where this dangerous woman was giving to her dress those finishing
touches which a lady alone can give. The doors were bolted, the
curtains drawn over them, and Valerie related in every detail all the
events of the evening, the night, the morning.
"What do you think of it all, my darling?" she said to Lisbeth in
conclusion. "Which shall I be when the time comes--Madame Crevel, or
Madame Montes?"
"Crevel will not last more than ten years, such a profligate as he
is," replied Lisbeth. "Montes is young. Crevel will leave you about
thirty thousand francs a year. Let Montes wait; he will be happy
enough as Benjamin. And so, by the time you are three-and-thirty, if
you take care of your looks, you may marry your Brazilian and make a
fine show with sixty thousand francs a year of your own--especially
under the wing of a Marechale."
"Yes, but Montes is a Brazilian; he will never make his mark,"
observed Valerie.
"We live in the day of railways," said Lisbeth, "when foreigners rise
to high positions in France."
"We shall see," replied Valerie, "when Marneffe is dead. He has not
much longer to suffer."
"These attacks that return so often are a sort of physical remorse,"
said Lisbeth. "Well, I am off to see Hortense."
"Yes--go, my angel!" replied Valerie. "And bring me my artist.--Three
years, and I have not gained an inch of ground! It is a disgrace to
both of us!--Wenceslas and Henri--these are my two passions--one for
love, the other for fancy."
"You are lovely this morning," said Lisbeth, putting her arm round
Valerie's waist and kissing her forehead. "I enjoy all your pleasures,
your good fortune, your dresses--I never really lived till the day
when we became sisters."
"Wait a moment, my tiger-cat!" cried Valerie, laughing; "your shawl is
crooked. You cannot put a shawl on yet in spite of my lessons for
three years--and you want to be Madame la Marechale Hulot!"
Shod in prunella boots, over gray silk stockings, in a gown of
handsome corded silk, her hair in smooth bands under a very pretty
black velvet bonnet, lined with yellow satin, Lisbeth made her way to
the Rue Saint-Dominique by the Boulevard des Invalides, wondering
whether sheer dejection would at last break down Hortense's brave
spirit, and whether Sarmatian instability, taken at a moment when,
with such a character, everything is possible, would be too much for
Steinbock's constancy.
Hortense and Wenceslas had the ground floor of a house situated at the
corner of the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Esplanade des Invalides.
These rooms, once in harmony with the honeymoon, now had that
half-new, half-faded look that may be called the autumnal aspect of
furniture. Newly married folks are as lavish and wasteful, without
knowing it or intending it, of everything about them as they are of
their affection. Thinking only of themselves, they reck little of the
future, which, at a later time, weighs on the mother of a family.
Lisbeth found Hortense just as she had finished dressing a baby
Wenceslas, who had been carried into the garden.
"Good-morning, Betty," said Hortense, opening the door herself to her
cousin. The cook was gone out, and the house-servant, who was also the
nurse, was doing some washing.
"Good-morning, dear child," replied Lisbeth, kissing her. "Is
Wenceslas in the studio?" she added in a whisper.
"No; he is in the drawing-room talking to Stidmann and Chanor."
"Can we be alone?" asked Lisbeth.
"Come into my room."
In this room, the hangings of pink-flowered chintz with green leaves
on a white ground, constantly exposed to the sun, were much faded, as
was the carpet. The muslin curtains had not been washed for many a
day. The smell of tobacco hung about the room; for Wenceslas, now an
artist of repute, and born a fine gentleman, left his cigar-ash on the
arms of the chairs and the prettiest pieces of furniture, as a man
does to whom love allows everything--a man rich enough to scorn vulgar
carefulness.
"Now, then, let us talk over your affairs," said Lisbeth, seeing her
pretty cousin silent in the armchair into which she had dropped. "But
what ails you? You look rather pale, my dear."
"Two articles have just come out in which my poor Wenceslas is pulled
to pieces; I have read them, but I have hidden them from him, for they
would completely depress him. The marble statue of Marshal Montcornet
is pronounced utterly bad. The bas-reliefs are allowed to pass muster,
simply to allow of the most perfidious praise of his talent as a
decorative artist, and to give the greater emphasis to the statement
that serious art is quite out of his reach! Stidmann, whom I besought
to tell me the truth, broke my heart by confessing that his own
opinion agreed with that of every other artist, of the critics, and
the public. He said to me in the garden before breakfast, 'If
Wenceslas cannot exhibit a masterpiece next season, he must give up
heroic sculpture and be content to execute idyllic subjects, small
figures, pieces of jewelry, and high-class goldsmiths' work!' This
verdict is dreadful to me, for Wenceslas, I know, will never accept
it; he feels he has so many fine ideas."
"Ideas will not pay the tradesman's bills," remarked Lisbeth. "I was
always telling him so--nothing but money. Money is only to be had for
work done--things that ordinary folks like well enough to buy them.
When an artist has to live and keep a family, he had far better have a
design for a candlestick on his counter, or for a fender or a table,
than for groups or statues. Everybody must have such things, while he
may wait months for the admirer of the group--and for his money---"
"You are right, my good Lisbeth. Tell him all that; I have not the
courage.--Besides, as he was saying to Stidmann, if he goes back to
ornamental work and small sculpture, he must give up all hope of the
Institute and grand works of art, and we should not get the three
hundred thousand francs' worth of work promised at Versailles and by
the City of Paris and the Ministers. That is what we are robbed of by
those dreadful articles, written by rivals who want to step into our
shoes."
"And that is not what you dreamed of, poor little puss!" said Lisbeth,
kissing Hortense on the brow. "You expected to find a gentleman, a
leader of Art, the chief of all living sculptors.--But that is poetry,
you see, a dream requiring fifty thousand francs a year, and you have
only two thousand four hundred--so long as I live. After my death
three thousand."
A few tears rose to Hortense's eyes, and Lisbeth drank them with her
eyes as a cat laps milk.
This is the story of their honeymoon--the tale will perhaps not be
lost on some artists.
Intellectual work, labor in the upper regions of mental effort, is one
of the grandest achievements of man. That which deserves real glory in
Art--for by Art we must understand every creation of the mind--is
courage above all things--a sort of courage of which the vulgar have
no conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.
Driven by the dreadful stress of poverty, goaded by Lisbeth, and kept
by her in blinders, as a horse is, to hinder it from seeing to the
right and left of its road, lashed on by that hard woman, the
personification of Necessity, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born
poet and dreamer, had gone on from conception to execution, and
overleaped, without sounding it, the gulf that divides these two
hemispheres of Art. To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a
delightful occupation. It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the
life of a courtesan who follows her own fancy. The work then floats in
all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the
fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juices of a fruit
enjoyed in anticipation.
The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as
a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But
gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting
it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every
morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking
it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be
instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of
this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in
sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in
painting to every memory, in music to every heart!--This is the task
of execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward
and obey the brain. But the brain has no more a creative power at
command than love has a perennial spring.
The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which
makes a mother--that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly
understood--the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so
difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the
opportunity of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor's edge,
she is in the air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a
crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is
a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the
sportsman's despair. And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike
dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are
often broken by it. A great poet of our day has said in speaking of
this overwhelming labor, "I sit down to it in despair, but I leave it
with regret." Be it known to all who are ignorant! If the artist does
not throw himself into his work as Curtius sprang into the gulf, as a
soldier leads a forlorn hope without a moment's thought, and if when
he is in the crater he does not dig on as a miner does when the earth
has fallen in on him; if he contemplates the difficulties before him
instead of conquering them one by one, like the lovers in fairy tales,
who to win their princesses overcome ever new enchantments, the work
remains incomplete; it perishes in the studio where creativeness
becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own
talent.
Rossini, a brother genius to Raphael, is a striking instance in his
poverty-stricken youth, compared with his latter years of opulence.
This is the reason why the same prize, the same triumph, the same bays
are awarded to great poets and to great generals.
Wenceslas, by nature a dreamer, had expended so much energy in
production, in study, and in work under Lisbeth's despotic rule, that
love and happiness resulted in reaction. His real character
reappeared, the weakness, recklessness, and indolence of the Sarmatian
returned to nestle in the comfortable corners of his soul, whence the
schoolmaster's rod had routed them.
For the first few months the artist adored his wife. Hortense and
Wenceslas abandoned themselves to the happy childishness of a
legitimate and unbounded passion. Hortense was the first to release
her husband from his labors, proud to triumph over her rival, his Art.
And, indeed, a woman's caresses scare away the Muse, and break down
the sturdy, brutal resolution of the worker.
Six or seven months slipped by, and the artist's fingers had forgotten
the use of the modeling tool. When the need for work began to be felt,
when the Prince de Wissembourg, president of the committee of
subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas spoke the inevitable
byword of the idler, "I am just going to work on it," and he lulled
his dear Hortense with fallacious promises and the magnificent schemes
of the artist as he smokes. Hortense loved her poet more than ever;
she dreamed of a sublime statue of Marshal Montcornet. Montcornet
would be the embodied ideal of bravery, the type of the cavalry
officer, of courage _a la Murat_. Yes, yes; at the mere sight of that
statue all the Emperor's victories were to seem a foregone conclusion.
And then such workmanship! The pencil was accommodating and answered
to the word.
By way of a statue the result was a delightful little Wenceslas.
When the progress of affairs required that he should go to the studio
at le Gros-Caillou to mould the clay and set up the life-size model,
Steinbock found one day that the Prince's clock required his presence
in the workshop of Florent and Chanor, where the figures were being
finished; or, again, the light was gray and dull; to-day he had
business to do, to-morrow they had a family dinner, to say nothing of
indispositions of mind and body, and the days when he stayed at home
to toy with his adored wife.
Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg was obliged to be angry to get the
clay model finished; he declared that he must put the work into other
hands. It was only by dint of endless complaints and much strong
language that the committee of subscribers succeeded in seeing the
plaster-cast. Day after day Steinbock came home, evidently tired,
complaining of this "hodman's work" and his own physical weakness.
During that first year the household felt no pinch; the Countess
Steinbock, desperately in love with her husband cursed the War
Minister. She went to see him; she told him that great works of art
were not to be manufactured like cannon; and that the State--like
Louis XIV., Francis I., and Leo X.--ought to be at the beck and call
of genius. Poor Hortense, believing she held a Phidias in her embrace,
had the sort of motherly cowardice for her Wenceslas that is in every
wife who carries her love to the pitch of idolatry.
"Do not be hurried," said she to her husband, "our whole future life
is bound up with that statue. Take your time and produce a
masterpiece."
She would go to the studio, and then the enraptured Steinbock wasted
five hours out of seven in describing the statue instead of working at
it. He thus spent eighteen months in finishing the design, which to
him was all-important.
When the plaster was cast and the model complete, poor Hortense, who
had looked on at her husband's toil, seeing his health really suffer
from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor's frame and arms and hands
--Hortense thought the result admirable. Her father, who knew nothing
of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a
triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by
them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a
favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.
Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon
took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were
indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried
to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a
newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy. Stidmann, the best of
good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was
contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works
in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be
the test.
"In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble," wrote Claude Vignon, "a
masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful. The plaster
is the manuscript, the marble is the book."
So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son.
The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.
The clock for the Prince and the price of the statue paid off the
young couple's debts. Steinbock had acquired fashionable habits; he
went to the play, to the opera; he talked admirably about art; and in
the eyes of the world he maintained his reputation as a great artist
by his powers of conversation and criticism. There are many clever men
in Paris who spend their lives in talking themselves out, and are
content with a sort of drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating
these emasculated but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard
work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its
difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his
will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew
swiftly away at the sight of this effete lover.
Sculpture--like dramatic art--is at once the most difficult and the
easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is
done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a
woman--this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of
sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men.
Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles,
Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton,
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an
achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a
man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized
Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.
Superficial thinkers--and there are many in the artist world--have
asserted that sculpture lives only by the nude, that it died with the
Greeks, and that modern vesture makes it impossible. But, in the first
place, the Ancients have left sublime statues entirely clothed--the
_Polyhymnia_, the _Julia_, and others, and we have not found one-tenth
of all their works; and then, let any lover of art go to Florence and
see Michael Angelo's _Penseroso_, or to the Cathedral of Mainz, and
behold the _Virgin_ by Albert Durer, who has created a living woman
out of ebony, under her threefold drapery, with the most flowing, the
softest hair that ever a waiting-maid combed through; let all the
ignorant flock thither, and they will acknowledge that genius can give
mind to drapery, to armor, to a robe, and fill it with a body, just as
a man leaves the stamp of his individuality and habits of life on the
clothes he wears.
Sculpture is the perpetual realization of the fact which once, and
never again, was, in painting called Raphael!
The solution of this hard problem is to be found only in constant
persevering toil; for, merely to overcome the material difficulties to
such an extent, the hand must be so practised, so dexterous and
obedient, that the sculptor may be free to struggle soul to soul with
the elusive moral element that he has to transfigure as he embodies
it. If Paganini, who uttered his soul through the strings of his
violin, spent three days without practising, he lost what he called
the _stops_ of his instrument, meaning the sympathy between the wooden
frame, the strings, the bow, and himself; if he had lost this
alliance, he would have been no more than an ordinary player.
Perpetual work is the law of art, as it is the law of life, for art is
idealized creation. Hence great artists and perfect poets wait neither
for commission nor for purchasers. They are constantly creating
--to-day, to-morrow, always. The result is the habit of work, the
unfailing apprehension of the difficulties which keep them in close
intercourse with the Muse and her productive forces. Canova lived in
his studio, as Voltaire lived in his study; and so must Homer and
Phidias have lived.
While Lisbeth kept Wenceslas Steinbock in thraldom in his garret, he
was on the thorny road trodden by all these great men, which leads to
the Alpine heights of glory. Then happiness, in the person of
Hortense, had reduced the poet to idleness--the normal condition of
all artists, since to them idleness is fully occupied. Their joy is
such as that of the pasha of a seraglio; they revel with ideas, they
get drunk at the founts of intellect. Great artists, such as
Steinbock, wrapped in reverie, are rightly spoken of as dreamers.
They, like opium-eaters, all sink into poverty, whereas if they had
been kept up to the mark by the stern demands of life, they might have
been great men.
At the same time, these half-artists are delightful; men like them and
cram them with praise; they even seem superior to the true artists,
who are taxed with conceit, unsociableness, contempt of the laws of
society. This is why: Great men are the slaves of their work. Their
indifference to outer things, their devotion to their work, make
simpletons regard them as egotists, and they are expected to wear the
same garb as the dandy who fulfils the trivial evolutions called
social duties. These men want the lions of the Atlas to be combed and
scented like a lady's poodle.
These artists, who are too rarely matched to meet their fellows, fall
into habits of solitary exclusiveness; they are inexplicable to the
majority, which, as we know, consists mostly of fools--of the envious,
the ignorant, and the superficial.
Now you may imagine what part a wife should play in the life of these
glorious and exceptional beings. She ought to be what, for five years,
Lisbeth had been, but with the added offering of love, humble and
patient love, always ready and always smiling.
Hortense, enlightened by her anxieties as a mother, and driven by dire
necessity, had discovered too late the mistakes she had been
involuntarily led into by her excessive love. Still, the worthy
daughter of her mother, her heart ached at the thought of worrying
Wenceslas; she loved her dear poet too much to become his torturer;
and she could foresee the hour when beggary awaited her, her child,
and her husband.
"Come, come, my child," said Lisbeth, seeing the tears in her cousin's
lovely eyes, "you must not despair. A glassful of tears will not buy a
plate of soup. How much do you want?"
"Well, five or six thousand francs."
"I have but three thousand at the most," said Lisbeth. "And what is
Wenceslas doing now?"
"He has had an offer to work in partnership with Stidmann at a table
service for the Duc d'Herouville for six thousand francs. Then
Monsieur Chanor will advance four thousand to repay Monsieur de Lora
and Bridau--a debt of honor."
"What, you have had the money for the statue and the bas-reliefs for
Marshal Montcornet's monument, and you have not paid them yet?"
"For the last three years," said Hortense, "we have spent twelve
thousand francs a year, and I have but a hundred louis a year of my
own. The Marshal's monument, when all the expenses were paid, brought
us no more than sixteen thousand francs. Really and truly, if
Wenceslas gets no work, I do not know what is to become of us. Oh, if
only I could learn to make statues, I would handle the clay!" she
cried, holding up her fine arms.
The woman, it was plain, fulfilled the promise of the girl; there was
a flash in her eye; impetuous blood, strong with iron, flowed in her
veins; she felt that she was wasting her energy in carrying her
infant.
"Ah, my poor little thing! a sensible girl should not marry an artist
till his fortune is made--not while it is still to make."
At this moment they heard voices; Stidmann and Wenceslas were seeing
Chanor to the door; then Wenceslas and Stidmann came in again.
Stidmann, an artist in vogue in the world of journalists, famous
actresses, and courtesans of the better class, was a young man of
fashion whom Valerie much wished to see in her rooms; indeed, he had
already been introduced to her by Claude Vignon. Stidmann had lately
broken off an intimacy with Madame Schontz, who had married some
months since and gone to live in the country. Valerie and Lisbeth,
hearing of this upheaval from Claude Vignon, thought it well to get
Steinbock's friend to visit in the Rue Vanneau.
Stidmann, out of good feeling, went rarely to the Steinbocks'; and as
it happened that Lisbeth was not present when he was introduced by
Claude Vignon, she now saw him for the first time. As she watched this
noted artist, she caught certain glances from his eyes at Hortense,
which suggested to her the possibility of offering him to the Countess
Steinbock as a consolation if Wenceslas should be false to her. In
point of fact, Stidmann was reflecting that if Steinbock were not his
friend, Hortense, the young and superbly beautiful countess, would be
an adorable mistress; it was this very notion, controlled by honor,
that kept him away from the house. Lisbeth was quick to mark the
significant awkwardness that troubles a man in the presence of a woman
with whom he will not allow himself to flirt.
"Very good-looking--that young man," said she in a whisper to
Hortense.
"Oh, do you think so?" she replied. "I never noticed him."
"Stidmann, my good fellow," said Wenceslas, in an undertone to his
friend, "we are on no ceremony, you and I--we have some business to
settle with this old girl."
Stidmann bowed to the ladies and went away.