Villette (36 page)

It seemed to me that an original and good picture was just as scarce as an original and good book; nor did I, in the end, tremble to say to myself, standing before certain
chef d‘œuvres
bearing great names, ‘These are not a whit like nature. Nature’s daylight never had that colour; never was made so turbid, either by storm or cloud, as it is laid out there, under a sky of indigo: and that indigo is not ether; and those dark weeds plastered upon it are not trees.’ Several very well executed and complacent-looking fat women struck me as by no means the goddesses they appeared to consider themselves. Many scores of marvellously-finished little Flemish pictures, and also of sketches, excellent for fashion-books, displaying varied costumes in the handsomest materials, gave evidence of laudable industry whimsically applied. And yet there were fragments of truth here and there which satisfied the conscience, and gleams of light that cheered the vision. Nature’s power here broke through in a mountain snow-storm; and there her glory in a sunny southern day. An expression in this portrait proved clear insight into character; a face in this historical painting, by its vivid filial likeness, startlingly reminded you that genius gave it birth. These exceptions I loved: they grew dear as friends.

One day, at a quiet early hour, I found myself nearly alone in a certain gallery, wherein one particular picture of pretentious size, set up in the best light, having a cordon of protection stretched before it, and a cushioned bench duly set in front for the accommodation of worshipping connoisseurs, who, having gazed themselves off their feet, might be fain to complete the business sitting: this picture, I say, seemed to consider itself the queen of the collection.

It represented a woman, considerably larger, I thought, than the life. I calculated that this lady, put into a scale of magnitude suitable for the reception of a commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone. She was, indeed, extremely well fed: very much butcher’s meat—to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids—must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half-reclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to say; broad daylight blazed round her; she appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not the case: out of abundance of material—seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery—she managed to make inefficient raiment. Then, for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans—perhaps I ought to say vases and goblets—were rolled here and there on the foreground; a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the floor. On referring to the catalogue, I found that this notable production bore name ‘Cleopatra.’

Well, I was sitting wondering at it (as the bench was there, I thought I might as well take advantage of its accommodation), and thinking that while some of the details—as roses, gold cups, jewels, &:c.—were very prettily painted, it was on the whole an enormous piece of claptrap; the room, almost vacant when I entered, began to fill. Scarcely noticing this circumstance (as, indeed, it did not matter to me) I retained my seat; rather to rest myself than with a view to studying this huge, dark-complexioned gipsy-queen; of whom, indeed, I soon tired, and betook myself for refreshment to the contemplation of some exquisite little pictures of still life: wild-flowers, wild-fruit, mossy wood-nests, casketing eggs that looked like pearls seen through clear green sea-water; all hung modestly beneath that coarse and preposterous canvass.

Suddenly a light tap visited my shoulder. Starting, turning, I met a face bent to encounter mine; a frowning, almost a shocked face it was.

‘Que faites vous ici?’ said a voice.

‘Mais, monsieur, je m’amuse.’

‘Vous vous amusez! et à quoi, s’il vous plait? Mais d‘abord, faites-moi le plaisir de vous lever: prenez mon bras, et allons de l’autre cote.’
^du

I did precisely as I was bid. M. Paul Emanuel (it was he) returned from Rome, and now a travelled man, was not likely to be less tolerant of insubordination now, than before this added distinction laurelled his temples.

‘Permit me to conduct you to your party,’ said he, as we crossed the room.

‘I have no party.’

‘You are not alone?’

‘Yes, monsieur.’

‘Did you come here unaccompanied?’

‘No, monsieur. Dr. Bretton brought me here.’

‘Dr. Bretton and Madame his mother, of course?’

‘No; only Dr. Bretton.’

‘And he told you to look at that picture?’

‘By no means: I found it out for myself.’

M. Paul’s hair was shorn close as raven down, or I think it would have bristled on his head. Beginning now to perceive his drift, I had a certain pleasure in keeping cool, and working him up.

‘Astounding insular audacity!’ cried the Professor. ‘Singulieres femmes que ces Anglaises!’

‘What is the matter, monsieur?’

‘Matter! How dare you, a young person, sit coolly down, with the self-possession of a garçon, and look at that picture?’

‘It is a very ugly picture, but I cannot at all see why I should not look at it.’

‘Bon! bon! Speak no more of it. But you ought not to be here alone.’

‘If, however, I have no society—no party, as you say? And then, what does it signify whether I am alone, or unaccompanied? nobody meddles with me.’

‘Taisez-vous, et asseyez-vous la—la!’ Setting down a chair with emphasis in a particularly dull corner, before a series of most specially dreary ‘cadres.’

‘Mais, monsieur.’

‘Mais, mademoiselle, asseyez vous, et ne bougez pas—en-tendez-vous? jusqu’ à ce qu’on vienne vous chercher, ou que je vous donne la permission.’

‘Quel triste coin!’ cried I, ‘et quels laids tableaux!’
^dv

And ‘laids,’ indeed, they were; being a set of four, denominated in the catalogue ‘La vie d’une femme.‘
^dw
They were painted rather in a remarkable style—flat, dead, pale and formal. The first represented a ‘Jeune Fille,’ coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villanous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a ‘Mariée’ with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites of her eyes in a most exasperating manner. The third, a ‘Jeune Mere,’ hanging disconsolate over a clayey and puffy baby with a face like an unwholesome full moon. The fourth, a ‘Veuve,’ being a black woman, holding by the hand a black little girl, and the twain studiously surveying an elegant French monument, set up in a corner of some Père la Chaise.
^dx
All these four ‘Anges’
^dy
were grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts. What women to live with! insincere, ill-humoured, bloodless, brainless nonentities! As bad in their way as the indolent gipsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers.

It was impossible to keep one’s attention long confined to these masterpieces, and so, by degrees, I veered round, and surveyed the gallery.

A perfect crowd of spectators was by this time gathered round the Lioness, from whose vicinage I had been banished; nearly half this crowd were ladies, but M. Paul afterwards told me, these were ‘des dames,’ and it was quite proper for them to contemplate what no ‘demoiselle’ ought to glance at. I assured him plainly I could not agree in this doctrine, and did not see the sense of it; whereupon, with his usual absolutism, he merely requested my silence, and also, in the same breath, denounced my mingled rashness and ignorance. A more despotic little man than M. Paul never filled a professor’s chair. I noticed, by the way, that he looked at the picture himself quite at his ease, and for a very long while: he did not, however, neglect to glance from time to time my way, in order, I suppose, to make sure that I was obeying orders, and not breaking bounds. By and by, he again accosted me.

‘Had I not been ill?’ he wished to know: ‘he understood I had.’

‘Yes, but I was now quite well.’

‘Where had I spent the vacation?’

‘Chiefly in the Rue Fossette; partly with Madame Bretton.’

‘He had heard that I was left alone in the Rue Fossette; was that so?’

‘Not quite alone: Marie Broc’ (the cretin) ‘was with me.’

He shrugged his shoulders; varied and contradictory expressions played rapidly over his countenance. Marie Broc was well known to M. Paul; he never gave a lesson in the third division (containing the least advanced pupils), that she did not occasion in him a sharp conflict between antagonistic impressions. Her personal appearance, her repulsive manners, her often unmanageable disposition, irritated his temper, and inspired him with strong antipathy; a feeling he was too apt to conceive when his taste was offended or his will thwarted. On the other hand, her misfortunes constituted a strong claim on his forbearance and compassion—such a claim as it was not in his nature to deny; hence resulted almost daily drawn battles between impatience and disgust on the one hand, pity and a sense of justice on the other; in which, to his credit be it said, it was very seldom that the former feelings prevailed: when they did, however, M. Paul showed a phase of character which had its terrors. His passions were strong, his aversions and attachments alike vivid; the force he exerted in holding both in check, by no means mitigated an observer’s sense of their vehemence. With such tendencies, it may well be supposed he often excited in ordinary minds fear and dislike; yet it was an error to fear him: nothing drove him so nearly frantic as the tremor of an apprehensive and distrustful spirit; nothing soothed him like confidence tempered with gentleness. To evince these sentiments, however, required a thorough comprehension of his nature; and his nature was of an order rarely comprehended.

‘How did you get on with Marie Broc?’ he asked, after some minutes’ silence.

‘Monsieur, I did my best; but it was terrible to be alone with her!’

‘You have, then, a weak heart! You lack courage; and, perhaps, charity. Yours are not the qualities which might constitute a Sister of Mercy.’

[He was a religious little man, in his way: the self-denying and self-sacrificing part of the Catholic religion commanded the homage of his soul.]

‘I don’t know, indeed: I took as good care of her as I could; but when her aunt came to fetch her away, it was a great relief.’

‘Ah! you are an egotist. There are women who have nursed hospitals-full of similar unfortunates. You could not do that?’

‘Could Monsieur do it himself?’

‘Women who are worthy the name ought infinitely to surpass our coarse, fallible, self-indulgent sex, in the power to perform such duties.’

‘I washed her, I kept her clean, I fed her, I tried to amuse her; but she made mouths at me instead of speaking.’

‘You think you did great things?’

‘No; but as great as I
could
do.’

‘Then limited are your powers, for in tending one idiot, you fell sick.’

‘Not with that, monsieur; I had a nervous fever: my mind was ill.’

‘Vraiment! Vous valez peu de chose:
^dz
You are not cast in an heroic mould; your courage will not avail to sustain you in solitude; it merely gives you the temerity to gaze with sang-froid at pictures of Cleopatra.’

It would have been easy to show anger at the teasing, hostile tone of the little man. I had never been angry with him yet, however, and had no present disposition to begin.

‘Cleopatra!’ I repeated, quietly. ‘Monsieur, too, has been looking at Cleopatra; what does he think of her?’

‘Cela ne vaut rien,’ he responded. ‘Une femme superbe—une taille d’imperatrice, des formes de Junon, mais une personne dont je ne voudrais ni pour femme, ni pour fille, ni pour sœur. Aussi vous ne jeterez plus un seul coup d’ œil de sa cote.’
^ea

‘But I have looked at her a great many times while Monsieur has been talking: I can see her quite well from this corner.’

‘Turn to the wall and study your four pictures of a woman’s life.’

‘Excuse me, M. Paul; they are too hideous: but if you admire them, allow me to vacate my seat and leave you to their contemplation.’

‘Mademoiselle,’ he said, grimacing a half-smile, or what he intended for a smile, though it was but a grim and hurried manifestation. ‘You nurslings of Protestantism astonish me. You unguarded Englishwomen walk calmly amidst red-hot ploughshares and escape burning. I believe, if some of you were thrown into Nebuchadnezzar’s hottest furnace,
⁶
you would issue forth untraversed by the smell of fire.’

‘Will Monsieur have the goodness to move an inch to one side?’

‘How! At what are you gazing now? You are not recognizing an acquaintance amongst that group of jeunes gens?’

‘I think so—Yes, I see there a person I know.’

In fact, I had caught a glimpse of a head too pretty to belong to any other than the redoubted Colonel de Hamal. What a very finished, highly-polished little pate it was! What a figure, so trim and natty! What womanish feet and hands! How daintily he held a glass to one of his optics! with what admiration he gazed upon the Cleopatra! and then, how engagingly he tittered and whispered a friend at his elbow! Oh, the man of sense! Oh, the refined gentleman of superior taste and tact! I observed him for about ten minutes, and perceived that he was exceedingly taken with this dusk and portly Venus of the Nile. So much was I interested in his bearing, so absorbed in divining his character by his looks and movements, I temporarily forgot M. Paul; in the interim a group came between that gentleman and me; or possibly his scruples might have received another and worse shock from my present abstraction, causing him to withdraw voluntarily: at any rate, when I again looked round, he was gone.