory by undervaluing his new work. He had hoped that the medal of honour would be given to his Jeanne d’Arc; this distinction was given to an artist of talent, but whose work had neither the originality, nor the qualities of execution, nor the importance of Bastien’s picture. He felt this injustice strongly and went to London; there the reception and appreciation of English artists and amateurs consoled him a little for this new mortification.
The two years that followed were fruitful in vigorous work of different kinds: Les Blés Mûrs (Ripe Corn), the London Docks, The Thames, Le Paysan allant voir son champ le dimanche (The Peasant Going to Look at his Field on Sunday), La Petite Fille allant à l’école (The little Girl Going to School); the portraits of M. and of Mme. Goudchaux, of Mdlle. Damain, of Albert Wolff, and of Mme. W., La Marchande de Fleurs (The Flower Girl); last of all, the two great pictures Le Mendiant (The Beggar), and Père Jacques, exhibited in the Salon in 1881 and 1882.
His stay in London and the reading of Shakspeare had inspired him with the idea of painting one of the heroines of the great poet, and in 1881 he went back to Damvillers full of a project for painting the Death of Ophelia.
“I have been painting hard” (letter to Ch. Baude, August, 1881), “for I want to go away and travel for two or three weeks. At the end of September you will come and see us. That is settled, is it not? Shooting, amusements, friendship. Since my return I have painted a haymaker and worked at a little picture of an interior: The Cuvier à Lessive (The Washing Kitchen); all the detail requires much time. Besides I have begun and already advanced a large picture of Ophelia. I think it will be well to do something as a contrast to my Mendiant (Beggar). It is to be a really touching Ophelia, as heartrending as if one actually saw her.”
“The poor distracted girl no longer knows what she is doing, but her face shows traces of sorrow and of madness. She is close to the edge of the water leaning against a willow; upon her lips, the smile left by her last song; in her eyes, tears! Supported only by a branch, she is slipping unawares; the stream is quite close to her. In a moment she will be in it. She is dressed in a little greenish blue bodice, and a white skirt with large folds; her pockets are full of flowers, and behind her is a river-side landscape. One bank under trees, with tall flowering grasses, and thousands of hemlock flowers, like stars in the sky; and in the higher part of the picture, a wooded slope; and the evening sun shining through birches and hazel bushes; that is the scene….”
This picture was never finished. The landscape and flowers were rendered as the artist wished, but the face and the costume of Ophelia recalled his Jeanne d’Arc too much.
Bastien-Lepage no doubt saw this, and for this reason put the picture on one side to return to his peasants.
The more he become master of his brush, the more the rustic work haunted him. He was still a thorough countryman. Although he had now at intervals the refinements of elegance and little bursts of worldliness; although he had exchanged the modest atelier in the Impasse du Maine for a house in the Quartier Monceau, the world soon wearied him, and he was glad to go back to his village.
This six weeks’ absence, of which he speaks in his letter to his friend Baude, was spent in an excursion to Venice, and in Switzerland. He came back only half delighted, and brought back only a few unimportant sketches.
Italy and the splendours of Venetian art had left him cold. In this world of history and mythology he was not at home. He sickened for his meadows and his Meusian forests.
During his rapid visits to Paris in 1881 and 1882, the painting of various portraits, notably that of Madame Juliette Drouet, and the compulsory tax of visits and soirées occupied him almost entirely. We saw but little of him. But these successes, and the adulation lavished upon him in Parisian drawing-rooms, did not change him.
He was still the loyal, joyous comrade, faithful to old ties; very good, very simple; happy as a child when he found himself in a circle of intimate friends.
We were both members and even founders of an Alsace-Lorraine dinner, the Dîner de l’Est, which was always given in summer in the country. One of the last meetings at which he was present, took place at the end of May, 1881.
A boat had been engaged, which was to take the diners to the bridge at Suresnes, and to bring them back at night. When we arrived at the landing-stage, a blind man was standing by the footbridge, attended by a young girl, who held out her sebilla to the passers-by.
“Come, gentlemen! all of you, put your hands in your pockets!” gaily commanded Bastien, and he passed over first, preaching by example. And the eighty, or a hundred guests of the Dîner de l’Est, passed one after another over the footbridge, each one leaving in the child’s sebilla a coin, large or small.
When we were on the deck, Bastien turned round to look at the blind man and his girl, who were amazed at this unexpected windfall, and were slowly counting their money.
“What a lovely group?” he said to me. “How I should like to paint that child!”
While waiting for dinner we walked in the Bois de Boulogne. The acacias and hawthorns were in flower. The lawns, newly shorn, gave out a perfume of mown grass. Jules, joyfully drawing in this air impregnated with country odours, laughed like a happy child.
At that moment all was going well with him. His Mendiant had had a great success at the Salon; his last visit to England had been very prosperous; his head was full of fine projects for pictures. “It is good to be alive!” he exclaimed, as he played with a flower he had plucked from the bushes…. On the way back he gave himself up to all sorts of roguish fun. Mounted on the prow of the boat he sang, with his full voice, the Chant du Départ.
The vibrating tones resounded powerfully between the two sleeping river banks; the sky was splendid, twinkling with innumerable stars. From time to time Bastien lighted a rocket and sent it up overhead, shouting a loud hurrah!
The fusée mounted slowly into the night, showering down many-coloured sparks, then fell suddenly and sank in the dark water. Alas! it was the image of the short and brilliant years that remained for him to live.