"For the rest," he added, in conclusion, "the Arténice whom I have
endeavoured to depict to you will, under the features which I have given
her, appear either perfectly hateful or perfectly beautiful according to
the ideal which each of you carries within himself or believes himself
to have met. There is no agreeing except on passive virtues. These have,
from the point of view of painting, an advantage which the others do not
enjoy. It is easy to evoke resignation, abnegation, submissiveness,
virginal modesty, humility, piety, renunciation, devotion, the spirit of
sacrifice, simplicity, ingenuousness, candour, the whole silent and
often desolate group of woman's powers scared away into life's dim
corners. The eye recognizes with emotion the familiar colours faded by
the centuries; and the picture is always full of a plaintive grace. It
would seem as if those virtues could not be mistaken, and their very
excesses make them more touching. But what an unusual and ungrateful
face is worn by those which stand out, which assert themselves and which
struggle without the gates! A mere nothing, a stray lock, a fold of a
garment that is not in its customary place, a tense muscle, makes them
unpleasing or suspicious, pretentious or hard. Woman has so long lived
kneeling in the shadow that our prejudiced eyes find it difficult to
seize the harmony of the first movements which she risks when rising to
her feet in the light of day. But all that one can say when striving to
paint the intimate portrait of a being bears but a very imperfect
resemblance to the more precise image which our thoughts form in our
minds at the moment when we are speaking of him; and this last image, in
its turn, is but a sketch of the great likeness, living, profound, but
incommunicable, which his presence has imprinted in our heart, like the
light on the sensitized plate. Compare the last proof with the first
two: however exact, however well impressed we may think these to be,
they no longer offer more than the garlands and arabesques of frames
more or less appropriate to the subject which they await; but the
genuine face, the authentic and integral being, with the only real good
and evil which he contains beneath his apparently real vices and
virtues, emerges from the shadow only at the immediate contact of two
lives. The finest energies and the worst weaknesses add hardly anything
to the mysterious entity that asserts itself, take hardly anything from
it; and what is revealed is the very quality of its destiny. We then
become aware that the existence which we have before us, all the hidden
possibilities of which only pass through our eyes to reach our soul, is
really that which it would wish to become, or will never be that which
it loyally strives not to remain.