came near ending in a revolution. It was all because she appeared at le
Bal des Quat'z' Arts in a costume altogether too simple and natural
to suit the prefect of police, who punished her. She was always at
the Salon on receiving-day, and shocked the occupants of the liveried
carriages on the Champs-Elysées with her dancing. In fact, she was
always at the head of everything extraordinary and sensational among the
Bohemians of Paris. But she aged rapidly under her wild life. Her figure
lost its grace, her lovers deserted her, and after her dethronement
as Queen of Bohemia, broken-hearted and poor, she put an end to her
wretched life,--and Paris laughed.
The breaking in of a new girl model is a joy that the students never
permit themselves to miss. Among the many demoiselles who come every
Monday morning are usually one or two that are new. The new one
is accompanied by two or more of her girl friends, who give her
encouragement at the terrible moment when she disrobes. As there are no
dressing-rooms, there can be no privacy. The students gather about and
watch the proceedings with great interest, and make whatever remarks
their deviltry can suggest. This is the supreme test; all the efforts
of the attendant girls are required to hold the new one to her purpose.
When finally, after an inconceivable struggle with her shame, the girl
plunges ahead in reckless haste to finish the job, the students applaud
her roundly.
[Illustration: 0067]
But more torture awaits her. Frightened, trembling, blushing furiously,
she ascends the throne, and innocently assumes the most awkward and
ridiculous poses, forgetting in that terrible moment the poses that she
had learned so well under the tutelage of her friends. It is then that
the fiendishness of the students rises to its greatest height. Dazed and
numb, she hardly comprehends the ordeal through which she is now put.
The students have adopted a grave and serious bearing, and solemnly ask
her to assume the most outlandish and ungraceful poses. Then come long
and mock-earnest arguments about her figure, these arguments having been
carefully learned and rehearsed beforehand. One claims that her waist is
too long and her legs too heavy; another hotly takes the opposite view.
Then they put her through the most absurd evolutions to prove their
points. At last she is made to don her hat and stockings; and the
students form a ring about her and dance and shout until she is ready to
faint.
Of course the studio has a ringleader in all this deviltry,--all studios
have. Joncierge is head of all the mischief in our atelier. There is
no end to his ingenuity in devising new means of torture and fun. His
personations are marvellous. When he imitates Bernhardt, Réjane, or
Calvé, no work can be done in the studio. Gérôme himself is one of his
favorite victims. But Joncierge cannot remain long in one school; the
authorities pass him on as soon as they find that he is really hindering
the work of the students. One day, at Julian's, he took the class
skeleton, and with a cord let the rattling, quivering thing down into
the Rue du Dragon, and frightened the passers out of their wits. As his
father is chef d'orchestre at the Grand Opéra, Joncierge junior learns
all the operas and convulses us with imitations of the singers.
[Illustration: 9070]
Another character in the studio is le jeune Siffert, only twenty-three,
and one of the cleverest of the coming French painters. Recently he
nearly won the Prix de Rome. His specialty is the imitation of the cries
of domestic fowls and animals, and of street venders. Gérôme calls him
"mon fils," and constantly implores him to be serious. I don't see why.
Then there is Fiola, a young giant from Brittany, with a wonderful
facility at drawing. He will suddenly break into a roar, and for an hour
sing one verse of a Brittany chant, driving the other students mad.
Fournier is a little curly-headed fellow from the south, near Valence,
and wears corduroy trousers tucked into top-boots. His greatest delight
is in plaguing the nouveaux. His favorite joke, if the day is dark, is
to send a nouveau to the different ateliers of the Ecole in search of
"le grand réflecteur." The nouveau, thinking that it is a device for
increasing the light, starts out bravely, and presently returns with a
large, heavy box, which, upon its being opened, is found to be filled
with bricks. Then Fournier is happy.
Taton is the butt of the atelier. He is an ingénu, and falls into any
trap set for him. Whenever anything is missing, all pounce upon Taton,
and he is very unhappy.
Haidor, the Turk, suspicious and sullen, also is a butt. Caricatures of
him abundantly adorn the walls, together with the Turkish crescent, and
Turkish ladies executing the _danse du ventre_.
Caricatures of all kinds cover the walls of the atelier, and some are
magnificent, being spared the vandalism that spares nothing else. One,
especially good, represents Kenyon Cox, who studied here.
W------, the student from Nebraska, created a sensation by appearing one
day in the full regalia of a cowboy, including two immense revolvers,
a knife, and a lariat depending from his belt. With the lariat he
astonished and dismayed the dodging Frenchmen by lassoing them at will,
though they exercised their greatest running and dodging agility to
escape. They wanted to know if all Americans went about thus heeled in
America.
There is something uncanny about the little Siamese. He is exceedingly
quiet and works unceasingly. One day, when the common spirit of mischief
was unusually strong among the boys, the bolder ones began to hint at
fun in the direction of the Siamese. He quietly shifted a pair of brass
knuckles from some pocket to a more convenient one, and although it was
done so unostentatiously, the act was observed. He was not disturbed,
and has been left strictly alone ever since.
One day the Italian students took the whole atelier down to a little
restaurant on the Quai des Grands-Augustins and cooked them an excellent
Italian dinner, with Chianti to wash it down. Two Italian street-singers
furnished the music, and Mademoiselle la Modèle danced as only a model
can.
[Illustration: 0072]
TAKING PICTURES TO THE SALON
EVER since New Year's, when Bishop began his great composition for the
Salon, our life at the studio had been sadly disarranged; for Bishop had
so completely buried himself in his work that I was compelled to combine
the functions of cook with those of chambermaid.
[Illustration: 9073]
This double work, with increasing pressure from my modelling, required
longer hours at night and shorter hours in the morning. But I was
satisfied, for this was to be Bishop's masterpiece, and I knew from the
marvellous labor and spirit that he put into the work that something
good would result.
The name of his great effort was "The Suicide." It was like him to
choose so grisly a subject, for he had a lawless nature and rebelled
against the commonplace. Ghastly subjects had always fascinated him.
From the very beginning of our domestic partnership he had shown a taste
for grim and forbidding things. Often, upon returning home, I had
found him making sketches of armless beggars, twisted cripples, and
hunchbacks, and, worse than all, disease-marked vagabonds. A skull-faced
mortal in the last stages of consumption was a joy to him. It was
useless for me to protest that he was failing to find the best in him
by developing his unwholesome tastes. "Wait," he would answer patiently;
"the thing that has suffering and character, that is out of the
ordinary, it is the thing that will strike and live."
The suicide was a young woman gowned in black; she was poised in the act
of plunging into the Seine; a babe was tightly clutched to her breast;
and behind the unspeakable anguish in her eyes was a hungry hope, a
veiled assurance of the peace to come. It fascinated and haunted me
beyond all expression. It was infinitely sad, tragic, and terrible, for
it reached with a sure touch to the very lowest depth of human agony.
The scene was the dead of night, and only the dark towers of Notre-Dame
broke the even blackness of the sky, save for a faint glow that touched
the lower stretches from the distant lamps of the city. In the darkness
only the face of the suicide was illuminated, and that but dimly, though
sufficiently to disclose the wonderfully complex emotions that crowded
upon her soul. This illumination came from three ghastly green lights
on the water below. The whole tone of the picture was a black, sombre
green.
That was all after the painting had been finished. The making of it is
a story by itself. From the first week in January to the first week in
March the studio was a junk-shop of the most uncanny sort. In order to
pose his model in the act of plunging into the river, Bishop had rigged
up a tackle, which, depending from the ceiling, caught the model at the
waist, after the manner of a fire-escape belt, and thus half suspended
her. He secured his green tone and night effect by covering nearly all
the skylight and the window with green tissue-paper, besides covering
the floor and walls with green rugs and draperies.
The model behaved very well in her unusual pose, but the babe--that was
the rub. The model did not happen to possess one, and Bishop had not yet
learned the difficulties attending the procuring and posing of infants.
In the first place, he found scores of babes, but not a mother, however
poor, willing to permit her babe to be used as a model, and a model for
so gruesome a situation. But after he had almost begun to despair, and
had well advanced with his woman model, an Italian woman came one day
and informed him that she could get an infant from a friend of her
sister's, if he would pay her one franc a day for the use of it. Bishop
eagerly made the bargain. Then a new series of troubles began.
The babe objected most emphatically to the arrangement. It refused to
nestle in the arms of a strange woman about to plunge into eternity, and
the strange woman had no knack at all in soothing the infant's outraged
feelings. Besides, the model was unable to meet the youngster's frequent
demands for what it was accustomed to have, and the mother, who was
engaged elsewhere, had to be drummed up at exasperatingly frequent
intervals. All this told upon both Bishop and Francinette, the model,
and they took turns in swearing at the unruly brat, Bishop in English
and Francinette in French. Neither knew how to swear in Italian, or
things might have been different. I happened in upon these scenes once
in a while, and my enjoyment so exasperated Bishop that he threw paint-
tubes, bottles, and everything else at me that he could reach, and once
or twice locked me out of the studio, compelling me to kick my shins in
the cold street for hours at a time. On such occasions I would stand in
the court looking up at our window, expecting momentarily that the babe
would come flying down from that direction.
When Bishop was not sketching and painting he was working up his
inspiration; and that was worst of all. His great effort was to get
himself into a suicidal mood. He would sit for hours on the floor, his
face between his knees, imagining all sorts of wrongs and slights that
the heartless world had put upon him. His husband had beaten him and
gone off with another woman; he had tried with all his woman-heart to
bear the cross; hunger came to pinch and torture him; he sought work,
failed to find it; sought charity, failed to find that; his babe
clutched at his empty breasts and cried piteously for food; his heart
broken, all hope gone, even God forgetting him, he thought of the dark,
silent river, the great cold river, that has brought everlasting peace
to countless thousands of suffering young mothers like him; he went to
the river; he looked back upon the faint glow of the city's lights in
the distance; he cast his glance up to the grim towers of Notre-Dame,
standing cold and pitiless against the blacker sky; he looked down upon
the black Seine, the great writhing python, so willing to swallow him
up; he clutched his babe to his breast, gasped a prayer....
At other times he would haunt the Morgue and study the faces of those
who had died by felo-de-se; he would visit the hospitals and study the
dying; he would watch the actions and read the disordered thoughts of
lunatics; he would steal along the banks; of the river on dark nights
and study the silent mystery and tragedy of it, and the lights that gave
shape to its terrors. In the end I grew afraid of him.
But all things have an end. Bishop's great work was finished in the
first days of March. Slowly, but surely, his native exuberance of
spirits returned. He would eat and sleep like a rational being. His eyes
lost their haunted look, and his cheeks filled out and again took on
their healthy hue. And then he invited his friends and some critics to
inspect his composition, and gave a great supper in celebration of the
completion of his task. Very generous praise was given him. Among the
critics and masters came Gérôme and Laurens at his earnest supplication,
and it was good to see their delight and surprise, and to note that
they had no fault to find,--was not the picture finished, and would
not criticism from them at this juncture have hurt the boy without
accomplishing any good? Well, the painting secured honorable mention in
the exhibition, and five years later the French government completed
the artist's happiness by buying one of his pictures for the Luxembourg
Gallery.
But about the picture: the canvas was eight by ten feet, and a frame
had to be procured for it. Now, frames are expensive, and Bishop had
impoverished himself for material and model hire. So he employed a
carpenter in the court to make a frame of thick pine boards, which we
painted a deep black, with a gold cornice. The whole cost was twenty-
five francs.
Next day we hired a good-sized _voiture-à-bras_ at eight sous an hour,
and proceeded to get the tableau down to the court. It was a devilish
job, for the ceilings were low and the stairs narrow and crooked. The
old gentleman below us was nearly decapitated by poking his head out of
his door at an inopportune moment, and the lady below him almost wiped
the still wet babe from the canvas with her gown as she tried to squeeze
past. The entire court turned out to wish Bishop good success.
The last day on which pictures are admitted to the Salon, there to await
the merciless decision of the judges, is a memorable one. In sumptuous
studios, in wretched garrets; amid affluence, amid scenes of squalor and
hunger, artists of all kinds and degrees have been squeezing thousands
of tubes and daubing thousands of canvases in preparation for the
great day. From every corner of Paris, from every quarter of France
and Europe, the canvases come pouring into the Salon. Every conceivable
idea, fad, and folly is represented in the collection, and most of them
are poor; but in each and every one a fond hope centres, an ambition is
staked.
Strange as it may seem, most of these pictures are worked upon until the
very last day; indeed, many of them are snatched unfinished from their
easels, to receive the finishing touches in the dust and confusion and
deafening noise of the great hall where they are all dumped like so much
merchandise. We saw one artist who, not having finished his picture,
was putting on the final touches as it was borne ahead of him along the
street on the back of a commissionnaire.
[Illustration: 0079]
And all this accounts for the endless smearing everywhere noticeable,
and for the frantic endeavors of the artists to repair the damage at the
last moment.
One great obstacle to poor artists is the rigid rule requiring that all
tableaux shall be framed. These frames are costly. As a result, some
artists paint pictures of the same size year after year, so that the
same frame may be used for all, and others resort to such makeshifts
as Bishop was compelled to employ. But these makeshifts must be
artistically done, or the canvases are ignored by the judges. These
efforts give rise to many startling effects.
It was not very long, after an easy pull over the Boulevard St.-Germain,
before we crossed the Seine at the Pont de la Concorde, traversed the
Place de la Concorde, and turned into the Champs-Elysées, where, not far
away, loomed the Palais des Beaux-Arts, in which the Salon is annually
held in March. The Avenue des Champs-Elysées, crowded as it usually is
in the afternoons, was now jammed with cabs, omnibuses, hand-carts, and
all sorts of moving vans, mingling with the fashionable carriages on
their way to the Bois. The proletarian vehicles contained art,--art
by the ton. The upper decks of the omnibuses were crowded with artists
carrying their pictures because they could not afford more than the
three-sous fare. And such an assortment of artists!
There were some in affluent circumstances, who rolled along voluptuously
in cabs on an expenditure of thirty-five francs, holding their precious
tableaux and luxuriantly smoking cigarettes.
[Illustration: 0081]
The commissionnaires had a great day of it. They are the ones usually
seen asleep on the street corners, where, when awake, they varnish boots
or bear loads by means of a contrivance on their backs. On this day
every one of them in Paris was loaded down with pictures.
Many were the hard-up students, like Bishop, tugging hand-carts, or
pairing to carry by hand pictures too large to be borne by a single
person. And great fun they got out of it all.
Opposite the Palais de Glace was a perfect sea of vehicles, artists,
porters, and policemen, all inextricably tangled up, all shouting or
groaning, and wet pictures suffering. One artist nearly had a fit when
he saw a full moon wiped off his beautiful landscape, and he would have
killed the guilty porter had not the students interfered. Portraits
of handsome ladies with smudged noses and smeared eyes were common.
Expensive gold frames lost large sections of their corners. But still
they were pouring in.
With infinite patience and skill Bishop gradually worked his _voiture-à-
bras_ through the maze, and soon his masterpiece was in the crushing
mass at the wide entrance to the Salon. There it was seized and rushed
along, and Bishop received in return a slip of paper bearing a number.
While within the building we reconnoitred. Amid the confusion of
howling inspectors, straining porters bearing heavy pictures, carpenters
erecting partitions, and a dust-laden atmosphere, numerous artists were
working with furious haste upon their unfinished productions. Some were
perched upon ladders, others squatted upon the floor, and one had his
model posing nude to the waist; she was indifferent to the attention
that she received. Thoughtful mistresses stood affectionately beside
their artist amants, furnishing them with delicate edibles and lighting
cigarettes for them.
Some of the pictures were so large that they were brought in rolled
up. One artist had made himself into a carpenter to mount his mammoth
picture. Frightful and impossible paintings were numerous, but the
painter of each expected a _première médaille d'honneur_.
It was nearing six o'clock, the closing hour. Chic demoiselle artistes
came dashing up in cabs, bringing with them, to insure safe delivery,
their everlasting still-life subjects.
Shortly before six the work in the building was suspended by a commotion
outside. It was a contingent of students from the Beaux-Arts marching up
the Champs-Elysées, yelling and dancing like maniacs and shaking their
heavy sticks, the irresistible Sarah Brown leading as drum-maior. She
was gorgeously arrayed in the most costly silks and laces, and looked
a dashing Amazon. Then, as always, she was perfectly happy with her
beloved _étudiants_, who worshipped her as a goddess. She halted them in
front of the building, where they formed a circle round her, and there,
as director of ceremonies, she required them to sing chansons, dance,
make comic speeches, and "blaguer" the arriving artists.
The last van was unloaded; the great doors closed with a bang, and the
stirring day was ended. All the students, even the porters, then joined
hands and went singing, howling, and skipping down the Champs-Elysées,
and wishing one another success at the coming exhibition. At the Place
de la Concorde we met a wild-eyed artist running frantically toward the
Salon with his belated picture. The howls of encouragement that greeted
him lent swifter wings to his legs.
The pictures finally installed, a jury composed of France's greatest
masters pass upon them. The endless procession of paintings is passed
before them; the raising of their hands means approval, silence means
condemnation; and upon those simple acts depends the happiness or
despair of thousands. But depression does not long persist, and the
judgment is generally accepted in the end as just and valuable. For the
students, in great part, flock to the country on sketching tours, for
which arrangements had been already made; and there the most deeply
depressed spirits must revive and the habit of work and hope come into
play. Year after year the same artists strive for recognition at the
Salon; and finally, when they fail at that, they reflect that there is
a great world outside of the Salon, where conscientious effort is
acceptable. And, after all, a medal at the Salon is not the only reward
that life has to offer.
And then, it is not always good for a student to be successful from the
start. Just as his social environment in Paris tries his strength and
determines the presence or absence of qualities that are as useful to
a successful career as special artistic qualifications, so the trial by
fire in the Salon exhibitions hardens and toughens him for the serious
work of his life ahead. Too early success has ruined more artists than
it has helped. It is interesting also to observe that, as a rule, the
students who eventually secure the highest places in art are those whose
difficulties have been greatest. The lad with the pluck to live on a
crust in a garret, and work and study under conditions of poverty and
self-denial that would break any but the stoutest heart, is the one
from whom to expect renown in the years to come. Ah, old Paris is the
harshest but wisest of mothers!
"_H! ah! vive les Quat'z' Arts! Au Molin Rouge--en route!_" the lamplit
streets of Paris as cab after cab and bus after 'bus went thundering
across town toward Montmartre, heavily freighted with brilliantly
costumed revellers of les Quat'z' Arts. Parisians ran from their dinner-
tables to the windows and balconies, blasé boulevardiers paused in their
evening stroll or looked up from their papers at the _café_-tables,
waiters and swearing cabbies and yelling newsboys stopped in the midst
of their various duties, and all knowingly shook their heads, "_Ah, ce
sont les Quat'z' Arts!_"?
For to-night was the great annual ball of the artists, when all artistic
Paris crawls from its mysterious depths to revel in a splendid carnival
possible only to the arts. Every spring, after the pictures have been
sent to the Salon, and before the students have scattered for the summer
vacation, the artists of Paris and the members of all the ateliers of
the four arts--painting, sculpture, architecture, and engraving--combine
their forces in producing a spectacle of regal splendor, seen nowhere
else in the world; and long are the weeks and hard the work and vast the
ingenuity devoted to preparations,--the designing of costumes and the
building of gorgeous floats.