WHEREIN EVERYTHING SEEMS STRANGE BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS
LOGICAL
The Chapel of the Holy Angels, which lies on the right hand as you enter
the Church of St. Sulpice, was hidden behind a scaffolding of planks.
Abbé Patouille, Monsieur Gaétan, Monsieur Maurice, his nephew, and
Monsieur Sariette, entered in single file through the low door cut in
the wooden hoarding, and found old Guinardon on the top of his ladder
standing in front of the Heliodorus. The old artist, surrounded by all
sorts of tools and materials, was putting a white paste in the crack
which cut in two the High Priest Onias. Zéphyrine, Paul Baudry's
favourite model, Zéphyrine, who had lent her golden hair and polished
shoulders to so many Magdalens, Marguerites, sylphs, and mermaids, and
who, it is said, was beloved of the Emperor Napoleon III, was standing
at the foot of the ladder with tangled locks, cadaverous cheeks, and dim
eyes, older than old Guinardon, whose life she had shared for more than
half a century. She had brought the painter's lunch in a basket.
Although the slanting rays fell grey and cold through the leaded and
iron-barred window, Delacroix's colouring shone resplendent, and the
roses on the cheeks of men and angels dimmed with their glorious beauty
the rubicund countenance of old Guinardon, which stood out in relief
against one of the temple's columns. These frescoes of the Chapel of the
Holy Angels, though derided and insulted when they first appeared, have
now become part of the classic tradition, and are united in immortality
with the masterpieces of Rubens and Tintoretto.
Old Guinardon, bearded and long-haired, looked like Father Time effacing
the works of man's genius. Gaétan, in alarm, called out to him:
"Carefully, Monsieur Guinardon, carefully. Do not scrape too much."
The painter reassured him.
"Fear nothing, Monsieur Gaétan. I do not paint in that style. My art is
a higher one. I work after the manner of Cimabue, Giotto, and Beato
Angelico, not in the style of Delacroix. This surface here is too
heavily charged with contrast and opposition to give a really sacred
effect. It is true that Chenavard said that Christianity loves the
picturesque, but Chenavard was a rascal with neither faith nor
principle--an infidel.... Look, Monsieur d'Esparvieu, I fill up the
crevice, I relay the scales of paint which are peeling. That is all....
The damage, due to the sinking of the wall, or more probably to a
seismic shock, is confined to a very small space. This painting of oil
and wax applied on a very dry foundation is far more solid than one
might think.
"I saw Delacroix engaged on this work. Impassioned but anxious, he
modelled feverishly, scraped out, re-painted unceasingly; his mighty
hand made childish blunders, but the thing is done with the mastery of a
genius and the inexperience of a schoolboy. It is a marvel how it
holds."
The good man was silent, and went on filling in the crevice.
"How classic and traditional the composition is," said Gaétan. "Time was
when one could recognise nothing but its amazing novelty; now one can
see in it a multitude of old Italian formulas."
"I may allow myself the luxury of being just, I possess the
qualifications," said the old man from the top of his lofty ladder.
"Delacroix lived in a blasphemous and godless age. A painter of the
decadence, he was not without pride nor grandeur. He was greater than
his times. But he lacked faith, single-heartedness, and purity. To be
able to see and paint angels he needed that virtue of angels and
primitives, that supreme virtue which, with God's help, I do my best to
practise, chastity."
"Hold your tongue, Michel; you are as big a brute as any of them."
Thus Zéphyrine, devoured with jealousy because that very morning on the
stairs she had seen her lover kiss the bread-woman's daughter, to wit
the youthful Octavie, who was as squalid and radiant as one of
Rembrandt's Brides. She had loved Michel madly in the happy days long
since past, and love had never died out in Zéphyrine's heart.
Old Guinardon received the flattering insult with a smile that he
dissembled, and raised his eyes to the ceiling, where the archangel
Michael, terrible in azure cuirass and gilt helmet, was springing
heavenwards in all the radiance of his glory.
Meanwhile Abbé Patouille, blinking, and shielding his eyes with his hat
against the glaring light from the window, began to examine the pictures
one after another: Heliodorus being scourged by the angels, St. Michael
vanquishing the Demons, and the combat of Jacob and the Angel.
"All this is exceedingly fine," he murmured at last, "but why has the
artist only represented wrathful angels on these walls? Look where I
will in this chapel, I see but heralds of celestial anger, ministers of
divine vengeance. God wishes to be feared; He wishes also to be loved. I
would fain perceive on these walls messengers of peace and of clemency.
I should like to see the Seraphim who purified the lips of the prophet,
St. Raphael who gave back his sight to old Tobias, Gabriel who announced
the Mystery of the Incarnation to Mary, the Angel who delivered St.
Peter from his chains, the Cherubim who bore the dead St. Catherine to
the top of Sinai. Above all, I should like to be able to contemplate
those heavenly guardians which God gives to every man baptized in His
name. We each have one who follows all our steps, who comforts us and
upholds us. It would be pleasant indeed to admire these enchanting
spirits, these beautiful faces."
"Ah, Abbé! it depends on the point of view," answered Gaétan. "Delacroix
was no sentimentalist. Old Ingres was not very far wrong in saying that
this great man's work reeks of fire and brimstone. Look at the sombre,
splendid beauty of those angels, look at those androgynes so proud and
fierce, at those pitiless youths who lift avenging rods against
Heliodorus, note this mysterious wrestler touching the patriarch on the
hip...."
"Hush," said Abbé Patouille. "According to the Bible he is no angel like
the others; if he be an angel, he is the Angel of Creation, the Eternal
Son of God. I am surprised that the Venerable Curé of St. Sulpice, who
entrusted the decoration of this chapel to Monsieur Eugène Delacroix,
did not tell him that the patriarch's symbolic struggle with Him who was
nameless took place in profound darkness, and that the subject is quite
out of place here, since it prefigures the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.
The best artists go astray when they fail to obtain their ideas of
Christian iconography from a qualified ecclesiastic. The institutions of
Christian art form the subject of numerous works with which you are
doubtless acquainted, Monsieur Sariette."
Monsieur Sariette was gazing vacantly about him. It was the third
morning after his adventurous night in the library. Being, however, thus
called upon by the venerable ecclesiastic, he pulled himself together
and replied:
"On this subject we may with advantage consult Molanus, _De Historia
Sacrarum Imaginum et Picturarum_, in the edition given us by Noël
Paquot, dated Louvain, 1771; Cardinal Frederico Borromeo, _De Pictura
Sacra_, and the Iconography of Didron; but this last work must be read
with caution."
Having thus spoken, Monsieur Sariette relapsed into silence. He was
pondering on his devastated library.
"On the other hand," continued Abbé Patouille, "since an example of the
holy anger of the angels was necessary in this chapel, the painter is to
be commended for having depicted for us in imitation of Raphael the
heavenly messengers who chastised Heliodorus. Ordered by Seleucus, King
of Syria, to carry off the treasures contained in the Temple, Heliodorus
was stricken by an angel in a cuirass of gold mounted on a magnificently
caparisoned steed. Two other angels smote him with rods. He fell to
earth, as Monsieur Delacroix shows us here, and was swallowed up in
darkness. It is right and salutary that this adventure should be cited
as an example to the Republican Commissioners of Police and to the
sacrilegious agents of the law. There will always be Heliodoruses, but,
let it be known, every time they lay their hands on the property of the
Church, which is the property of the poor, they shall be chastised with
rods and blinded by the angels."
"I should like this painting, or, better still, Raphael's sublimer
conception of the same subject, to be engraved in little pictures fully
coloured, and distributed as rewards in all the schools."
"Uncle," said young Maurice, with a yawn, "I think these things are
simply ghastly. I prefer Matisse and Metzinger."
These words fell unheeded, and old Guinardon from his ladder held forth:
"Only the primitives caught a glimpse of Heaven. Beauty is only to be
found between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The antique, the
impure antique, which regained its pernicious influence over the minds
of the sixteenth century, inspired poets and painters with criminal
notions and immodest conceptions, with horrid impurities, filth. All the
artists of the Renaissance were swine, including Michael-Angelo."
Then, perceiving that Gaétan was on the point of departure, Père
Guinardon assumed an air of bonhomie, and said to him in a confidential
tone:
"Monsieur Gaétan, if you're not afraid of climbing up my five flights,
come and have a look at my den. I've got two or three little canvases I
wouldn't mind parting with, and they might interest you. All good,
honest, straightforward stuff. I'll show you, among other things, a
tasty, spicy little Baudouin that would make your mouth water."
At this speech Gaétan made off. As he descended the church steps and
turned down the Rue Princesse, he found himself accompanied by old
Sariette, and fell to unburdening himself to him, as he would have done
to any human creature, or indeed to a tree, a lamp-post, a dog, or his
own shadow, of the indignation with which the æsthetic theories of the
old painter inspired him.
"Old Guinardon overdoes it with his Christian art and his Primitives!
Whatever the artist conceives of Heaven is borrowed from earth; God, the
Virgin, the Angels, men and women, saints, the light, the clouds. When
he was designing figures for the chapel windows at Dreux, old Ingres
drew from life a pure, fine study of a woman, which may be seen, among
many others, in the Musée Bonnat at Bayonne. Old Ingres had written at
the bottom of the page in case he should forget: 'Mademoiselle Cécile,
admirable legs and thighs'--and so as to make Mademoiselle Cécile into a
saint in Paradise, he gave her a robe, a cloak, a veil, inflicting thus
a shameful decline in her estate, for the tissues of Lyons and Genoa are
worthless compared with the youthful living tissue, rosy with pure
blood; the most beautiful draperies are despicable compared with the
lines of a beautiful body. In fact, clothing for flesh that is desirable
and ripe for wedlock is an unmerited shame, and the worst of
humiliations"; and Gaétan, walking carelessly in the gutter of the Rue
Garancière, continued: "Old Guinardon is a pestilential idiot. He
blasphemes Antiquity, sacred Antiquity, the age when the gods were kind.
He exalts an epoch when the painter and the sculptor had all their
lessons to learn over again. In point of fact, Christianity has run
contrary to art in so much as it has not favoured the study of the nude.
Art is the representation of nature, and nature is pre-eminently the
human body; it is the nude."
"Pardon, pardon," purred old Sariette. "There is such a thing as
spiritual, or, as one might term it, inward beauty, which, since the
days of Fra Angelico down to those of Hippolyte Flandrin, Christian art
has--"
But Gaétan, never hearing a word of all this, went on hurling his
impetuous observations at the stones of the old street and the
snow-laden clouds overhead:
"The Primitives cannot be judged as a whole, for they are utterly unlike
each other. This old madman confounds them all together. Cimabue is a
corrupt Byzantine, Giotto gives hints of powerful genius, but his
modelling is bad, and, like children, he gives all his characters the
same face. The early Italians have grace and joy, because they are
Italians. The Venetians have an instinct for fine colour. But when all
is said and done these exquisite craftsmen enamel and gild rather than
paint. There is far too much softness about the heart and the colouring
of your saintly Angelico for me. As for the Flemish school, that's quite
another pair of shoes. They can use their hands, and in glory of
workmanship they are on a level with the Chinese lacquer-workers. The
technique of the brothers Van Eyck is a marvel, but I cannot discover in
their Adoration of the Lamb the charm and mystery that some have
vaunted. Everything in it is treated with a pitiless perfection; it is
vulgar in feeling and cruelly ugly. Memling may touch one perhaps; but
he creates nothing but sick wretches and cripples; under the heavy,
rich, and ungraceful robing of his virgins and saints one divines some
very lamentable anatomy. I did not wait for Rogier van der Wyden to call
himself Roger de la Pasture and turn Frenchman in order to prefer him to
Memling. This Rogier or Roger is less of a ninny; but then he is more
lugubrious, and the rigidity of his lines bears eloquent testimony to
his poverty-stricken figures. It is a strange perversion to take
pleasure in these carnivalesque figures when one can have the paintings
of Leonardo, Titian, Correggio, Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin,
or Prud'hon. Really it is a perverted instinct."
Meanwhile the Abbé Patouille and Maurice d'Esparvieu were strolling
leisurely along in the wake of the esthete and the librarian. As a
general rule the Abbé Patouille was little inclined to talk theology
with laymen, or, for that matter, with clerics either. Carried away,
however, by the attractiveness of the subject, he was telling the
youthful Maurice all about the sacred mission of those guardian angels
which Monsieur Delacroix had so inopportunely excluded from his picture.
And in order to give more adequate expression to his thoughts on such
lofty themes, the Abbé Patouille borrowed whole phrases and sentences
from Bossuet. He had got them up by heart to put in his sermons, for he
adhered strongly to tradition.
"Yes, my son," he was saying, "God has appointed tutelary spirits to be
near us. They come to us laden with His gifts. They return laden with
our prayers. Such is their task. Not an hour, not a moment passes but
they are at our side, ready to help us, ever fervent and unwearying
guardians, watchmen that never slumber."
"Quite so, Abbé," murmured Maurice, who was wondering by what cunning
artifice he could get on the soft side of his mother and persuade her to
give him some money of which he was urgently in need.