veins by the stoves of the public libraries, and she lost her work in
the box trade after the New Year fairs, and had to eke out as best she
might the few francs she had been able to lay back in the old brown
pipkin in the closet. She had, moreover, to sell most of the little
things in her garret; her own mattress went, though she kept the bed
under her grandmother. But there were two things she would not sell,
though for both was she offered money; they were her mother’s reliques
and myself.
She would not, I am sure, have sold the picture, either. But for that
no one offered her a centime.
One day, as the last of the winter solstice was passing away, the old
woman died.
Lili wept for her sincere and tender tears, though never in my time,
nor in any other, I believe, had the poor old querulous, paralytic
sufferer rewarded her with anything except lamentation and peevish
discontent.
“_Now_ you will come to me?” murmured her lover, when they had returned
from laying the old dead peasant in the quarter of the poor.
Lili drooped her head softly upon his breast.
“If you wish it!” she whispered, with a whisper as soft as the first
low breath of summer.
_If_ he wished it!
A gleam of pale gold sunshine shone through the dulled panes upon my
feeble branches; a little timid fly crept out and spread its wings;
the bells of the church rang an angelus; a child laughed in the street
below; there came a smile of greenness spreading over the boughs of
leafless trees; my lover, the wind, returned from the south, fresh
from desert and ocean, with the scent of the spice groves and palm
aisles of the East in his breath, and, softly unclosing my lattice,
murmured to me: “Didst thou think I was faithless? See, I come with the
spring!”
So, though I was captive and they two were poor, yet we three were all
happy; for love and a new year of promise were with us.
I bore a little snowy blossom (sister to the one which slept lifeless
on René’s heart) that spring, whilst yet the swallows were not back
from the African gardens, and the first violets were carried in
millions through the streets--the only innocent imperialists that the
world has ever seen.
That little winter-begotten darling of mine was to be Lili’s
nuptial-flower. She took it so tenderly from me that it hardly seemed
like its death.
“My little dear rose, who blossoms for me, though I can only cage her
in clay, and only let her see the sun’s rays between the stacks of the
chimneys!” she said softly over me as she kissed me; and when she said
that, could I any more grieve for Provence?
“What do they wed upon, those two?” said the old vine to me.
And I answered him, “Hope and dreams.”
“Will those bake bread and feed babes?” said the vine, as he shook his
wrinkled tendrils despondently in the March air.
We did not ask in the attic.
Summer was nigh at hand, and we loved one another.
René had come to us--we had not gone to him. For our garret was on the
sunny, his on the dark, side of the street, and Lili feared the gloom
for me and the bird; and she could not bring herself to leave that old
red-leaved creeper who had wound himself so close about the rainpipe
and the roof, and who could not have been dislodged without being slain.
With the Mardi Gras her trade had returned to her. René, unable to
prosecute his grand works, took many of the little boxes in his own
hands, and wrought on them with all the nameless mystical charm and the
exquisite grace of touch which belong to the man who is by nature a
great artist. The little trade could not at its best price bring much,
but it brought bread; and we were happy.
While he worked at the box lids she had leisure for her household
labors; when these were done she would draw out her mother’s old
Breton distaff, and would sit and spin. When twilight fell they would
go forth together to dream under the dewy avenues and the glistening
stars, or as often would wait within whilst he played on his mountain
flute to the people at the doorways in the street below.
“Is it better to go out and see the stars and the leaves ourselves, or
to stay indoors and make all these forget the misfortune of not seeing
them?” said Lili on one of those evenings when the warmth and the
sunset almost allured her to draw the flute from her husband’s hands
and give him his hat instead; and then she looked down into the narrow
road, at the opposite houses, at the sewing-girls stitching by their
little windows, at the pale students studying their sickly lore with
scalpel and with skeleton, at the hot, dusty little children at play on
the asphalt sidewalk, at the sorrowful, darkened casements behind which
she knew beds of sickness or of paralyzed old age were hidden--looked
at all this from behind my blossoms, and then gave up the open air and
the evening stroll that were so dear a pastime to her, and whispered to
René, “Play, or they will be disappointed.”
And he played, instead of going to the debating-club in the room round
the corner.
“He has ceased to be a patriot,” grumbled the old vine. “It is always
so with every man when once he has loved a woman!”
Myself, I could not see that there was less patriotism in breathing
the poetry of sound into the ears of his neighbors than in rousing the
passions of hell in the breasts of his brethren.
But perhaps this was my ignorance: I believe that of late years people
have grown to hold that the only pure patriotism is, and ought to
be, evinced in the most intense and the most brutalized form of one
passion,--“Envy, eldest-born of hell.”
So these two did some good, and were happy, though more than once it
chanced to them to have to go a whole day without tasting food of any
sort.
I have said that René had genius,--a genius bold, true, impassioned,
masterful,--such a genius as colors the smallest trifles that it
touches. René could no more help putting an ideal grace into those
little sweetmeat boxes--which sold at their very highest, in the booths
of the fairs, at fifty centimes apiece--than we, the roses, can help
being fragrant and fair.
Genius has a way of casting its pearls in the dust as we scatter our
fragrance to every breeze that blows. Now and then the pearl is caught
and treasured, as now and then some solitary creature pauses to smell
the sweetness of the air in which we grow, and thanks the God who made
us.
But as ninety-nine roses bloom unthanked for one that is thus
remembered, so ninety-nine of the pearls of genius are trodden to
pieces for one that is set on high and crowned with honor.
In the twilight of a dull day a little, feeble, brown old man climbed
the staircase and entered our attic with shambling step.
We had no strangers to visit us: who visits the poor? We thought he
was an enemy: the poor always do think so, being so little used to
strangers.
René drew himself erect, and strove to hide the poverty of his
garments, standing by his easel. Lili came to me and played with my
leaves in her tender, caressing fashion.
“You painted this, M. René Claude?” asked the little brown old man. He
held in his hand one of the bonbon boxes, the prettiest of them all,
with a tambourine-girl dancing in a wreath of Provence roses. René had
copied me with loving fidelity in the flowers, and with a sigh had
murmured as he cast the box aside when finished: “That ought to fetch
at least a franc!” But he got no more than the usual two sous for it.
The little man sat down on the chair which Lili placed for him.
“So they told me where I bought this. It was at a booth at St. Cloud.
Do you know that it is charming?”
René smiled a little sadly; Lili flushed with joy. It was the first
praise which she had ever heard given to him.
“You have a great talent,” pursued the little man.
René bowed his handsome, haggard face--his mouth quivered a very
little: for the first time Hope entered into him.
“Genius, indeed,” said the stranger; and he sauntered a little about
and looked at the canvases, and wondered and praised, and said not very
much, but said that little so well and so judiciously that it was easy
to see he was no mean judge of art, and possibly no slender patron of
it.
As Lili stood by me I saw her color come and go and her breast heave. I
too trembled in all my leaves: were recognition and the world’s homage
coming to René at last?
“And I have been so afraid always that I had injured, burdened him,
clogged his strength in that endless strife!” she murmured below
her breath. “O dear little rose! if only the world can but know his
greatness!”
Meanwhile the old man looked through the sketches and studies with
which the room was strewed. “You do not finish your things?” he said
abruptly.
René flushed darkly. “Oil pictures cost money,” he said briefly,
“and--I am very poor.”
Though a peasant’s son, he was very proud: the utterance must have cost
him much.
The stranger took snuff. “You are a man of singular genius,” he said
simply. “You only want to be known to get the prices of Meissonier.”
Meissonier!--the Rothschild of the studios, the artist whose six-inch
canvas would bring the gold value of a Raphael or a Titian!
Lili, breathing fast, and white as death with ecstasy, made the sign of
the cross on her breast; the delicate brown hand of René shook where it
leaned on his easel.
They were both silent--silent from the intensity of their hope.
“Do you know who I am?” the old man pursued with a cordial smile.
“I have not that honor,” murmured René.
The stranger, taking his snuff out of a gold box, named a name at which
the painter started. It was that of one of the greatest art dealers in
the whole of Europe,--one who at a word could make or mar an artist’s
reputation,--one whose accuracy of judgment was considered infallible
by all connoisseurs, and the passport to whose galleries was to any
unknown painting a certain passport also to the fame of men.
“You are a man of singular genius,” repeated the great purchaser,
taking his snuff in the middle of the little bare chamber. “It is
curious--one always finds genius either in a cellar or in an attic: it
never, by any chance, is to be discovered midway on the stairs--never
in the _mezzo terzo_! But to the point. You have great delicacy of
touch, striking originality, a wonderful purity yet bloom in your
color, and an exquisite finish of minutiæ, without any weakness,--a
combination rare, very rare. That girl yonder, feeding white pigeons on
the leads of a roof, with an atom of blue sky, and a few vine leaves
straying over the parapet--that is perfectly conceived. Finished it
must be. So must that little study of the beggar-boy looking through
the gilded gates into the rose-gardens--it is charming, charming. Your
price for those?”
René’s colorless, worn young face colored to the brows. “Monsieur is
too good,” he muttered brokenly. “A nameless artist has no price,
except--”
“Honor,” murmured Lili as she moved forward with throbbing heart and
dim eyes. “Ah, monsieur, give him a name in Paris! We want nothing
else--nothing else!”
“Poor fools!” said the dealer to his snuff-box. I heard him--they did
not.
“Madame,” he answered aloud, “Paris herself will give him that the
first day his first canvas hangs in my galleries. Meanwhile, I must in
honesty be permitted to add something more. For each of those little
canvases, the girl on the roof and the boy at the gate, I will give
you now two thousand francs, and two thousand more when they shall be
completed. Provided--”
He paused and glanced musingly at René.
Lili had turned away, and was sobbing for very joy at this undreamed-of
deliverance.
René stood quite still, with his hands crossed on the easel and his
head bent on his chest. The room, I think, swam around him.
The old man sauntered again a little about the place, looking here and
looking there, murmuring certain artistic disquisitions technical and
scientific, leaving them time to recover from the intensity of their
emotion.
What a noble thing old age was, I thought, living only to give hope
to the young in their sorrow, and to release captive talents from the
prison of obscurity! We should leave the little room in the roof, and
dwell in some bright quarter where it was all leaves and flowers; and
René would be great, and go to dine with princes and drive a team of
belled horses, like a famous painter who had dashed once with his
splendid equipage through our narrow passage; and we should see the sky
always--as much of it as ever we chose; and Lili would have a garden of
her own, all grass and foliage and falling waters, in which I should
live in the open air all the day long, and make believe that I was in
Provence.
My dreams and my fancies were broken by the sound of the old man’s
voice taking up the thread of his discourse once more in front of René.
“I will give you four thousand francs each for those two little
canvases,” he repeated. “It is a mere pinch of dust to what you will
make in six months’ time if--if--you hear me?--your name is brought
before the public of Paris in my galleries and under my auspices. I
suppose you have heard something of what I can do, eh? Well, all I
can do I will do for you; for you have a great talent, and without
introduction, my friend, you may as well roll up your pictures and burn
them in your stove to save charcoal. You know that?”
René indeed knew--none better. Lili turned on the old man her sweet,
frank Breton eyes, smiling their radiant gratitude through tenderest
tears.
“The saints will reward you, monsieur, in a better world than this,”
she murmured softly.
The old man took snuff a little nervously. “There is one condition I
must make,” he said with a trifling hesitation--“one only.”
“Ask of my gratitude what you will,” answered René quickly, while he
drew a deep breath of relief and freedom,--the breath of one who casts
to the ground the weight of a deadly burden.
“It is, that you will bind yourself only to paint for me.”
“Certainly!” René gave the assent with eagerness. Poor fellow! it was
a novelty so exquisite to have any one save the rats to paint for. It
had never dawned upon his thoughts that when he stretched his hands out
with such passionate desire to touch the hem of the garment of Fortune
and catch the gleam of the laurels of Fame, he might be in truth only
holding them out to fresh fetters.
“Very well,” said the old man quietly, and he sat down again and looked
full in René’s face, and unfolded his views for the artist’s future.
He used many words, and was slow and suave in their utterance, and
paused often and long to take out his heavy gold box; but he spoke
well. Little by little his meaning gleamed out from the folds of
verbiage in which he skilfully enwrapped it.
It was this.
The little valueless drawings on the people’s sweetmeat boxes of gilded
cardboard had a grace, a color, and a beauty in them which had caught,
at a fair-booth in the village of St. Cloud, the ever-watchful eyes
of the great dealer. He had bought half a dozen of the boxes for a
couple of francs. He had said, “Here is what I want.” Wanted for what?
Briefly, to produce Petitot enamels and Fragonard cabinets--genuine
eighteenth-century work. There was a rage for it. René would understand?
René’s dark southern eyes lost a little of their new lustre of
happiness, and grew troubled with a sort of cloud of perplexity. He did
not seem to understand.
The old man took more snuff, and used phrases clearer still.
There were great collectors--dilettanti of houses imperial and royal
and princely and noble, of all the grades of greatness--who would give
any sum for _bonbonnières_ and _tabatières_ of eighteenth-century
work by any one of the few famous masters of that time. A genuine,
incontestable sweetmeat box from the _ateliers_ of the Louis XIV. or
Louis XV. period would fetch almost a fabulous sum. Then again he
paused, doubtfully.
René bowed, and his wondering glance said without words, “I know this.
But I have no eighteenth-century work to sell you: if I had, should we
starve in an attic?”
His patron coughed a little, looked at Lili, then proceeded to explain
yet further.
In René’s talent he had discerned the hues, the grace, the delicacy
yet brilliancy, the voluptuousness and the _désinvolteure_ of the best
eighteenth-century work. René doubtless did other and higher things
which pleased himself far more than these airy trifles. Well, let him
pursue the greater line of art if he chose; but he, the old man who
spoke, could assure him that nothing would be so lucrative to him as
those bacchantes in wreaths of roses and young tambourine-players
_gorge au vent_ dancing in a bed of violets, and beautiful marquises,
powdered and jewelled, looking over their fans, which he had painted
for those poor little two-sous boxes of the populace, and the like
of which, exquisitely finished on enamel or ivory, set in gold and
tortoise-shell rimmed with pearls and turquoises or opals and diamonds,
would deceive the finest connoisseur in Europe into receiving them
as--whatever they might be signed and dated.
If René would do one or two of these at dictation in a year, not
more,--more would be perilous,--paint and sign them and produce them
with any touches that might be commanded; never ask what became of
them when finished, nor recognize them if hereafter he might see them
in any illustrious collection--if René would bind himself to do this,
he, the old man who spoke, would buy his other paintings, place them
well in his famous galleries, and, using all his influence, would
make him in a twelvemonth’s time the most celebrated of all the young
painters of Paris.
It was a bargain? Ah, how well it was, he said, to put the best of
one’s powers into the most trifling things one did! If that poor little
two-sous box had been less lavishly and gracefully decorated, it would
never have arrested his eyes in the bonbon-booth at St. Cloud. The old
man paused to take snuff and receive an answer.
René stood motionless.
Lili had sunk into a seat, and was gazing at the tempter with
wide-open, puzzled, startled eyes. Both were silent.
“It is a bargain?” said the old man again. “Understand me, M. René
Claude. You have no risk, absolutely none, and you have the certainty
of fair fame and fine fortune in the space of a few years. You will be
a great man before you have a gray hair: that comes to very few. I
shall not trouble you for more than two _dix-huitième siècle_ enamels
in the year--perhaps for only one. You can spend ten months out of
the twelve on your own canvases, making your own name and your own
wealth as swiftly as your ambition and impatience can desire. Madame
here,” said the acute dealer with a pleasant smile--“Madame here can
have a garden sloping on the Seine and a glass house of choicest
flowers--which I see are her graceful weakness--ere another rose-season
has time to come round, if you choose.”
His voice lingered softly on the three last words.
The dew stood on René’s forehead, his hands clenched on the easel.
“You wish me--to--paint--forgeries of the Petitot enamels?”
The old man smiled unmoved: “Chut, chut! Will you paint me little
_bonbonnières_ on enamel instead of on cardboard? That is all the
question. I have said where they go, how they are set: what they are
called shall be my affair. You know nothing. The only works of yours
which you will be concerned to acknowledge will be your own canvas
pictures. What harm can it do any creature? You will gratify a
connoisseur or two innocently, and you will meanwhile be at leisure to
follow the bent of your own genius, which otherwise--”
He paused: I heard the loud throbs of René’s heart under that cruel
temptation.
Lili gazed at his tempter with the same startled terror and
bewilderment still dilating her candid eyes with a woful pain.
“Otherwise,” pursued the old man with merciless tranquillity, “you
will never see me any more, my friends. If you try to repeat any story
to my hindrance, no one will credit you. I am rich, you are poor. You
have a great talent: I shall regret to see it lost, but I shall let it
die--so.”
And he trod very gently on a little gnat that crawled near his foot,
and killed it.
A terrible agony gathered in the artist’s face.
“O God!” he cried in his torture, and his eyes went to the canvases
against the wall, and then to the face of his wife, with an
unutterable, yearning desire.
For them, for _them_, this sin which tempted him looked virtue.
“Do you hesitate?” said the merciless old man. “Pshaw! whom do you
hurt? You give me work as good as that which you imitate, and I call
it only by a dead man’s name: who is injured? What harm can there be in
humoring the fanaticism of fashion? Choose--I am in haste.”
René hid his face with his hands, so that he should not behold those
dear creations of his genius which so cruelly, so innocently, assailed
him with a temptation beyond his strength.
“Choose for me--you!” he muttered in his agony to Lili.
Lili, white as death, drew closer to him.
“My René, your heart has chosen,” she murmured through her dry,
quivering lips. “You cannot buy honor by fraud.”
René lifted his head and looked straight in the eyes of the man who
held the scales of his fate, and could weigh out for his whole life’s
portion either fame and fortune, or obscurity and famine.
“Sir,” he said slowly, with a bitter, tranquil smile about his mouth,
“my garret is empty, but it is clean. May I trouble you to leave it as
you found it?”
So they were strong to the end, these two famished children of
frivolous Paris.
But when the door had closed and shut their tempter out, the revulsion
came: they wept those tears of blood which come from the hearts’
depths of those who have seen Hope mock them with a smile a moment, to
leave them face to face with Death.
“Poor fools!” sighed the old vine from his corner in the gray, dull
twilight of the late autumn day.
Was the vine right?
The air which he had breathed for fifty years through all his
dust-choked leaves and tendrils had been the air off millions of human
lungs, corrupted in its passage through millions of human lips; and the
thoughts which he thought were those of human wisdom:
The sad day died; the night fell; the lattice was closed; the flute lay
untouched. A great misery seemed to enfold us. True, we were no worse
off than we had been when the same day dawned. But that is the especial
cruelty of every tempter always: he touches the innocent, closed eyes
of his victims with a collyrium which makes the happy blindness of
content no longer possible. If strong to resist him, he has still his
vengeance, for they are never again at peace as they were before that
fatal hour in which he showed them all that they were not, all that
they might be.
Our stove was not more chill, our garret not more empty; our darkness
not more dark amidst the gay, glad, dazzling city; our dusky roof
and looming crown that shut the sky out from us not more gloomy and
impenetrable than they had been on all those other earlier nights when
yet we had been happy. Yet how intensified million-fold seemed cold and
loneliness and poverty and darkness, all!--for we had for the first
time known what it was to think of riches, of fame, of homage, of
light, as _possible_, and then to lose them all forever!
I had been resigned for love’s sake to dwell amongst the roofs, seeing
not the faces of the stars, nor feeling ever the full glory of the
sun; but now--I had dreamed of the fair freedom of garden-ways and the
endless light of summer suns on palace terraces, and I drooped and
shivered and sickened, and was twice captive and twice exiled, and knew
that I was a little nameless, worthless, hapless thing, whose fairest
chaplet of blossom no hand would ever gather for a crown.
As with my life, so was it likewise with theirs.
They had been so poor, but they had been so happy: the poverty
remained, the joy had flown.
The winter was again very hard, very cold: they suffered greatly.
They could scarcely keep together body and soul, as your strange phrase
runs; they went without food sometimes for days and days, and fuel they
had scarcely ever.
The bird in his cage was sold; they would not keep the little golden
singing thing to starve to silence like themselves.
As for me, I nearly perished of the cold; only the love I bore to Lili
kept a little life in my leafless branches.
All that cruel winter-time they were strong still, those children of
Paris.
For they sought no alms, and in their uttermost extremity neither of
them ever whispered to the other: “Go seek the tempter; repent, be
wise. Give not up our lives for a mere phantasy of honor.”