IV.
On the death of Gambetta, January 1, 1883, Bastien was commissioned to make a design for the funeral car in which the great orator was to be conveyed to Père Lachaise; he spent a week in the little room at Ville d’Avray, painting the picture representing the statesman on his deathbed. The cold was extreme at this time, and, his work scarcely finished, he went away, feeling ill, to Damvillers, where he hoped to finish the great picture he had began of L’Amour au Village.
His native air, the simple life, and his mother’s loving care restored him, and he began to work again with his usual eagerness.
Muffled in a warm jacket and a travelling cloak that covered him down to the feet, he made his models pose for him in the piercing days of February, in the little garden where he had already painted the portrait of his grandfather. In March the work was well advanced, and he invited me to go and see it at Damvillers before it was sent to the Salon. I left Verdun on a freezing afternoon, accompanied by the old friend who had walked with us through the Argonne, and we were set down at Damvillers at night-fall. Our hosts were awaiting us on the doorstep; the grandfather, always the same, with his Greek cap and white beard, and his Socratic face; the painter and the little mother, with smiles and outstretched hands.
Around them Basse the spaniel, and Golo and Barbeau were bounding and barking joyfully to give us a welcome.
The next morning, early, we went up to the studio to see L’Amour au Village, which was to go to Paris that day.
The subject of this picture is well known; it is one of the most real and the most original that the artist has painted: the daylight is waning; at the gate of a village garden, a lad of twenty, who has been binding sheaves, and still wears his leggings of leather, is talking, leaning against a fence, with a young girl, who turns her back to the spectator; what he is saying to her may be guessed from his awkward manner of twisting his stiff fingers, and also from the attentive but embarrassed air of the young girl. One feels that they are not saying much, but that love exhales from every word, so difficult to speak. Around them summer spreads the robust verdure of the country. The fruit trees stand lightly silhouetted against a background of kitchen herbs, gently sloping up to the houses of the village, whose brown roofs and pointed spire come against the soft and misty twilight sky. All this, bathed in a subdued light, is marvellously painted. The young girl, her short plaits falling over her shoulders, her neck bent, the form of her back, so young, so delicate, is an exquisite figure; the face of the young harvester, so energetic, so ingenuously in love, is charming in expression; the treatment of the hands, the bust, the dress, is masterly. There is in this picture a true and manly poetry, which is strengthening and refreshing, like the odour of ripe corn.
Bastien was glad to have completed this difficult work, and his satisfaction enabled him to bear with cheerfulness the pains in his loins, and the digestive troubles which were becoming more and more frequent.
It was long since I had seen him so gay and unreserved. This happy holiday-week spent at Damvillers was the pendant to the walk through the Argonne. The sullen sky, continually blotted out by chilling showers, allowed us few walks in the open air; but every morning we went up to the studio. Jules dismissed the little sweep, who was sitting for a picture that he had on hand, and, taking a sheet of copper, he made us pose for an etching. I have this plate before me now; it did not bite well. It represents the whole family, including the grandfather, making a circle round our friend F., who, standing up and very grave, is reciting one of La Fontaine’s fables. While I look at it, I seem to hear again the merry laughter which filled the studio, alternating with the rattling of the hail against the windows.
In the evening, after supper, we placed ourselves at the round table, and played at Diable or Nain rouge. Jules, throwing away his best cards, always managed to let the grandfather win; and when the octogenarian, quite proud of his success, took up the stakes, he would pat him on the shoulder, and cry out, with a merry twinkle of the eye, “Ha! what a lucky man! he will ruin us all!” and the laughter began again.
We did not go to bed till well on into the night, after having roused the little domestic, Felix, who had dozed off in the kitchen while copying a portrait of Victor Hugo.
In the intervals of sunshine, Bastien-Lepage took us to visit “his fields.” He had a peasant’s love for the land, and he employed his gains in adding to the paternal domains. He had just bought an orchard situated in the old moat of the town, which had belonged to an unfrocked priest. He intended to build a châlet there, where his friends, painters or poets, might come and live in their holidays and dream at their ease. He explained to us with the delight of a child, his plans for the future. When, with his portraits, he should have gained an independent fortune, he would execute at his ease and in freedom, the grand rustic pictures that he dreamed of, and among others, that burial of a young village girl, for which he had already made many notes and sketched the principal details. We only took one long walk, and it was in those woods of Réville which form the background of his landscape, Ripe Corn. The weather had remained cold, and there were still patches of snow on the backs of the grey hills, though the sun shone sometimes. Except a few downy buds on the willows, the woods were without verdure; but the ploughed fields had a beautiful brown colour; the larks sang; the tops of the beeches began to have that reddish hue, which indicates the rising of the sap, the swelling buds. “Look,” said Bastien to me, when we were in the forest, “my Wood-cutter in the last Salon was reproached with want of air…. Well, here we are in a wood, and the trees are still without leaves, yet look how little the figure stands out from the undergrowth of trees and bushes. There is a great deal of routine and prejudice in that criticism of the perspective of my pictures done in the open air. It is the criticism of people who have never looked at a landscape, except crouching down or sitting. When you sit down to paint, you naturally see things quite differently from the way you see them standing. Sitting, you see more sky and you have more objects—trees, houses, or living beings standing out sharply in silhouette against the sky, which gives the illusion of a greater distance and a wider atmosphere. But it is not in this way that we generally see a landscape. We look at it standing, and then the objects, animate or inanimate, that are nearest to us, instead of being seen in profile against the sky, are silhouetted upon the trees, or upon the fields, grey or green. They stand out with less clearness, and sometimes mix with the background, which then, instead of going away, seems to come forward. We need to renew the education of our eye, by looking with sincerity upon things as they are in nature, instead of holding as absolute truths the theories and conventions of the school and the studio.”
All the afternoon passed thus happily away in friendly talking and slow smoking along the wooded paths. The blackbirds were whistling; from time to time we discovered a flower in the open spaces, which showed that spring was surely coming; a wood anemone, with its milk-white petals, or a branch of mezereon, with its pink flowers opening before the leaves, and its Japanese appearance.
Jules stopped and gathered a stem of black helebore. “Ah, how beautiful!” he said. “How one would like to make a careful study of these leaves—so decorative, so finely cut—of dark green, almost brown, out of which comes this pale green stem, with its clusters of greenish flowers edged with pale rose-colour. What lovely forms, and what a variety of tender shades! This is what they ought to give as a copy to the children in the schools of design, instead of the eternal and wearisome Diana de Gabies!”
We did not return till evening, when there was a magnificent sunset, which crimsoned the smoky roofs of Réville, and made the light clouds scattered over the sky look like a strew of rose-leaves.
The next day was the last of my visit. We took leave after long embraces, making fine plans for returning to Damvillers for the September holiday, while the grandfather, shaking his hoary head, murmured sadly, “Who knows if you will find me here?” And Barbeau, and Golo, and Basse bounded and barked round the omnibus that took us away with tremendous noise.
I did not see Jules again till a month later, at the opening of the Salon, in front of L’Amour au Village, which had a full success. He was ill, and complained of pains in the loins more acute than formerly; then he suddenly disappeared mysteriously. The door of the atelier in Rue Legendre was closed, and visitors were told that the painter was gone into the country. We did not know till later that he had hidden himself, to undergo a sharp and painful treatment, and that, scarcely convalescent, he had gone to breathe the sea air in Brittany, at Concarneau. He spent his days there, in a boat, painting the sea, and forgetting his pains by the help of work.
When he came to see us again in October, he appeared to be recovered; but digestion was still a difficulty, and his habitual gaiety was, as it were, clouded over. His character was changed. There were no more of those trenchant affirmations of which his comrades sometimes complained; he was indulgent, and even affectionate, much more than was usual with him. He did not stay long in Paris, but hastened back to Damvillers, to get seriously to work again. He arrived in time to be present during his grandfather’s last moments. The old man departed loaded with years; but, though surely expected, his death was a painful blow to the survivors. “The house,” he wrote, “is empty more than one could believe. Only a few days ago, at any moment, a door would open and the grandfather appeared, without motive, without object, without speaking or being spoken to; but the sight of his kindly face was enough. One kissed him, and he went away, as before, without object, sitting down, going into the garden, coming back, and always with the same kind face. I remember now that he has been growing paler for some days…. No, you can have no idea how empty the house is. I cannot get accustomed to it. We often talk of him with my mother—with what pleasure! It is not that we weep for him with tears; we reason about it, and we appear resigned and courageous; but behind all that there is a sad feeling of want, of absolute loss. It is the touch one wants…. I have been ill with it, and am so still. I have not been able to work; to-day, for the first time, I went out to shoot larks; the weather was fine, the sun was shining, and the country beautiful. This did me good.”
Indeed, the health of the artist, far from improving, was becoming daily more uncertain. “It is the digestive tube,” said he, “that is out of order.” Nevertheless, he worked with his usual courage, overlooking his Concarneau studies, planning a new picture, and only stopping to go out shooting or to saunter through the woods.
“Our evening walks are the best part of the day”—(letter to Ch. Baude, Nov. 27, 1883)—“that is, from the setting of the sun till it is dark. Every night the spectacle is new. The programme changes with the weather. Sometimes the subject of the piece is dramatic; the next day it is soft and charming; and, with the constant rain, our inundated meadows reflect the brilliant scenery. Can you imagine all our pleasure, in your dingy Paris? The next morning is too slow in coming; one wants so much to put down last night’s impression; so that I am making a heap of sketches, and find much pleasure in it. Then—here is a surprise!—I have a new picture on the way…. Guess!… The subject is a wounded deer taken by the dogs. The scene is, naturally, the wood, and the wood at this time of year: only a few leaves of brilliant yellow against the marvellous rosy-grey of the branches of the trees; then the violet tone of the dead leaves flattened on the soil, and a few green briars round a pool under a willow. The place was not chosen by me. The deer chose it himself to die there; for I killed him the other day, and he went there to be taken, a hundred yards from where he was shot—just opposite the spot where Minet killed a hare. It was then that this picture struck me. Afterwards I sketched in and reconstructed the scene; and, as I wanted a model, I killed a second deer….”
Here is a characteristic symptom: he who formerly only wrote the shortest of notes, scribbled in haste at the corner of a table, now sent long, expansive letters to his friends, showing signs of redoubled love of life, of art, of the beauties of nature:—
“My dear friends” (Jan. 3, 1884), “if you could see your poor Bastien, with this heap of letters to write, you would certainly say: ‘How he is changed!’… If my wishes had the extraordinary virtue of fulfilling themselves, I should like that you, whom I love, should profit by it, and that 1884 should bring health and happiness and success to all. My mother’s wishes are the same as mine, and she rejoices that we are to see you soon. Ah, my dear friend, what pleasure you would have in living upon the woods, as I feed upon them now almost every day, along with Golo and Barbeau! What marvellously delicate tones! and the fading out of daylight, and when the evening comes on! The woods are exquisitely fine, with their tall, dry, ivory-coloured grasses; they are so tall in some of the open spaces that they caress your face as you pass, and the cool touch upon your face and hands, hot with walking, is a delicious sensation. I rarely leave the woods before night, for I must send up a few salutes to the wild ducks with my gun before going in. One hears them coming from a great distance, but it is difficult to judge if they are far away or near, from the peculiarity of their cry; so they have often passed, and are already a good way off, before one finds out that one has missed them.
“This is to let you know that I am not a stay-at-home, as you might think. I find it important to walk a good deal, for in this way I regain a little health. My stomach was beginning to get wrong, but it is better!…”
A few days after this I met a mutual friend of ours. “Well,” he said to me, “our poor Bastien is very ill…. They think it is hopeless.”