Mes maîtres et mes amis

A Family of Fourierist Republicans, VI: My Masters and My Friends

The Milliet Family

A FAMILY OF FOURIERIST REPUBLICANS

the Milliet family

VI. — my masters and my friends

1863-1868

I — My Friends of Geneva

ROEHRICH. — BALAVOINE. — DORET. — THE DARIERS. — JULES NICOLE.

I have kept a grateful memory of the Academy, today the University, of Geneva, for the instruction I received there from masters who were superior men, as much by their goodness and devotion to their pupils as by the solidity of their learning.

And I have kept memories sweeter still of the Society of Belles-Lettres, where I found very precious sympathies among comrades who always knew how to merit the esteem and the affection of those who knew them. I should like to give the young Parisians an idea of what the young Genevans of my day were like. I do not believe I am mistaken in saying that my friends represented excellently that Protestant milieu, composed of conscientious students, naturally honest, and whose moral sense was every day refined by culture.

What a contrast between the coarse braggarts of Paris, among whom I was about to find myself transplanted, and my dear Genevan theologians!

The puritan austerity of Calvinist manners in no way prevented my friends from joking with wit, nor from amusing themselves with all the exuberance of their age. Their cheerfulness and their wholesome gaiety had that happy frankness of people who have nothing to hide. Pure souls resemble those transparent waters at the bottom of which one sees the bed of bright, clean pebbles over which they glide.

The Belles-Lettres societies of Geneva, of Lausanne, and of Neuchâtel met at least once a year in a fraternal festival. Often the meeting place chosen was one of the cheerful little towns strung like pearls in the nests of greenery all around the lake of Geneva. Rolle, for example, was often chosen, and, for two or three days, this retreat, usually so calm, filled with the dances, the songs, and the cries of our joyous bands. A literary and musical performance for the benefit of the poor was followed by a grand ball, in which all the young girls of the country took part, accompanied by their mothers.

One had to see Charles and Albert Darier, the two handsomest boys of the Society, their brows crowned with moss, leading the procession at the head of the antique bacchanals. One stopped in the public square to perform the picoulet, a Belles-Lettres dance which has more in common with those of savages than any other known dance.

(1) It was for one of these festivals that Marc Doret composed a song whose tune is that of The Town of Rolle, whose refrain was a hundred times taken up in chorus in a lively allegro:

Of little white wine (twice),
The town of Rolle,
Upon my word,
Has some famous little white wine!

What charmed us still more, although in a half-unconscious manner, was to feel consolidating in these festivals the invisible bonds that unite comrades occupied with the same studies. Already, before knowing one another personally, we felt for each other that sympathy and that affectionate benevolence which ought to exist between all men.

In France, in Paris above all, students seem to lack a little of this spirit of union, which appears due to life in associations. Perhaps too they do not maintain friendly relations frequently enough with the analogous societies of the other universities.

At the Gleyre studio, the apprentice artists, my new comrades, were much less corrupt than they would have wished to make one believe; I soon perceived that these braggarts of vice were posing for the benefit of subjects who did not respect them at all. But their factitious and forced gaiety was none the less that of men jaded before their age; they took pleasure in dirty jokes, in mean and stupid hazing. I felt myself uprooted.

It is only among my friends of Geneva that I found a complete intimacy. We spent together the happiest years of our existence, and our charming memories of youth are bonds that nothing can break, whatever divergences of opinion there may be. The disagreement, whose gravity I would not wish to dissimulate, bears solely on questions of metaphysics. On the other hand, numerous tendencies have remained common to us, and first of all a sincere desire, a constant effort toward the perfecting of oneself and of others. My friends taught me by their example tolerance, sympathy even for those who, by diverse paths, walk as we do with their eyes fixed on an ideal of goodness and of justice. Whether one calls it God or Humanity, this ideal remains the same for all honest people.

Without having the pretension of equaling such models, I wish nevertheless that one would kindly apply to me a little the proverb: “Tell me whom you keep company with, and I will tell you who you are.” What I can affirm is that I have been happy, that I blossom, every time I have had the sweetness of breathing near my friends that atmosphere of healthy and strong probity, of natural benevolence and of sincere cordiality.

1

When, in 1856, the king of Prussia threatened to retake Neuchâtel, and when the royalists of that canton attempted a coup, the Swiss Confederation rose up entirely in a magnificent surge of patriotic solidarity, ready to repel the powerful invader. At Geneva, the students of the Academy at once constituted a corps of volunteers, under the orders of General Klapka. The Society of Zofingue put up for competition a patriotic song to the tune of “Rufst du mein Vaterland,” and it was the young Belles-Lettres member Henri Rœhrich, a student of philosophy, who won the prize. Here are a few verses of this song, which has become the national anthem of French-speaking Switzerland:

O independent mountains,
Repeat our strains
Our free songs!
To thee, fatherland,
Beloved Switzerland,
The blood, the life
Of thy children.

Let us guard with pride
The tree planted at Grütli
Liberty!
May from age to age,
Despite the storm,
This heritage
Be respected.

Rœhrich, at the time when he was still a simple student of theology, already brilliantly displayed his qualities as musician, poet, and philosopher. (1) We had named him president of the Society of Belles-Lettres, because no one else could have rightfully assumed it. It is with such men as with liquids: they quite naturally find their level. Rœhrich’s comrades willingly accepted that legitimate authority which is given by elevation of mind and uprightness of character.

2

Balavoine, today pastor and professor of moral philosophy at the Faculty of Theology of Geneva, was finishing his studies. He was a tall young man with a well-built head, an open countenance, a witty and somewhat mocking smile, an easy speech, a subtle and refined mind. In our discussions, his tendency toward controversy translated itself into certain paradoxical theses, which he launched boldly and sustained with much wit. His religious convictions never had anything narrowly dogmatic about them. I am no doubt mistaken, but I have often had the idea that, had he been raised in another milieu, his nature would perhaps have inclined toward skepticism. (1) Be that as it may, his pretty letters of youth will show the precocious gravity of his philosophical mind.

(1) “Our dear Rœhrich is more than a philosopher, he is a perfectly beautiful soul, a generous and good heart, who fears the servant of God. The portion is magnificent enough as it is.” Note by Jules Nicole.

(1) A recent letter from my friend seems to confirm my supposition: “Assuredly, I have always cast about with an activity of thought apt to make me see difficulties everywhere, objections, the for and the against. Vanquished under one form, I found them being reborn under another… I remain like a public square where problems come to present themselves whenever it pleases them. Happily the sun has risen, and often for me after the darkness, for the truth in me has recovered its strength. The truth which makes itself known, of those which I lack. In wishing always to defend others from skepticism, I myself have always escaped. On the last rung set in place, I see below the fogs of doubt climbing irresistibly, laughing or sifting themselves. The author living in a Christian manner resumes, but I know that the ladder mounts up to the sun.”

II. Balavoine to Paul

Carouge, 10 October ‘63.

… I shall not tell you that you are the new honorary member of the Society of Belles-Lettres and that the Ribbon of honor has been conferred on you; Nicole must have told you all that when announcing his departure to you… And as for me, I am leaving in a month. Everyone departs here below; life is but a series of departures; man is a bird that goes from branch to branch, until he reaches the one from which the wind carries him off toward Eternity. Do you make such sad reflections in that great city, where everything distracts and dissipates thought? Do you not make sadder ones still?

Since your departure, I have worked like one of those fellahs who dig the Suez canal; they advance stone by stone, yet sweat no less, and never touch their pay. Theology is like the sand of the desert; the slightest wind comes to destroy all the works that have been built up there for centuries; one must always begin again, and those who set their hand to the task risk everything; the slightest error leads them to the abyss, and their soul dries up at these fatiguing and endless labors. But you understand nothing of this probably; let it be said without angering you, let us pass on to something else.

Do you know that I was re-elected censor in the month of September, for lack of anything better and because Nicole could not accept.

There follows the account of an unhappy altercation between two students and of the expulsion of one of them.

But for him to be expelled, they had to walk over the bodies of Nicole and myself: Nicole, a biting and dangerous orator, I, in censorship embarrassing and incorruptible; so much so that, despite their hateful efforts, the expulsion of M., presented illegally without my knowledge and voted conditionally, could not become an accomplished fact, and the resignation of M. was not accepted. (1) It is to finish with a flourish, but also with a disagreeable affair. When, in a future now very near, Belles-Lettres shall be for me no more than a memory, I shall never be able to look upon it without first seeing, at the entrance of this gallery of joyous and naïve facts, an ugly episode all swollen with malice and hateful passion. I shall always have to see that in order to be able to shake the hand of my friends of study, in order to sing again with them the Gaudeamus, to recite with them Othello or Britannicus, to love them and rejoice in them in the past and to let resound in my ear those old refrains of a time that is no more. (1)

But let us not regret, my dear; God created us to look forward. Let us hope, since God is love. Ah! Milliet, my dear friend, my old comrade, may the contrary always bring you back to the contrary, the imperfect to the perfect, evil to good, the magnificent to the Eternal, the world to God, in order to love him and give yourself to him, and you will be happy, and you will live in time and in Eternity.

Fraternal greetings and a handshake. Farewell, H. E. BALAVOINE.

(1) If I recall these facts, of little importance in themselves, it is to indicate to the French reader what the student Societies were in Switzerland. There we made a true and very useful apprenticeship in public life.

(1) Most happily the ugly episode has long been forgotten, while the memory of our sweet years of study and friendship still remains alive.

Balavoine to Paul

                    Strasbourg, 3 December 1863.

My dear Milliet, I am between the anvil and the hammer; I come from Charybdis and run toward Scylla; I have finished my examinations and I am leaving for Paris. My situation has nothing, as you see, particularly gay about it, when one is on the point of no longer being able to write a few words to oneself; and, when you reflect that everything fails me here, my parents, my friends, my habits and my ways of being, you will understand my letter and will hasten to answer me.

Yes, I am at Strasbourg, a stupid town, I assure you, picturesquely situated in a plain without horizon, but agreeably furrowed by rivers bordered with muddy hills. They say the country makes the man; it is possible; in that case, I must be somewhat flat here, or shall not be long in becoming so. Unfortunately, man does not make the country, otherwise I should already have had brought here and there fine and good mountains, a lake like that of Geneva, a Rhône, etc.—in short, all that would be needed to enliven a quasi-Genevan like me, for so far we have at Strasbourg only one clamor: the bell of the cathedral, and only one river, the Rhine, and even that is a league away. I nevertheless hastened to go and watch it flow, but the waters are very low now and the bed striped with sandbanks does not allow one to glimpse and admire at a single glance the majesty of the great river. I have also seen that famous bridge of Kehl where the French railways connect with those of Germany; it is very curious, and a half-hour’s work, even five minutes, would suffice to destroy the communication.

The other curiosity is the cathedral. What an imposing edifice! The exterior and above all the façade are of a richness, of a finish of execution, of a striking beauty. Within, everything changes; severity gives way to gothic luxury, and, under these gigantic vaults, the soul, moved and trembling, rises toward the heavens. The impression is powerful: this obscurity, this silence, this breath of the past that runs beneath the vaults—all is interesting and attracts me; I go there very often; I shall never have seen anything so great. The bell-tower, for its part, is very curious, very beautiful, very delicate; it is all chiseled, all cut out, all pierced through with light.

The third curiosity of Strasbourg is myself, and as it is a passing curiosity, I speak to you of it while there is still time, for it is said that I am going to Dresden with the aim of learning German, and there one lives…

And you? what are you doing? Are you becoming an accomplished painter, do you make pictures for auction, or do you devote yourself to fantasies for art? Do you read the poets? do you cultivate the philosophers? Do you follow the Parisian fashion and frequent the Idler? It would be quite possible and perhaps happy for you, for idling, practiced within certain limits, is a necessary relaxation to keep for the mind all its verve, for the imagination all its freshness, for the soul all its power, and I know this by experience. By dint of being tense, anxious, worked over, I lose all that I had and I do not find what I seek. (1) One must not abuse one’s body, nor one’s mind, nor one’s heart, on pain of withering and stupefying them.

You see that I preach distraction today, and it is probably because I can take no more of it. Man has an inclination to extol to the skies the goods that he lacks.

You asked me, my dear Milliet, to give you news of our Belles-Lettres friends. I know nothing of Nicole, not even his address. Doret has begun his second year of theology. Rœhrich is pastor at Stockholm; he draws a very fine salary and enjoys four months’ leave during the summer season. He is still your old and affectionate fellow Belles-Lettres member, an old friend, who always thinks with pleasure of those amusing evenings which everything conspired to make joyous. Write to me; it will be a good deed.

(1) One will note in all these letters the effects of intellectual overwork rendered necessary by the examinations.

                            Dresden, 9 March '64.

… I have visited the picture gallery; you know how many masterpieces there are there. I went six or seven times. I have not yet seen everything, and all that I have seen I have not understood. The Madonnas (Holbein, Raphael, Murillo, etc.) leave me cold; what moved me most was a Madonna by Correggio. Ah! that picture is magnificent! There is also there a Saint Sebastian, a handsome young man, nude and bound to a tree, who dies struck to the heart, a fine smile toward the sky upon a face where suffering so visibly gives way to ecstasy, that the spectator feels himself moved by envy and by regret. Such paintings seem to me made rather for amateurs than for artists. It seems to me that, if I were a painter and visited this gallery, I should break, on leaving, my easel and my brushes.

I should like you to be here, however, to discourse with me on all these pictures and help me to understand them by saying to me: There is where the difficulty has been overcome; there, it is only a cliché, but the stroke of genius is here.

From afar one can hardly talk painting, still less philosophy or theology. You asked me, however, the subject of my thesis: it is Calvin’s theory on Justification by Faith. Do you know these questions? No. So much the worse,… or so much the better!

It matters little, moreover, whether you know a word of theology, provided you know what Religion is. For that is where the salvation of man lies, of that which in us is eternal, of our nobility, of our greatness. Conversation with God gives us eternal life. Seek the Eternal and you shall live. I preached Sunday on this text, but I cannot let you enjoy the sermon; it would be too long, and, when one is at the other end, one must know how to restrain oneself.

Let us restrain ourselves, then, but let us not forget ourselves. Give me news of yourself soon. Speak to me of Nicole, and wherever he may be, present him my friendly regards.

3

Another poet and a philosopher. A few fragments of the letters of Marc Doret will suffice to make known this amiable and cheerful mind, this excellent heart. The sweetness and the unalterable benevolence of a happy father of a numerous and fine family, the uprightness of his judgment, the wisdom of his counsels have created around the venerated pastor an atmosphere of a beneficent charm. (1)

The following letter reveals to us a tender and profound feeling for nature, which reminds me of that of Saint Francis of Assisi, and which seduces me by its affinities with pantheism.

(1) Marc Doret has published an excellent book entitled The Protestant Convictions (H. Robert, publisher, 1908).

… Why yes! I had weighed anchor for Rheinfelden when you landed at Geneva. At Rheinfelden one has, to cultivate one’s aesthetic sense: 1° an orchestra of which I have no difficulty speaking ill, which sometimes abuses the right to assassinate the most beautiful things that one can make heard; 2° constructions in the old-German style, of which some do not lack character, although thanks to the very red of which they are built, they easily take on a monumental aspect. But how pedantic the German is! Where one little turret would suffice and would close off the prettiest scene, he notches the gables and the landings and the pepper-pot turrets and the staircases—everything must figure: hence corners and recesses, parts that jut out on every face, hence the points of view spoiled by lack of simplicity. When one counts the orchestra, many pretty motifs, but too many. 3° A gentle nature, very gentle, which contrasts with the hardness of the architecture. It seems that they wished to correct the sweetness of the one by the angles of the other.

A great amphitheater closed in by wooded hills, beech woods, a few of fir, but rare, on which the morning light and the slanting sun of evening produce the most beautiful effects. — They are deep veins, warm, of varied and always rich tones, with the black patches of the undersides and the streaks of the white trunks against the greens, heapings, billowings of golden greens, at once massive and light. The northern half of the amphitheater is from Baden, the other is Swiss. Between the two there is the Rhine “tranquil and strong,” as the other one says. — Pardon, I remember that Boileau says “tranquil and proud”—so much the worse! I prefer my version. A beautiful sheet of water that one sees almost from the entrance, sometimes calm like a lake, sometimes lightly bubbling, when the bed is rocky… and always singing, as though more pressed to give back the spectators.

It is great, it is calm, it is strong; one does not weary of watching it pass and of listening to it sing. And one makes all sorts of reflections, conscious or unconscious, which give a particular impression, that of being swept along. — One tests oneself in face of the glaciers. These enormous masses which conceal life, but let it be glimpsed, crush and absorb. One is nothing before them; the more one measures oneself against their size, the more one feels oneself disappearing, and as, after all, one tells oneself that one comes from those hidden forces, that one is earth and rock and water, that one will one day return into those elements, one returns into them in advance, one lets oneself be snatched up, stunned, swept away; one returns into what is called the bosom of nature; one sinks into it with an intimate enjoyment of telling oneself that one is nonetheless something else, since one knows that one is absorbed, that one lets oneself be voluntarily devoured and that soon one will come back from it.

If Pascal had accompanied de Saussure to Mont Blanc, he would have gathered impressions of this kind and would have concluded from them the spiritual value of man: “A mountain can swallow you, but he knows that he is swallowed.” Only, this feeling is right at the bottom. One leaves oneself in a half-unconsciousness in order the better to feel the rare feeling of the contradictory enjoyment of absorption by matter. It is like a pleasure of very delicate materialist dilettantism.

It is rare, to test oneself thus before the Rhine too. One must be near it, one must feel its breath; it sweeps you along. The Germans have expressed that by idyllic poems which disfigure it. The Lorelei is a caricature… It is something else: it is again an absorption into the material world; but there is this difference between this absorption and that of the mountain, that the latter crushes and stuns, and that the other sweeps along and vivifies. This movement becomes a movement; a movement without aim, it is true, above all without precision, but a movement. One has needs of movement, one dreams of gathering one’s impressions and of understanding the inarticulate language of the river. The mountain sweeps you along and lulls you to sleep, the river sweeps you along and makes you live.

Do you understand? I speak to you perhaps Swiss German. What do you expect? Each speaks his own language, and good philosophers despise none of them, not even that of the monkeys, if it exists.

You will know at least the influence of the Rhine on your old comrade, and you will learn, I think, with pleasure, that his materialization was never anything but passing. He has always come back from it very happy not to be either a mountain or a river. (1)

(1) These pages were already at the printer’s when death took from me this dear friend.

4

The Darier brothers have remained among my dearest friends. The elder, Charles, was doing his architectural studies at the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris, and Albert preceded me by a year at the Gleyre studio. Thanks to him I was in no way one of those Prussian blues, nor a vermillion, according to the witty tradition that perpetuates itself from age to age among our wicked monkeys.

Albert is a painter; he displayed from his childhood remarkable dispositions. Gleyre loved him much, because he divined in him a true artist. Of these two natural gifts, no study could take their place. Albert always had the eye and the hand of a master. — It was also from their parents that the Darier brothers had inherited, along with artistic taste and talent, another precious and rare gift, an extreme goodness.

Albert Darier to Paul M.

                            Paris, 22 March 1863.

… I have only to congratulate myself on having entered M. Gleyre’s, and I hope that soon you will come to swell the number of his pupils. Our worthy patron is a serious man, conscientious, severe in his criticism and little encouraging, but that, I believe, is a quality for a professor, and, on this point, you will think as I do. He is very much an artist and his teaching has nothing routine about it. As for the studio, it is the pupils who keep it running; one of them, the massier, takes care of the finances, the models, the purchases of plaster casts, etc. The studio rapins are turbulent; nevertheless the workers are respected and their number is fairly great. I can only encourage you in your plan of entering this studio, and all the more so since I am not at all disinterested in the execution of this project. M. Gleyre demands of his pupils a tight and conscientious drawing, but he is not at all tyrannical and leaves each one free in his choices and in his actions. Here are a few subjects of composition that he has given us: The Banquet of Plato. — Themistocles at Strike but listen. — Joseph and Madame Potiphar. — Ruth and Boaz. I did the first, and you see that the number of competitors is great (30) and the number of those accepted is only 80. They say that recommendations are not useless for obtaining success. The examination consists of a drawing after the living model, made in 12 hours. We have for model a man named Mayenberger who posed for one of Lugardon’s Three Swiss, the one in the middle, I believe. Tell me what you are saying and speak to me of the pupils of the evening Academy, of Galetty, of Badel, of Piguet, Furet, etc. I sometimes see Plissonnier, who sends you his warm regards as well as to the so-called members of the Academy. Speak to me of Belles-Lettres, of Nicole, Doret, Mathey, etc. I have received news of Richard; he is editor of a new journal, the Provincial Charivari, and clamors loudly for a satirical chronicle of the Fine Arts from me. He is always the amiable mocker we know.

Albert Darier to Paul M.

                            Paris, 19 June 1863.

… You ask me several questions about the life of a rapin in Paris; I am going to answer you: In summer there is a model at the studio only from 7 o’clock to noon. Work at the School takes place from 4 o’clock to 6 o’clock. Toward 11 o’clock we take half an hour to lunch, some at the studio, others at the wine-merchant’s on the corner, where for 15 sous we feast. I have many good friends whom I shall make known to you, in particular my fellow-countryman Hirschy (of La Chaux-de-Fonds), whom you will appreciate, I hope, as well as the good workers of the studio. I rejoice greatly, dear friend, to see you one of us. The return to work is in the month of September; if you will wait for me, I shall be happy to be your patron. In case you would wish to enter the studio at once, here are the pecuniary conditions: 30 francs for the masse; three months payable in advance at 10 francs = 30, total, 60 francs. Moreover, it is the custom to pay a welcome-treat which is drunk at the studio, mulled wine, punch, beer, etc.; you will receive on entering your little quota of teasing tasks; they are not very heavy to bear, from the point of view of good-naturedness, one gets through them quickly. When you are asked to sing, do not hesitate; those who play the recalcitrant draw upon themselves numerous hazings. Do not take fright either at what goes on in all the studios; it is their only ugly side; there one makes famous studies of manners and of character, but one ends by getting used to it. Despite appearances, the studios do not fail to be a very good school. I congratulate myself each day on having entered M. Gleyre’s, and I hope that you too will never have to repent of it. Plissonnier has charged me to transmit his warm regards to you. He has carried off the first medal in anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts.

When, in 1866, I passed through Geneva to go to Florence, I wrote to my mother:

I was received, as always, in the most cordial manner by the Darier family. I felt myself surrounded by an atmosphere of benevolence that does the heart great good. Albert and Charles took me to the banks of the Rhône and we bathed in a sort of natural bathing-chamber, formed by the blue river, which passes beneath the shade of century-old trees, whose branches fall back into the water. I know nothing more mystical than these verdant countrysides, these hills so picturesquely undulating, and this mysterious retreat, this little gulf so well closed in, where one imagines no one ever seems to have penetrated. Each step uncovers for me landscapes of high style; the gods of Greece would be there as at home, and my two friends completed the illusion. They seemed to have descended from the frieze of the Parthenon. I expected to see surge from the thickets some startled or curious nymph. One would wish to spend one’s whole life there.

5

The reader already knows Jules Nicole, my best friend. The student so finely mocking has become a master in Greek studies. On many occasions he has given proof of a profound erudition and of a singular perspicacity in the interpretation of texts sometimes cruelly mutilated, of which he has been able to divine and reveal the high interest. These happy “finds” of manuscripts could only have come to researchers solidly armed.

Now that his numerous and important works have assured my friend a lasting renown among Hellenists and philologists, the interest is all the keener to follow at its beginnings this fine career of a scholar.

Alongside penetrating and personal judgments on works of literature and art, his letters bear witness to a rare delicacy of conscience, and recount moral struggles of high example which deserve to be noted.

As with many very hard-working young people, my friend felt, following his examinations, the deplorable physical effects of intellectual overwork.

Jules Nicole to Paul

                            25 August 1863.

It is soon a month since you left me. I was then preparing my examinations, when the [obscured] blood, with which the sciences supplied me, began to come out with a surprising energy. I was excessively weakened by it. Forbidden me to touch books. At last I set myself up in front by the doctor’s prescription. It is the beast that must be tended; it is she who reigns. I am a veritable machine measuring the space that separates the meals.

Your letter gave me the greatest pleasure, even in the places where you depict your sad position, for they increase the esteem I had for you. A noble soul like yours must suffer from this perpetual contact with such people. May God will, as I pray him for you and for me, to keep us always young, always living, loving what is beautiful. I too have to fear the milieu in which I shall soon find myself if, in all probability, it is in Russia that I am to be engulfed.

How shall I manage far from my country, from the salutary influence of my family and of my memories? that is what I do not ask myself often enough.

As you have experienced, I occupy myself with my departure as if it were someone else who had to go away: I write, I answer, I run about; it is for me the most important affair of my life, the one that worries me most, that prevents me from sleeping, but with pleasure at the bottom of devotion. There will come for me too the hour when I shall see again all my country, the mountains! which I have never left…

                            [obscured], 7 September '63.

Dear friend, I have found, I have found! It will be at the end of this month for Germany. Everything is beyond my most audacious hopes. My pupil is not one of those tots of seven years to whom they proposed I rehearse the alphabet; he is a young man of fifteen, a companion of studies and of ideas. I am going to Germany; it is a very great blessing, for after having had this beautiful country in prospect throughout all my studies, it was very hard to renounce it for pecuniary motives. Moreover, when I shall have spent two or three years preparing my pupil, I shall follow him to the University. I am so happy that I cannot sleep, having no longer any cares from morning to evening. The shock was even a little strong and I am quite shaken by it; but the maladies of happiness heal very quickly.

Listen, if you please, to my story:

For Germany a young tutor was wanted. The mother of the pupil was at Lausanne. A friend speaks of me, and Thursday morning I receive a telegraphic dispatch: “Mme X… awaits you, come.” — Vexed by this summons, I asked myself whether one had to go and salute the schoolmistress and oblige oneself thus to the orders of people. My mother answered yes, and her father prevailed. Soon, or rather at last, under the protection of a theologian who had given the first information about me, I present myself at the Gibbon hotel and to Mme X…

I see a person of great name, of a very agreeable figure, and speaking the Teutonic tongue with an embarrassing rapidity. The theology student takes upon himself the role of interpreter. I forgot to tell you that on my entrance, my great youthfulness, my beardless face and all the rest excited in the lady a smile, very frank it is true, but which disconcerted me. I exhibit my diplomas. She passes much too quickly over all these fine sciences, telling me that, moreover, if I found this or that branch of teaching disagreeable, she would give her son private masters. She explains, she asks, she offers me—the pecuniary conditions arrive. She proposes 1,500 francs; I refuse flatly. The [theologian], suffering, forgets the suffering that my interests are to him; he pleads the lady’s cause, and here comes a warm candid argument: But, Monsieur, at your age, says he, I left for 900 francs, and even 900 francs to you, that is… I take courage and I answer: “Monsieur, I know that, if I postpone my departure, I can wait at home, and if Madame maintains her propositions, I shall answer straightaway that I cannot accept them.” — After this excess of courage, distressed at refusing for some wretched money a place that suited me so well, I left my theologian and the Lady to deliberate together and I no longer understood their German at all. At last, I see my Monsieur turn toward me a radiant face: “The lady answers that she accepted my conditions. My firmness had pleased her. Think, think a little of my surprise and of my happiness! The lady pleased me infinitely; her ideas are so elevated for a person of high class (for these are great personages). She told me that her son, knowing already that he would be rich and very much in view, regarded as his inferiors the young people of [lower citizens]: “I greatly desire that the tutor combat this disposition.” — I believe that on that side, she has indeed found her man.

6

Paul to Jules Nicole

                            10 September 1863.

Dear friend, Your last letter, I assure you, was a very great joy for me, a true ray of sunshine. I pictured to myself the whole scene: the smile of the lady on seeing your face so young, and your embarrassment, and your theologian turning so constantly like a [weathervane], your firmness which astonishes me and which I admire. I followed all your impressions. Yes, I was as happy as you, and when I saw you delivered from your anxieties, I too breathed and cried: at last! — Your old professor, M. Chassevant, said to me yesterday: “I have known two great joys in my life: representing and teaching, teaching above all.” He was right; it is the finest mission, a noble aim, that this noble feeling alone has taught, even to your pupil himself. Speak to me of him, when you have observed him well, make him known to me. I am sure that he will love you, and then you will be able to direct him toward your aim. You will make him love study, you will elevate his ideas… I see already accomplished all the good you are going to do.

I like very much your republican astonishment at finding elevated ideas among great personages. One must not, however, judge in advance the morality of people by an exclusive bias, and from the fact that modest fortunes are more favored, make a sort of aristocracy of it, of which this superiority would be the privilege. We must no more despise the great than the small. I hold that an upright judgment and fine sentiments may be met in all classes, in those where man must struggle against poverty or even against opulence.

I would have great pleasure in browsing a little among the bookstalls on the quays, on your behalf, (1) but you will excuse me if I do not do it at once. The examinations of the École des Beaux-Arts begin Monday and last all week. When I say examinations, I am mistaken; it is rather a competition for places. It is not enough to draw passably; one must do better than the others; one has to struggle against an unknown adversary; so I count little on success.

As for the Gleyre studio, my first impression has not changed: my mind is always the same, and my judgment just as sad. I have not yet found anyone with whom to speak of things seriously, or even simply and naturally. There is a continual jet of jokes, and so stupid! everything is greenhorns, with their factitious and forced gaiety; they have such an ugly laugh, an expression so bestial, when they hear a dirty joke. Except for yourself, when my model comes to show itself, one would think oneself in a menagerie of slaves; one admires how it is all finely turned, how pretty in color, one would think there was nothing but a still life. Not one of them seems to perceive that he has before his eyes a human being degraded and debased by misery, not one feels the slightest sentiment of pity.

Last week, we had before our eyes a little girl of eleven years. What an education for a child, this milieu of perverse rapins! Not long ago there came to show herself a poor girl in rags, awkward and blushing, reduced by hunger to this sad trade. Yesterday, she came back in great finery, laughing with a brazen laugh, knowing already how to answer everything. A fortnight had sufficed to bring about in her this transformation.

Among these creatures who all inspire an equal disgust, one is astonished to observe a sort of hierarchy in vice: a regular of a certain public ball would believe she was demeaning herself if she frequented the one who dances in another. It is shame that despises the dunghill.

There is the milieu in which I am forced to pass my life. What still drives me to despair is that, with a passionate love for my art, I have the very profound feeling of my mediocrity. I understand the great masters well enough to have the desire to follow them from afar, but I do nothing but exhaust myself by a continual tension. And yet it is not at all from ambition; glory tempts me no more than it does you. [The lot] of illustrious painters has nothing enviable about it. I am always indignant when I see the public in a museum; it passes by indifferent, without respect, off-hand, mocking even, in face of that canvas over which the artist has wept, over which he has consumed his life, in burning hours of inspiration that often make him beside himself. He has long meditated, he has worked, he has suffered,… all that to see his sorrow stuck against a wall and jeered at by the first comer. I cannot believe that the judgment of posterity touches him. The hope of being one day perhaps done justice to by it must have been a very small thing beside the testimony of his conscience. What does it matter today to Homer that his works and even his existence are disputed? (1)

It also seems to me that there is a certain egoism in occupying oneself solely, as I do, with the development of one’s mind; happy you who can both elevate your soul and cultivate your intelligence.

I beg you, do not abandon me in my frightful isolation. I no longer breathe in this atmosphere sullied with vice. (2) You see, I feel it well, I have left my heart at Geneva. It is there that I lived my sweet years when I was happy and where I should have continued so well to live in happiness; it is there that I still live in thought. (1) Here, I pass by in silence, without seeing anything, distracted, listening to an inner voice that speaks to me of you, of my friends, of that country white with the fine lake. At Geneva, in that honest and good milieu, in face of those eternal snows, of that virgin nature, of that town still healthy, one breathes a purer air, one feels God whom you adore, we felt him extending over us, gentle and paternal. Here, the sky is empty and desolate. God has deserted his face. It is of him alone that I think, that I want. There where I should need one of those cries that can sustain me, what are vague spiritualist tendencies, a system sketched out, supported only by a reason whose whole weakness I feel? You know it, dear friend, I am neither in myself an atheist nor an impious man, I believe as firmly in God as in my own existence, but the nature of God escapes me; his relations with the world, I believe I feel them vaguely enveloping us, but all that in a profound obscurity. It is a hope and not a certainty, nor a faith. An unknown Spirit before which my reason must bow, it is scarcely if I dare say that I love him, scarcely if I pray to him. (2)

Pardon, dear friend, if I respond so badly to the joy you bring me. I know that you take part in my anguish as I do in your happiness, and in the sorrowful state in which I am, it is already a comfort to be pitied.

(1) In those days bibliophiles still found a few opportunities.

(1) I then believed in a single author of the Homeric poems. (2) This impression seems to me today very exaggerated.

(1) One sees by their letters what friends I had left. (2) When my spiritualist beliefs were modified, in a less anthropomorphic sense, this evolution constituted the gravest event of my life. (See my Remarks on the Monadology.)

7

Although he had to earn his living, Jules Nicole did not accept the first place offered to him. The pecuniary advantages counted for little in his decision. It will not be useless to show to what delicate sentiments he obeyed, for these are examples that one may wish to see followed more often.

My friend wrote to me on 19 September 1863:

… That place which I had obtained and which made my so great happiness, well! I have just given it back to you.

I had come back to Geneva, delighted with Madame X… My parents wished to know exactly the qualities of my future family, and I found all these precautions useless, and said to them: Ah! you have not seen the lady! — Ah! if you had seen the lady!

Do you know what these inquiries brought to light first, and what all my information has irreparably confirmed? Monsieur X… is the lessee of three famous casinos. Such is the origin of the great fortune and of the charities that one names, which he spreads around him, for our correspondents pay homage to his excellent heart. What I had to do, you know it as well as I knew it. Without hesitating an instant, I composed my refusal. I cannot tell you what it cost me. Several persons understood my delicacy little! They alleged my specious reason. Was there not a noble task to fulfill: a young man, dangerously exposed, to ward off from temptations? But the preceptor of a child must be able to say to him: This is good, this is bad, without ever risking impairing his respect for his parents, and you will admit that this liberty would not have been permitted me.

I have renewed my inquiries. A Russian princess has asked for me; I went to see her. She seemed astonished at my youth, but instead of a frank and good smile, it was mistrust, suspicion. Like all the persons who set themselves above simple honest people, she had that imperious curiosity, that so unpleasant manner of penetrating into your family and your life. The pecuniary conditions of this house were very fine; that is for me the great affair. My pupil is ten and a half years old; he is very childish, very idiotic. It may be that I accept and that I try a few months (she spends the winter in Switzerland), at the end of which the whole principal household will return to Russia and I to Geneva, where I shall continue to study.

I have [obscured] my father by you. For these frightful proceedings, I cannot manage to finish a wretched little note, without erasing six times these phrases as stupid as they are polite, where now I venture a few in succession, almost rapid for my nature. I see that I have spoken only of myself. In another letter, I shall recount to you the matters I am harnessing myself to gather for history, and about the poetry that you oppose to it. In finishing, I take myself to the Belles-Lettres ball. It had its Froissart festival last Thursday. X… presided at the banquet. As he has the misfortune always to do, he killed [obscured] things, so much so that the great Z…, of Iéna, came to blows with him. Hence windows and tables broken, shirts torn, the whole for the edification of the Zofingues (1) present at the scene and of five young members filled until then with a burning zeal.

(1) Students of the Zofingue Society.

8

Jules Nicole accepted a place as preceptor in Spain. He wrote to me from Madrid on 29 January, then on 4 February 1864:

… I asked one day of one of my pupils: What happened to Jesus Christ six weeks after his Resurrection? — There was a profound silence and great meditations. — You will understand, my dear children, that I have to instruct. You cannot imagine how my day is taken up and whether much time remains for my correspondence, even that which is dearest to me. At last it is today Sunday, day of rest; I have walked my pupils about and I can occupy myself a little with myself, while they play hide-and-seek. (N.B. The elder is sixteen, the younger fourteen.)

Here I am then three hundred leagues from my beautiful country, four hundred from the German universities. But all is for the best: I feel by my fatigue of mind that to go at once to Germany to begin strong studies would have meant the ruin of my health. Better to spend first some time among the Spaniards. I shall rest there, and I shall take from here my run-up for Germany.

And then the elevated position of the family in which I am will allow me to observe a host of things that I could never even have glimpsed. I shall observe closely a class of people, the nobility, whom one cannot afford to ignore if one loves history and philosophy, since they are the people who governed the world for so long, and who are still the masters in many countries.

Madrid where we live is a large insignificant city, the least Spanish and the least original of all. There are indeed a few resources, even a university, but I do not yet possess Spanish well enough to attend the courses, and my pupils would not leave me the time for it. There is—and of this at least I can take advantage—one of the most magnificent galleries in the world! The Raphaels, the Murillos, the Velazquezes compose almost the whole collection. These are pictures of which the slightest one would make the glory of another museum. Contemplating, with tears in my eyes, the Spasm of Saint Cecilia, I thought much of you; my enjoyments would be yours, at the delicious moments that I have spent before the fine engravings. How far away those moments of youth and of beauty are! I am now plunged into this frightful practical life. Where are those long evenings when we composed, when we made literary and historical critiques, on Louis XI “precursor of the French Revolution,” when we did passages of old chroniclers, putting naïveté into their spelling? And those readings of Homer, at every moment interrupted by a silence of admiration, or again by commentaries very far removed from the text, and which brought us back to the Society of Belles-Lettres, to electoral intrigues and to the hunt for a candidate. Sometimes, not understanding the Greek well, we imagined a sense and made Homer say magnificent things. What genius! we said, and what was our laughter, when our intelligent friend showed us our error!

I hope that you will write to me. You cannot imagine how I thirst for friendship, for memories, for poetry. Give my friendly regards to the Dariers. Farewell, my dear friend, think every time you can of J. NICOLE.

                    Madrid, 5 May '64.

… The Count of A…, grandfather of my pupils, having died, all the projects of a prompt return to Switzerland and of a little stop at Paris are overturned. I must say farewell to the magnificent Velazquezes, Murillos, and Rubenses which were gathered here! They have been inventoried and sold. These treasures were hardly esteemed by their masters; I often heard these paintings appraised and heard it said that they represented millions. The finest ones had even been put in nooks where the light of day did not penetrate, and to admire the finest Rubens of the house, I had to take a candle.

You ask my opinion on the Spanish school. As I am a layman, I shall present my judgments to you with every sort of reserve and humility. I shall tell you that Murillo seems to me a greater painter than he is held to be; in several of his pictures there is, it is true, a disagreeable tendency toward effect; some of his Virgins have little [obscured], but in his masterpieces, when he is inspired, he shows an admirable grace, purity, and boldness. And this above all! The Museum possesses a painting by this master which struck me especially, and of which I was thinking in speaking of purity, of boldness, and of grace. It is an old monk kneeling who has a vision: the Virgin descends from heaven with the Infant Jesus; she shows to the monk the breast at which she nourished the Son of God.

As for Velazquez, the museum encloses a host of his equestrian portraits of princes and of great Spanish personages; Philip IV and Charles II as a child were painted by him several times. You know that these scions of great lords are ugly and stupid. Well, the admirable painter has been able to wrest from them the little soul and idea they had; so that their faces, while being, it is said, very lifelike, have expression and beauty. In a collection of deformed hands, Velazquez displays an extreme realism. There is also the Count of Olivares, regarded as his masterpiece. My visits to the museum are rare and I profit little by them, obliged as I am always to drag along with me my two terrible children who yawn and stamp their feet before each beautiful thing at which I stop a little.

In spite of that, I have lingered a very long while before the Spasm of Saint Cecilia, the one among the Raphaels that I understand best. The Christ is on his knees beneath his cross; he holds out his left arm toward the earth, as if to support his body; the arm, that outstretched hand express an immense sorrow, an immense prostration. The head crowned with thorns and bloody turns with effort toward the poor women who accompany him; on that face, which physical pain contracts, one reads the thought of Christ in all its divinity: at that frightful moment, Jesus does not think of himself, his soul does not suffer for himself, he does not weep over himself, he laments only those poor women who are going to be enveloped in the vengeance of God; he suffers from the chastisements the murderers are going to draw upon themselves: “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me, but weep over yourselves and over your children.” And Saint Cecilia, how she understands the infinite love of the Master, how she rushes toward Him, how she pities Him, how she loves Him! In short, all that is so true, so beautiful, so living, that I could no longer believe that I had before me only a canvas, and not reality itself.

Pardon me this long chatter; I have no one with whom to share my impressions, and then it seems to me that I am still in the fine time when, after the sessions (of the Society of Belles-Lettres), we made pass and pass again over the bridges, over the quays, the thread of an interminable and delicious conversation.

Very often, dear friend, I envy your lot. What a vocation is yours! You live constantly in the beautiful, in art; you have no need, as I do, to go out of yourself and of your compartments to admire, to enjoy, to see yourself. You continue over there those years of noble study and of poetry that are finished for me. You have kept all your freshness of impression, your facility, and in reading in your last letter that charming passage where you speak of the old avenues of Nola, your friends, I found myself again at Belles-Lettres, listening to and admiring the compositions of Paul Milliet. Whereas I, dear friend, if you knew what a prosaic and unhealthy existence I lead with my children! In short, my mind, my intelligence are so much in a state of repose that I am growing fat and getting a paunch. There are moments when I stop on the road of life to watch those two tots who are always following me, to listen to the wise counsels that I give them; it seems to me that I am a papa.

I had, however, two months ago, a few hours of joy and of poetry. We went to see the Escorial on Good Friday. I knew the Escorial through geography, through history, and above all through that verse of Ruy Blas:

Alone in the Escorial he appears, treading the dead.

The Escorial is backed against the Sierra de Guadarrama, which forms a semicircle, and which is at that spot of a frightening aridity. Not a tree, not a bush, nothing but the bare and gray rock, standing out against the deep limpidity of the sky. Around the Escorial is a little village formed above all by the outbuildings of the palace. Lower down is another village built in a marshy country; and these are the only trees, the only flowers of the plain of Castile. A white patch announces Madrid and its palace in the distance.

As for the edifice itself, I expected to be seized with sadness, and, as one had told me… [obscured].

It was then that I came back little by little from my disappointment. These great vaults of massive granite, bare or furnished with severe paintings of battles, prepare the grandiose effect that the temple was to produce on me forever. No, never in my life shall I forget this expedition [obscured] magnificence. Massive pillars of granite rising with a crushing power; at the center a gigantic cupola, [conferring] grandeur and gravity, grandeur. The high altar was veiled in black; I saw only to its right and its left a royal group, representing I know not which sovereigns of Spain, attending with their family the divine service. Nothing could say what these statues express. There were there many people come on the pilgrimage. These men and these women seemed visibly seized by that holy grandeur; their movements, their admirations, their formulations profaned so much gravity. Only the bunches of keys of the dead had silence and respect enough.

The church itself is very simple; with the exception of the fine frescoes of the ceiling, all is bare stone. It is the most Calvinist temple I have ever seen. (If Philip II heard me!) — On leaving the temple they led us, always through these great vaults, to the Pantheon of the kings. The staircase that descends to the vault is of marble; steps, vaults, walls—everything has been built in magnificent polished marble. One would think oneself in the midst of a dream of the Thousand and One Nights, with the difference that it is not to cheerful gardens, to a radiant fairyland, that this staircase leads. The Pantheon is very simple; it resembles all the Spanish cemeteries; it is a round and vaulted hall, whose walls are furnished with niches in tiers. In each of these niches is a coffin of stone. Most of the coffins bear the names of kings and noble letters. Charles the Fifth, Philip II, and all the sovereigns of Spain, are placed according to the order of their reigns. A few coffins await their names. Isabella II can already see and touch the place where she will be. It is for that reason that she does not love the Escorial and that she stays there as little as possible.

Before being placed in the vault, the corpse of a king of Spain is deposited in the purgatory. They call thus a [obscured] where running water washes unceasingly and where the dead body remains until all the flesh has been removed. The whitened bones are then carried to the Pantheon. We passed before a gallery from which one can hear this water flow.

These visits to the temple, to the Pantheon, had at last produced in me the true impression. I found the Escorial astonishingly sad and great. Philip II may have been content with his asylum; there is nothing to do there for a man but pray. Such was this impression in me that when, traversing new galleries, I saw through open windows a stretch lit by the sun, I was astonished and almost indignant at this dazzling light.

After having cast an eye over the seven thousand relics of saints that one has had the patience to count, we were led back to the church to visit the choir. It is very high above the nave. All around, the stalls where the monk would mount and the seat where Philip II came every day to hear mass. It was there that he was, when they came to announce to him that his fleet had been sent to the bottom by the English, the fleet on which he counted to annihilate the royalty of England. What a memory! What a moment I spent there, I who have always so loved history! He was there then, Philip II, listening to the chant of the monks resound beneath the immense vaults of the Escorial. There, he pursued his dream, he saw England and its heretic queen crushed by his fleet, then France conquered in its turn, finally the whole of Europe becoming the empire of the kings of Spain. He exterminated heresy, established everywhere the Inquisition and the tortures. The whole world became an Escorial, as religious, as grave, as sad as that temple of granite where the chant of the monks resounded. Philip II mused thus, and yet his face expressed nothing of the austere joy that his soul felt. At the back of the royal seat there was a little door that was opened only to announce to the monarch important news. The chant of the monks and the dream of the king continued, when this door opened and a low voice came to say: “The Invincible Armada is destroyed.”

Pardon me, dear friend, this long story. But when I came back from the Escorial, my imagination filled with sadness and with grandeur, I threw pell-mell onto paper these impressions that I send you, for it is the only moment of truly poetic joy, of great happiness, that I spent in Spain.

My two children too give me all the joy they can; I have never seen children so backward, nor any task so difficult as their education, but neither have I ever had pupils so good, so loving.

The Spanish that you [recommended to me] is useful in my philological career. I read Don Quixote and the History of Toreno (1) which has indeed its merit… But, my dear, what is this literature beside our Homer, beside our Greeks? (2) — What an admirable study of the human heart! they will say. Today all is science, history of science, manuals of the human heart. So it has very often happened to me, in the evening, at the moment when, out of sadness, I was working on a Spanish book, to rise on the pretext of seeking a word in a dictionary, and to take instead my Homer or my Xenophon. There! if you knew how the Greeks [obscured], if I had been at the battle of Marathon! If I had seen the tragedies of Sophocles! But no, my name is Nicole, I wear a black hat, I keep the Sundays, and I teach the decimal system to two tots cropped [obscured].

(1) Toreno, born in 1786, died in 1843, defended his country against the French in 1808; deputy to the Cortes in 1812, he pronounced [for] the suppression of the monastic orders and of the Inquisition. Exiled several times, he came to reside in Paris. In 1835, he was named minister of finance by his queen Christina, then President of the Council. He suppressed the order of the Jesuits. [Following] his resignation in 1835. His History of the Revolution of Spain has been translated by L. Viardot. (2) “Don Quixote is something other than Greek poetry, something that is not inferior to it.” (Note by J. Nicole.)

9

                            September '64.

… Scarcely returned to Geneva, I threw myself into politics. I was of that procession of voters who… you have heard vaguely spoken of it,— was received with rifle-shots by people of Saint-Gervais…

These details probably bore you, but I, who came from a country where one was dying of boredom, found all this politics of Geneva to be life. But this true life it is from your letters that I await it: speak to me of art, of painting, of all that you think and of what you hear; let me enjoy a little that Paris so active, so laborious, which gives me so much longing. There [are obscured] little contributed to making me think better of returning to Spain.

I am reading at this moment Faust. What poetry, and what strange poetry! Is it far from our Homer, so well [obscured] and often! It is far from the century; it is the poetry of incredulity. Oh! I prefer the light, the repose, and the faith. Tell me what you think of it; tell me what are the remarkable passages that you see in your readings, I shall read them; I shall speak to you also of mine, and we shall continue, although well separated, those times so happy when all my ideas and all my works bore names.

Will it be given me to go and live in Paris? It is too beautiful to be possible. (1)

                            Madrid, 11 December '65.

… Here I am again in Spain for a year. My dear friend, in the first times of your studio life, when you were under the impression of the change and had as yet seen only the sad sides of your surroundings, you often told me that my letters did you good, and I am happy about it, because between you and me there have been, there will never be, any compliments. Now it is I who need you to listen to me. If you knew how many beautiful days come back to me. Do you remember that spring morning spent at the edge of the lake and in the paths of the magnificent slope of Prégny? This memory came back to me these last days with a singular force. We were going over Tacitus again for our examinations. I see perfectly the two tall poplars, quite near the lake; we were stretched out on the grass in their shade, reading the somber scenes of the reign of Nero, and interrupting every minute the sad chapter to admire those mountains, those blue waters, that springtime, beautiful as we shall see no more. We were driven out by an old woman, personification of time, a surly person whom I had a wish to insult. We jumped over a railing. Oh yes, it is very old, this complaint that one makes about time that goes away, but it is truly true. It even happens to me, when I think of the broad happiness that awaits us, to ask myself whether those days past will be given back to us. Without them, I have difficulty conceiving happiness. If you knew, dear friend, what a ray of joy and of poetry enters into my old soul of a schoolmaster, (1) when a letter from my own people is brought to me! I forget my pupils, I forget my rules of grammar, I forget all the troubles of an already serious life, I become better. Write to me often; when you have not the time to make a letter, send me a page of your handwriting, one of those works that you keep in a certain box for manuscripts. All that will tell me that you think of me, that time has not separated us, will be received with happiness. It is so frightful a thing to see our former life disappear; one feels so much that one walks toward death, and death, [obscured] Jesus Christ, is the king of terrors. (2)

Pardon me, dear friend, this lugubrious [letter], but among friends, one must show oneself to the other as one is. In the next letter you will speak to me of yourself, you will speak to me of painting and of our dear Greeks. Our dear Greeks, I do rather neglect them a little; they were free men, and I am a [obscured]; I do not feel myself worthy of them. Oh! if I lived in Paris, if we could take up again in the evening our Homer, canto II of the Odyssey, where we left off the last time; it would seem to me to live again somewhat for another nineteen years.

(1) Jules Nicole came later to Paris, and I attended his licentiate examination at the Sorbonne. [Following] discussions, he was at once named répétiteur at the École des Hautes Études.

(1) He was twenty-one years old. (2) My friend was to find the remedy for these sad thoughts in his family, and later at last; in perpetuating life, they make one forget the end of the individual being. The feeling that one is part of the whole is one of the principal causes [against] hypochondria.

10

                            Geneva, 5 July '65.

… I do not yet know what will become of me. I have solemnly sent my resignation to Madrid, and I can say that I have done a good deed. I was going over again, arriving in my notebooks, with our friend the minister Balavoine; or shall I return to Spain? so many X’s, Y’s, and Z’s whose value I leave to time the care of drawing out.

I bought lately a fine edition of the Odyssey; I hope that we shall do canto III.

                            Geneva, 12 August '65.

Yesterday a contract was signed which binds me to a Russian family, in the capacity of preceptor. It is first in Austria, at Ischl, where my new pupils await me. From there, the great locomotive of Destiny will lead me as far as Saint Petersburg.

At the moment of going away so far and for a very long time perhaps, you understand whether I desire to see you and to have you. Come then, dear friend, as soon as possible; if you wish, let us finish the second canto. I think that you will accompany me a little, at least as far as Munich, where there are such fine paintings.

Until soon, is it not so?

We did in fact make the journey together as far as Munich, where my friend came to take it up again on his return from Ischl. I admired at leisure the marbles of Aegina, the fine collection of Greek vases, the masterpieces of the Pinakothek and of the Glyptothek.

Jules Nicole spent six years in Russia.

            Saint Petersburg, 12 November '65.

… I have in a pretty room those of my Greeks, Romans, and Spaniards from whom I really could not bring myself to part; and yet it seems to me, when I look at them, that they are no longer the same. There is only old Homer, too old ever to change, who always makes the same effect on me. I had my pupils read the other day the story of the Cyclops and I found a thing that had escaped me: “The Cyclops lived far from men, he practiced injustice from his heights, one must not amuse oneself by measuring.” And the farewells of Hector and Andromache! (When I think that a lady asked me the other day what [pleasure I find] in these ancient books rather than in those of the present!) In reading all that scene, do you not find that the soul enlarges, that the feeling of the eternal existence of minds comes to you with an irresistible force, and that in small moments one makes light of all the centuries?

And yet my Hector and my Andromache made their farewells at least three thousand years ago!

My friend poses excellently the great problem. Even apart from the perpetuity of the [lineage], thoughts are transmitted from generation to generation; the mind circulates through time, as through space. But the personality of man with its loves and its hatreds, with its sadnesses and its joys, cannot survive the destruction of the body. That is what the Greeks had divined.

Jules Nicole to Paul

                    Saint Petersburg, February '66.
                    Temperature — 10° Réaumur.

Dear friend, Seriously, do you not exaggerate the part, which I believe very great, of the subject? (I speak to you like Balavoine, far from the famous discussions on the objective.) Do you not think that this fever, this exasperation that you describe so well, must fatigue and in the long run kill the imagination? do you think, in short, that one must make of your efforts a going forward to meet ideas, and that it would not be wiser not to agitate oneself so much, [and] to let them come peacefully? — I recall that Rousseau says in his letters that, horribly fatigued and wearied by this relentless pursuit of ideas, he had resolved to abandon it, and that, for example, in his walks, instead of going to ask of the mountains, of the meadows, of the trees, what they meant, he let all these objects make on him their impression, all passive, all calm, and all fresh.

And then, it seems to me that you exaggerate too what may be lacking to you; you will never be a poor frog, and I do not see myself at all in the superb [obscured] in a career.

And then you speak of jaded taste, of the dust of our memories; you regret our pictures of youth; well, in reading it, I looked around me to see my grandsons.

No, I too have believed that I was jaded, but I believe that it is life that is jaded. But how many words for an impression that has had [no obscured]; I should have done better to go with my wife to Paris, without which I shall soon be as foolish as my ancestor Adam.

Thus I have already seen, with my own eyes seen, horrible things, but all that has not made on me more of an impression than a ridiculous dream, and I find myself as naïve as when I did not want X… at the Society of Belles-Lettres, because he was very often at the café, without asking permission of his uncle…

                            Petersburg, 15 October '67.

Here I am back in my winter quarters, five hundred leagues from Paris and without any now probable hope of returning there before long. Everyone around me has gone to the Exhibition, or hastens to run there; everyone speaks of it with rapture, and I alone remain in Russia… We are far from the time when our families were both complete and separated from one another only by the width of the lake. There are moments when I ask myself whether it is indeed possible.

There, the other day I was leafing through an old portfolio that I obstinately persist in carrying and wearing out despite the mockers; an old portfolio in which I have piled up for seven years all sorts of things, and which I have started into from all sides at once, without looking whether it was from the top or from the bottom. There are accounts there, laundry lists, maxims and remarkable thoughts, often written in pencil, of which we used to make a collection, words to look up in the dictionary, addresses, a timetable of the Collège de France and of the Sorbonne—in short, nothing that is not found there. Now, in turning the fifth leaf, I read the following inscription: “M. P. Milliet, Hôtel der Manen Traube, Dœmen gasse, 11.” And all our pretty journey traced itself again, so clear, so detailed before my eyes, that I found myself transplanted very far from that frightful village of Smela where the scene was taking place. Do you remember our frantic dash through Munich, and our transport of admiration on coming out of the famous tunnel before Lausanne? The journeys that I make now hardly resemble that one; the beautiful country and the dear friend are no longer there, and I am no longer the same.

These letters do me great good, and the truly living life that you lead makes me quite envious! The Exhibition, the theaters, the Théâtre-Français, and above all the courses? All that passes well far from my nose, as we say at Geneva. The names of the professors that you have cited to me are not unknown to me. I have read several articles by M. Janet in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and by M. Caro a book, The Idea of God, which interested me much and which pleased me. But it is one thing to read a book and another to hear an orator.

It is what I feel still for Hernani. (1) I should have liked to see this work played at the Théâtre-Français; I should have known how to appreciate it on coming out of the Théâtre-Français, and after all it is by a great poet, but the reading did not move me: the play seems to me cold and the characters lack altogether personality. They declaim, they say very fine verses, but I picture them to myself as having very much the same figure and the same sound of voice. It is a reproach that I have often heard made of the theater of Victor Hugo, and on reflecting on it this reproach appears to me well-founded. (1)

(1) By Sarah Bernhardt and Mounet-Sully, both young then.

(1) On the stage, great artists add to the characters created by the poet that personality. In the reading, it is somewhat lacking to them.

11

Paul M. to J. Nicole

                            Paris, 23 February '68.

We hope to spend this winter together at Rome. The principal motive that has kept me here is the education of my sister; she shows for drawing remarkable dispositions and I am naturally her professor. Moreover, she has just taken a grave resolution, that of studying Latin and Greek. I do not know whether you will approve of it, but it seems to me unjust that women should be deprived of one of the greatest pleasures of the mind: reading Homer in the text. You will find me very bold to wish to teach what I hardly know myself. Give me a few directions, you who already have the experience of teaching. Without believing it possible to learn Greek and Latin in a short time, it seems to me that one could shorten a little the long years of arid and tedious study that one spends at the collège.

I have sometimes run to the Sorbonne and to the Collège de France. What a pity that it is so difficult to be erudite enough! My old professors spread a thick veil of mystery between the poets and ourselves. M. Rossignol explains the Bacchae and M. Egger speaks to Andromache of grave academic matters quite out of fashion. Nevertheless, their courses interest me and I have much to gain from them. — M. Ch. Lévêque is a sort of Trissotin doubled with a Vadius, with a pretentious delivery, frenzied gestures, underlining each word with a fine smile and a wink full of innuendo. The task of not laughing at it is [arduous]; one ought almost too not to hear it. In spite of that, he has learning and the subject he treats is interesting; he explains some fragments of the Greek philosophers.

The course of M. Alfred Maury on the origins and the migrations of the races who peopled Europe is given with great clarity. He takes care to distinguish what one knows from what one is ignorant of; he sorts among the hypotheses and puts each one in its rank. His lessons on the Etruscans interested me keenly. I compared them to the vast confused erudition of M. Longchamp, that formidable heap of materials piled up pell-mell which leave in the mind only vague notions.

I am reading the manual of archaeology of Otfried Müller. There at least is the admirable monument of a science that masters itself. Unfortunately I read it in a translation, the worst that one can see. The traitor who wrote it knew neither German, nor French, nor Greek, nor archaeology.

I have spoken to you only of the use of my idle moments. It is only between two strokes of the dictionary that I catch on the run a lesson here and there. I shall not yet exhibit this year, but [I love] disinterested studies so much that I would willingly spend my life in the museums and the schools. I see around me my comrades, both young eaglets and old geese, trying their wings, not without some cackling, nor without some falls… But it would be in bad grace for me to criticize those who work, I who content myself with giving advice to everyone.

Your brother tells me that you are sad and discouraged. The winter at Saint Petersburg cannot be gay. As for me, when the sky is gray, I see things the color of the weather and I despair of painting. It appears to me, with sculpture and architecture, like three old toothless women, with shaking heads, who drivel in a faded voice the memories of their youth. Crushed beneath the weight of their past, [their] history, they have lost all freedom of bearing, and have no longer the strength to digest their erudition. — Happily a ray of sun suffices to dissipate these melancholy vapors.

I would not wish to leave you without saying a word to you of a performance of Don Juan at the Français. It is beautiful beyond all expression. I thought much of you; what pleasure we should have had in exchanging our ideas and our impressions! The play is admirably interpreted by Bressant as Don Juan, Régnier as Sganarelle, and Coquelin as Pierrot. I spent there one of those evenings when one feels that one is elevating oneself through admiration, one grows greater, one becomes better. What a poet Molière is! what bitter sadness in his skepticism, what sorrowful misanthropy beneath that gaiety nevertheless so frank! He has profound thoughts, worthy of Pascal, dramatic scenes, worthy of Corneille, a fantasy worthy of Aristophanes, a penetrating observation of life, worthy of Shakespeare. And all that so strongly marked with his personal stamp! What a marvel! It will be necessary that one day or another we see that together.

II — My First Master

LÉONARD LUGARDON

1

Like my friends Nicole, Doret, Balavoine, and Rœhrich, Léonard Lugardon (1801-1885) was a Genevan of the old stock. These noble souls have the purity of the eternal snows that crown the summits of the Alps. With them religion is an armor, a rigid garment, but it is the garment of honor, of intransigent probity, of a conscience at once upright and high.

Léonard Lugardon was a true artist. He had the cult of beauty and knew how to make his pupils share his fervent admiration for the masterpieces of Antiquity and of the Renaissance.

Here are a few notes on the teaching of my venerated master; I regret that my aging memory has let escape a good number of interesting memories. (1)

What is the best method for the teaching of drawing? A much-controverted question: some, faithful to old traditions, affirm the hegemony of reason; they advocate exact measurements, precise contours, and ask of a study after nature that it be a scientifically faithful copy.

Others, and in the first rank the American innovators, prefer to reasoning intuition and individual feeling, with its gaps, its exaggerations, and even its errors, which they [will not resolutely correct]. A great artist, it is true, has not to represent things to us as they are—which moreover is impossible—but as they appear to him at such an hour of the day, in such a season of the year, to him, who finds himself today in such a disposition of mind, in such a state of health. As one sees, we are coming far from the search for the absolute Beautiful.

But must the respect for the individuality of the pupil go as far as the negation of all direction? Lugardon did not think so. A beginner commits faults; one must point them out to him; one must teach him to see, to observe the truth attentively. He did not advise beginning by taking measurements, a manual labor which does not exercise the eye, which chills the impression and tends to replace it. It is better to contemplate the model at length, to be impregnated with it, until its reflection leaves an indelible trace in the cerebral mirror. One then tries to project this image onto the paper, one lightly traces its simplified silhouette, attaching oneself to the masses, to the whole, to the great planes, to the verticals, to the proportions, and systematically neglecting the details. What good is it to study an eye or a mouth, if one is not yet certain of the place and the dimensions of the head? If the great lines are exact, the details will come of themselves; it will be a pleasure and almost a game to complete an indication already excellent.

When the placing of the whole has been carefully studied, one may have recourse to measurements to verify it. Science intervenes only to rectify the errors of feeling. One compares the widths with the heights, and all the principal divisions among themselves. These measurements, the professor indicates them, but it is the pupil himself who must take them. A given master might have contestable predilections: one will like the robust and stocky vigor of forms, another the elegant proportions and the small heads. The pupil has the right not to share these tastes, but he will docilely accept a correction that he will himself have recognized as necessary. If he is not led astray by mannerism or by pride, he will yield to the evidence.

Whatever one may say today, the professor can render service to his pupils by warning them of the faults they have committed. Later, if one of them becomes a new Michelangelo, he will have the right to bend nature to his grandiose conceptions; he will sculpt figures such as the Night, whose attitude no living model could reproduce. These audacities are permitted only to artists of the first rank; genius alone can make them be accepted. I know well that every beginner imagines that he will be, that he already is, a master. But this genius in potentiality, which he feels seething within him, needs, in order to develop, to submit itself still for some time to a precise observation, to a naïve study of the truth. The finest works of the great idealists are based on realism.

In order to give his pupils a certain sureness of hand, and to accustom them to reflect before tracing a line, Lugardon had us draw only on a sheet of paper glued onto a board, in the manner of architects. We drew directly with black pencil or with sanguine, without preliminary sketch in charcoal.

Lugardon retouched our drawings little; he preferred to trace in the margin a few strokes which, better than words, explained his observations. I have kept more than one mediocre study, in order to preserve preciously these corrections of the master, sketches astonishingly expressive, full of life, of passionate ardor, of an admirable sureness and of a striking character.

If it was a question of a painted study, Lugardon advised proceeding by touches frankly laid on the canvas and left intact, beginning with the lightest tone and the darkest tone, reproduced, as far as possible at the first stroke, in their exact value. He had a horror of the conventional finish, of the blending, which he called “a false finish.” However, when the study was finished, he tolerated in places a few very light strokes of the dry brush, to finish off this preparatory work, to bind the tones and give them that aspect of unity that we admire in nature and in most of the old masters.

The contemporary school prefers to let the work of the rough sketch show. Often even the artist makes some parade of his virtuosity; he has a masterly brushstroke, “in the manner of Velazquez,” or “in the manner of Frans Hals”; [he takes care] not to lose himself in commas or in a monotonous and shimmering stippling. The public is right not to appreciate much these feats of skill. The very simple procedures that were employed by the primitives and also by Leonardo, by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, and many others, are more modest and preserve perhaps some merit, although today out of fashion.

With a rare conscientiousness, Lugardon made admirable copies. He chose, among the masterpieces, not those that could have developed his native defects, but those that were apt to complete his artistic education. Perhaps he prolonged these studies too long, when his talent, already mature, allowed him to create original works. But this excess of modesty is assuredly a defect become very rare. One disdains copies today. Young artists do not seem to suspect the profit they would draw from these respectful, patient, and deepened studies. They are mistaken, those who believe they know a masterpiece because they have looked at it for five minutes. This rapid glance, cast in passing, does not suffice. The impression received so quickly is superficial and fleeting. To make a sketch of the whole of a composition, to copy faithfully a fragment of it, is to ask counsel of a great master, is to converse with him, to enter into his intimacy. What happiness and what joy!

Although a pupil of Gros, Lugardon could not escape the influence of L. David. He held, with R. Töpffer, that drawing, even more than color and than light, is a powerful means of expression. (1)

(1) Certain considerations will perhaps appear a little too technical, but the question of teaching methods is perhaps [important] today and the discussion bears not only on drawing.

(1) This opinion is debatable, but the complete exposition of this problem would lead us too far.

A good method ought to have suppleness enough to vary according to individual temperaments. One may remark that each artist begins with what seems to him most important. The rough sketch of a colorist resembles in nothing that of a draftsman, nor that of a luminist, and the finished works preserve the trace of this beginning. It reveals, by underlining it, the sensation of each artist in what it has that is spontaneous and his dominant preoccupations. The variety in the order of investigations is thus an important characteristic of each school of art. If, very often, the masters are still more interesting in their sketches than in their finished pictures, it is because they reveal to us their predilections. The analysis and the patient study that will come to complete this first impression do not add to it much that is essential.

The drawings of Lugardon executed after nature are strongly characterized, astonishingly vibrant and living.

In all times the young school has shown itself somewhat unjust toward its predecessors. It is the eternal story: In fifty years, the innovators of today will be old, and the young of tomorrow will disdain the out-of-fashion art of yesterday. When Lugardon was beginning, alongside Géricault, Overbeck, Schnetz, Léopold Robert, he ranged himself resolutely in that independent and courageous school which attempted, in its effort respecting the traditions of serious science and of conviction grave for the truth had restored to honor; he rejected theatrical emphasis, the coldness of bad classicism, the formulas servilely traced upon the mediocre statues of the Roman decadence. But he did not let himself be drawn either to the disordered violences, to the excessive sentiments, nor to the systematic search for contrasts, of which the romantics then abused. The return to nature, but to a chosen truth, the search for character reconciled with that for beauty—such was the program to which Lugardon rallied, and which he always followed.

An ardent patriot, he recounted with emotion the finest traits of the Swiss legend and history. He sought and he knew how to find models whose individual character was conformable to the idea he had formed of each of his personages. He thus created figures truly typical, incarnating the [stock] and the diverse temperaments, which he knew how to keep an intense life. It is by an intelligent choice that the individual can thus rise to the general, without falling into cold abstractions. The gestures of his personages are always just, simply and powerfully expressive. The lively imagination of the artist and his profound conviction resurrect the past. Each scene seems to have been seen from nature; the work imposes itself, one forgets it no more. Nothing useless nor bizarrely archaeological in the costumes. The accessories remain in their place, without diverting the attention from the drama that is taking place in the souls. This sobriety makes one think of our fine French tragedies, where place and time are neglected, in order to bring out the sole analysis of the human passions.

I shall add a few more words on the private man. I should like to tell the nobility of the elevation of his character, his inexhaustible goodness, his enthusiasm for fine actions and fine thoughts. What unalterable benevolence! what devotion to his artistic and religious convictions, what abnegation! Near Lugardon, in seeing him, in hearing him, one felt oneself becoming better. From time to time, he invited his pupils to spend the evening at his house; he leafed through with us some fine collection of engravings, those of Marcantonio, for example; then this crippled old man, nailed by pain to his armchair, forgot for an instant his great age and his sufferings; his face lit up; he was twenty years old. They were no longer prints that he had before his eyes; the original works lived again in his memory, with their immortal freshness and their triumphant beauty. His colored speech made us divine and glimpse them.

These are unforgettable memories. Enthusiasm is not taught, but it is kindled at the contact of a great mind and of a great heart. Like those torches of which Lucretius speaks, it transmits light and fire from generation to generation. Such talks are worth more than all precepts and all systems.

I keep a profound gratitude toward the noble artist whose communicative admiration taught me the pious respect of the great Italian masters of the Renaissance.

I wish that this short study may draw the attention of the friends of the arts to a master almost unknown outside his country, and of whom Switzerland has the right to be proud.

2

Letters of J. L. Lugardon to Paul

                    25 September '63.

Dear Monsieur Milliet, I was touched by your very kind letter and by the affectionate sentiments you keep for me.

I should have wished to answer you sooner, but it is now nearly six weeks that I am in bed, suffering much. They cauterize my poor knee with the red-hot iron… It is M. Binet who tends me. Who knows how long he will burn me yet? Patience.

I saw with much satisfaction that M. Gleyre had been content with what you are doing. You were received by my friend M. Perrin (1) with the benevolent interest that you so well merited. I believe that this relation will be for you good and precious to maintain. On your side, you will renew to him the expression of my sincere friendship. You will have gone to see the Louvre with him; this visit made with an artist of so pure a taste will be for you and for a long time infinitely precious, for it will have pointed out to you the works most particularly worthy of your admiration and of your studies.

Never forget that to succeed in art, one must take the strait gate. The wide, easy road leads to perdition.

[They lend me], to distract me from my long days, the pretty collection of the Musée Napoléon of Filhol, [some] volumes with charming engravings, most of them very finely executed. The memories that the sight of these works has revived in me have been very sweet. Lesueur, Poussin, Raphael are there in all their glory… I found myself again in company with that good and worthy society. I congratulate you on being no longer surrounded by bad taste as we are here. Painting has become a commerce, an industry.

I join to the present a print of my portrait, because I think that this will give you pleasure… I beg you to remember me kindly to your parents and to be, yourself, my dear friend, well persuaded of the lively and true interest that I take in all that touches you, in your progress in art. You are so well surrounded that I am quite sure that you will succeed, if you are vigilant and attentive in the choice of your studies. See M. Perrin sometimes; you will consult him.

Farewell, my dear pupil; recall sometimes your old professor and believe in his constant friendship. LUGARDON.

P.S. — I thought I should find still one of my photographed portraits; they are no longer to be found. I write to M. Carrier, 21, passage de la Thuile, at the Batignolles, to send you one. M. Carrier, although a good friend, has ideas quite other than ours in painting, so take care if you see him.

(1) The faithful friend of Orsel and the author of the paintings that decorate one of the chapels of the church of Notre-Dame de Lorette.

                    30 July '64.

My dear Monsieur Milliet, It is a very long time that a good and affectionate letter awaits a reply. My silence will have explained to you the sad state in which I have been all winter, always lying down, and [with] the little strength that remained to me…

I read with much interest all that you tell me about the state of the arts, about the [obscured] manners in honor at present. It is very fortunate that M. Ingres is still there. I always repeat the [obscured]. Reputations that ring like his command respect.

I have just read a work that has been for me a continual subject of joy. (1) I urge you to read it as soon as possible and to speak of it to M. Perrin. Try to have it read by other artists; it is the preaching of the fine and sublime theories of art and of thought. I hope that you too will follow these principles of the future, in the search for the beautiful. This study is the source of happiness.

You [shun] like the plague the doctrines that pass through Paris. Evil is seductive. The first steps that one takes in it are not perceived… Continual vigilance. Reflection. Observation before letting the fingers [go]. It is not [a matter of] dashing off work, of piling up studies, of being, as one will think it a proof of genius, a [dasher-off]. No. This term is for me synonymous with [trickster], which is something altogether foolish.

To compare the works of the great masters among themselves, to analyze them, to learn to know them. To seek good company, for a painter who loves his art, is to take pleasure with the ancients, with the works matured by the study of the beautiful. These works are felt at once, because there is always order, wisdom in the thoughts; which one does not find among the [mere executants].

Here, my dear Milliet, is a very little letter. Forced to stop by the fatigue that the pen causes me… Farewell, believe me your well-devoted friend. LUGARDON.

A few more reflections of my master: Beauty, M. Lugardon said, is spread in profusion in nature. Each man, each object, having its particular character, has also its own beauty. There is no inferior genre in painting: landscapes, seascapes, animals, still lifes—everything has its kind of beauty.

But to discover this beauty, it will not be useless to study first the great masters. In copying with respect their masterpieces, you will come to understand that, in a picture, they have not expressed only what they had seen; they have put into it the very essence of their art. Their work is the product of a whole life of conscientious studies, made by a man of genius. You will understand then, and you will admire that modesty with which they have hidden, beneath a simple and unpretentious workmanship, treasures of science and of feeling.

Down with photography, he added, because it is inept and stupid. It puts all men and all things on the same level, debasing all that there is of noble and elevated in being. Through its mirror, nature seems ugly, because it suppresses all that makes the true glory of man and his legitimate pride. With a cynical brutality, it displays the wart on the brow of the illustrious man; you come up to such a one, the great painter, the sublime poet? Well, there he is! He is like that! There he is? you say; I see well his eyes, or rather his spectacles, his nose, his overcoat, his cravat; I see well the animal, his body, with all the little miseries of age, of the moment; but his genius? Where is it? … Soul, no thought? What, nothing of all that! No, this photograph is not at all a portrait; it is a bestial caricature. (1)

Assuredly the artist can create nothing; a purely ideal beauty does not exist; it is in reality that one must draw the elements that compose it. But you will not copy at random, no matter what, on the pretext that everything is beautiful in nature. There is beauty in everything, but you will never reproduce this beauty if you have not understood and felt it. Art is not creation; it is choice.

This beauty, when you have recognized it in nature, your memory preserves it, sets it apart, and makes it undergo the work of imagination. Assimilated by genius, it combines with other [complete impressions], and it is only when it has thus been modified by the elaboration of all the faculties of an individual soul, that it finds itself marked with the stamp of a personality. This beauty has become the ideal of a painter.

(1) Photography, which seemed to claim to replace the art of the masters by mechanical and soulless procedures, has its rights. Today certain photographers have become true artists, displaying a real spirit of choice in the motifs and the effects of light. As for the warts or the wrinkles, they do not efface them too much.

ANNEX TO CHAPTER II

I owe to the kindness of mademoiselle Danielle Plan the following notice, extracted from an article that she published in the Schweizerisches Künstler-Lexikon (6th fascicle):

Jean-Léonard Lugardon, born at Geneva on 30 September 1801, son of a watchmaker of a family of refugee French Protestants, did his first studies of painting under the direction of F. G. Reverdin. At the age of 19, he entered at Paris the studio of Gros. Two years later, at Florence, he met Ingres, of whom he became the friend. In 1826, he married at Geneva mademoiselle Suzanne Pachoud, returned with her to Italy, and settled at Rome. His wife having died in 1829, he came back to Geneva with his two children. From 1835 to 1837 he lived in Paris, obtained a few commissions for the Museum of Versailles and seconded Alaux in the restoration of the frescoes of the palace of Fontainebleau (a part of the hall of François I). Returned to Geneva, he professed there for eight years as director of the School of the figure. He formed numerous pupils and died at Geneva on 16 August 1884.

Among his principal works we shall cite: The Deliverance of Bonivard by the Bernese, 1824 (museum of Geneva). — Capture of the castle of Rossberg, 1827 (in the possession of doctor Cordès). — The Oath of the Grütli, 1836 (exhibited at Paris — Museum of Geneva). — Hagar in the desert (in the possession of mademoiselle A. Colladon). — William Tell saving Baumgarten, 1835 (Federal Palace). — Arnold of Melchtal, 1841 (museum of Geneva). — The Christ expiring on the cross, 1853 (church of Gex). — Ruth and Boaz (in the possession of M. Dufour, banker at Paris). — Calvin refuses the Communion to the Libertines. — Portraits of madame Bernard, of W. A. Töpffer, of R. Töpffer, of M. Schenker-Schneener, of Garibaldi (1861), of M. Gautier, engineer, of M. Hentsch-Chastel, of the mother of the author, at the Museum of Geneva.

For Versailles, a few historical portraits including Louis XIII (after Philippe de Champaigne), and a battle picture: The Capture of the poop of Saint-Laurent, an episode of the siege of Antwerp.

Lugardon made very fine copies. The museum of Geneva possesses The Triumph of Virtue, after the pastel of Correggio in the Louvre, and M. Étienne Duval a reduction of the Antiope.

III — First Stay in Paris

GLEYRE. — THE ÉCOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS. — TAINE. — M. HEUZEY. — M. DE NIEUWERKERKE.

1

Before the reorganization of the École des Beaux-Arts, the Gleyre studio was one of the most important in Paris. Our master had already formed numerous and brilliant pupils, such as Hamon and Gérôme, whose success grew each year, and the neo-Greek school had chosen for its guide the author of the Hercules at the feet of Omphale.

Genre painters, like Toulmouche, Anker, Hirsch, etc., decorators of style, like Monchablon and François Ehrmann, who were then beginning—all affirmed themselves as the resolute defenders of the classical traditions, of a precise, learned, and correct drawing, of a sober taste, and of that conscientious workmanship which disdains the display of virtuosity. (1)

(1) My friend Paul Baudouin, the renovator of the fresco in France, was then like me a simple student.

A learned draftsman and a poet full of charm, Gleyre was neither a great colorist, nor a virtuoso of the brush; but he knew it, and, a rare thing, he admired in others the qualities he did not possess. Modest to excess, he imposed his preferences on no one, still less his procedures.

Leonardo, Correggio, Raphael, Titian, Veronese, Velazquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, have each had their own manner, answering to diverse and personal visions of nature. This proves that there are several ways of painting well. Gleyre knew it, while many of our young tachistes and pointillistes seem to be ignorant of it.

His pictures did not always completely escape the regrettable influence of the doctrines that had been in honor in the school of David. Searching well, one even finds in them a few traces of those artistic prejudices that spread out so disagreeably in the learnedly banal works of Bouguereau. Gleyre knew how to find the individual character and expressed it sometimes with vigor, in his Romans passing under the yoke, for example, but other times with a certain timidity. (1) In this respect, his counsels and his lessons were still worth more than his pictures.

The subjects for sketches that he proposed to us were chosen by preference among those that painting can express better than literature.

(1) His Bacchantes of the Museum of Madrid hardly differ one from another except by the color of the hair; I [saw] not a nose long or short, not one is tall or small, not one fat or thin; and their movements are a little too learnedly balanced.

“The ideas of painters,” he said, “are forms and colors.” — I remembered this profoundly just formula when, playing a little on the words, I added: “For a draftsman, as for a sculptor, the form is the substance.” — These theories did not prevent the author of the Lost Illusions from often hiding in his paintings some allegorical idea, or some symbol full of poetry.

Melancholy, discouraged, and jaded, Gleyre had too much studied the great masters not to have become a judge of severe taste. He had much wit and of the finest, so we trembled a little in submitting to him our mediocre attempts, and we were grateful to him for the effort he had to make not to mock us. His benevolence was moreover real and his judgment very sure. A glance sufficed him to discover the weak point of a project for a picture, and he knew how to indicate the remedy to us. His counsels were excellent, principally when it was a question of the arrangement of the lines of a composition, of the proportion and the placing of the figures in a landscape, of their number and their dimensions in a given canvas, of the truth of the gestures and the attitudes for the expression of a subject.

In general, he spoke to us very low, too low even; it was as though to spare the young self-esteems; he addressed each one in particular and never held forth. Other professors, like M. Carolus Duran, for example, profit on the contrary by every occasion to give a lesson of general theory, and this method, less modest, is assuredly more profitable for the pupils.

Gleyre was for a long time a member of the jury of the Salon, where his opinion enjoyed great authority, because his impartiality was never falsified by camaraderie nor by recommendations. His compatriot the art critic Charles Clément was to speak to me of his celebrity [owing] to the sureness of taste of his friend and to his exceptional conscientiousness. Each year, the exhibiting artists awaited, not without anxiety, the judgments borne on their works by this arbiter so well informed.

Gleyre wished to receive no remuneration from his pupils. An absolute disinterestedness was part of the traditions professed by the artists of former days. We had therefore simply chosen a massier to pay the rent of our studio, the heating, and the model sessions, by means of subscriptions. Modest as these were, our expenses already seemed heavy to some of us; the founding of entirely free studios at the École des Beaux-Arts brought about numerous desertions in our ranks.

2

Twice a year very numerous pupils presented themselves to be admitted to draw in the evening the academies at the École des Beaux-Arts. The candidates were ranked by means of a competition and called each Monday for the choice of places according to the order of their admission.

Twice a week, our drawings were corrected by some member of the Institut, so old that he seemed to us to date from the quaternary epoch. These masters, respectable in the works they had produced in their good time, were little respected. Their wigs and their outdated doctrines excited the mocking verve of the young rapins.

When M. de Nieuwerkerke had reorganized the School, we fell from Charybdis into Scylla. Yvon, the battle painter, was charged with forming our taste. A singular choice! Not that this artist lacked talent, but his method was deplorable. To believe him, all the models would have been eight heads high or thereabouts. He had a heap of recipes and formulas; he taught what painters call chic. These academic proportions learned in advance are the negation of all research and of all sincerity. It is a bed of Procrustes; all individual character of the model or of the artist disappears, or at least is attenuated. On the pretext of idealizing the model, one slims it if it is stocky, one fattens it if it is thin. Given Aesop, Thiers, or Littré, the academic style consists in bringing their image nearer to that of some Apollo or other. This pretended correction is only a banality erected into a system. The living model posed for a week, and the hall overflowed with pupils. Then, the following week, we drew after the casts of antique statues, and the hall remained nearly empty. I was astonished at a taste so exclusive. It did not seem to me that a great effort of imagination was necessary to consider the antique statues as living too. Their pale complexion, their white hair, their blind eyes did not prevent me from admiring the purity of the proportions and the beauty of the Greek [stock]. Through their works, the ancient masters speak to us still; it is easy to divine what they wished to say, and a little good will suffices for one to come to confound their moving copies with nature itself which they reproduce so faithfully. The realism of the great artists has always struck me much.

Later, at Rome, I often took pleasure in observing the types of the passers-by, and in noting their incontestable resemblances with the personages whose portraits the masters of old painted or sculpted. An old beggar who asked me alms had kept on his well-built face the majesty of the ancient consuls; a fishmonger seemed a cast in flesh and bone of the first Brutus; there, a blacksmith with a fierce look made one think of Caracalla. More than once the Fornarina or the Psyche of Raphael came to pose in my studio, and [those souls in their solitary walks], I perceived sometimes, seated in the mysterious shadow of some portico, those women with the noble features, the grandiose silhouettes, the weary and profoundly saddened attitudes, sublime in their familiarity, who pursue their sorrowful dream in the pendentives of the Sistine Chapel. — If the transformists are not mistaken, they exaggerate nonetheless perhaps a little; men at least do not seem to have changed much. For long centuries, they have kept the same features, the same passions, the same vices, the same anguishes, and the same sorrows.

3

At the École des Beaux-Arts, I followed with much interest the lessons of anatomy and of perspective. We received only elementary notions of these two sciences indispensable for a painter, and without ever having known much of them, I nevertheless obtained a few medals in this kingdom of the blind. I have always been astonished to see that certain artists of great talent cannot overcome their repugnance for these studies or even [for] contestable theories on the influence of the milieu and on “the master faculty.” The slightest sketch after the masters seemed to us much more instructive. The theories of Taine contain a part of truth, in what they have that is banal, and a part of error, in what they have that is exaggerated.

Assuredly one finds in his books very brilliant descriptions of works of art and even a few pages [most exact] and new on the great masters. It is that, very probably, on that day Taine had been inspired by some artist friend of his. In spite of his talent as a writer, which is of the first order, one divines, even in his best works, that he was not a connoisseur and that at bottom art interested him only by halves. (1)

(1) A profound psychologist, he would have wished to analyze in detail the process of creative invention in a master and to describe the phases of a sort of artistic embryogeny. Baudry, whom he pressed with indiscreet questions, ended by answering him brusquely: “One likes well enough to make a child, but one does not like to recount publicly how one went about it.” Artistic creation has in effect its modesty.

4

M. Heuzey has contributed in a much more effective manner to the formation of public taste in France, by rectifying the false conceptions that were held before him of antiquity.

Having recently finished his stay at the School of Athens, he came back to us, joyous at the rich booty that he brought back from his mission in Macedonia. The imperial government, vexed perhaps by the opposition of the academicians, had brutally driven from the École des Beaux-Arts the members of the Institut, and by reaction, a political cabal had hissed the new professor, Viollet-le-Duc, despite his superior talent. The students were then in a moment of effervescence and of turbulent folly. Before each lesson, the stamping and the cries of animals alternated with the canticles; it was a frightful uproar that the guards remained powerless to make cease. However, scarcely had M. Heuzey opened the hall, when a religious silence was instantaneously made. One could have heard a fly buzz, when the young and sympathetic professor, a little timid at the start, began to speak.

He recalled to us neither the actor, nor even the orator. He often had recourse to his notes, but he read very well, and in his lessons, so filled with elevated ideas and true notions, the perfection of the literary form preached to us by example the sober simplicity and the elegant purity of the Attic style.

The numerous pupils who have profited from the teaching of M. Heuzey keep for him a lively gratitude. Each year it is a true treat for the artists and for the connoisseurs to attend the sessions that he devotes to the practical study of the ancient costumes—Assyrian, Egyptian, Roman, and above all the Greek costumes, which he knows how to drape on the living model with a marvelous art. Thanks to his journeys in the Orient, and also to his purchases at the universal exhibitions, M. Heuzey has gathered a precious collection of hand-woven fabrics, whose supple and firm folds reproduce, much better than our common and limp flannels, the incomparable draperies of Phidias.

I remember a young Italian woman, with a very pure profile, with almost awkward manners, whom the master had clothed in the noble Doric peplos of white wool. Her black hair, attached by a fillet, fell quite plainly down her back. When M. Heuzey told the young girl to take a few steps, she advanced with a bearing so simply noble and chaste that the whole hall burst into applause. It was an animated statue, a caryatid of the Erechtheion, or rather an Athenian virgin of the time of Pericles who was living before our eyes.

Often at these study sessions on the antique costumes there attend a few celebrated actors and the directors of our Parisian theaters. So, thanks to M. Heuzey, our tragedians and tragediennes have ceased to be ridiculous in their dress. What still too often is lacking to them is the art that I formerly admired in la Ristori, the art of making the drapery play an expressive role, of rendering it living, of using it to accentuate the expressive emotions of the acting.

Alongside the learned lessons of archaeology, more than one [of them] would need to ask of M. Heuzey too a few lessons of true taste. Our most illustrious actors bawl like true barbarians; they are far from the Greek sobriety, whether in their ungainly gestures, or in their melodramatic manner of declaiming.

M. Heuzey always speaks of the masterpieces like a man who understands them and who loves them. He inspires in those who listen to him that respectful enthusiasm, without which the study of ancient art would be only a vain science of archaeologists, of a utility rather slight for a painter or for a sculptor.

Most of the young artists profess a contemptuous disdain for the so-called classical style, which they call the pompier style, and they are not wrong. Pseudo-masterpieces have been proposed to their admiration for too long. The mediocre reproductions, executed by common practitioners in the time of the Roman decadence, in no way merit their traditional reputation. But the Greek art of the fine epochs is something altogether different. I hardly believe that there is today a single sculptor of talent who does not recognize the incomparable superiority of that Greek art, not only over the best productions of contemporary sculpture, but over those of all countries and of all times.

5

I am personally very grateful to M. Heuzey for having made me know and admire the paintings of the Greek vases. In default of the pictures and the frescoes today lost, there is in them an inexhaustible mine of information on the manners, the costumes, the usages, the religion of the Greeks. It is there that modern artists can draw a true knowledge of ancient life. I have spent very agreeable hours at the Museum of the Louvre copying these light sketches, traced with a charming dexterity, at the tip of the brush, by humble artisans. They were not very learned, these potters of Athens, but they lived in an astonishingly artistic milieu, surrounded by masterpieces whose perfection surpassed all that human genius has ever created. Then, each day, at the gymnasium or at the palaestra, they saw frolicking a whole people of young men beautiful as gods.

The collections of Greek vases had just been installed at the Louvre by M. de Nieuwerkerke, with great luxury. A guard too zealous wished to forbid me to draw in these brand-new halls; I protested, and all the while withdrawing, I did not fail to grumble very loud. The vexation that this unfortunate prohibition caused me will excuse, I hope, the little respectful tone of the letter that I wrote on this occasion; moreover it is not useless to recall to the curators of museums and to the librarians that the treasures of which they have the keeping are destined for public instruction.

Monsieur the Superintendent of Fine Arts,

If I have recourse to you, Monsieur, do not believe that it is a question of very great interests, nor of the future of painting; it is a question only of a little study that I should like to do. I had believed until now that the masterpieces with which the collections of the Louvre have just been enriched were exhibited in order to be seen, admired, studied, even copied by all. Provided with my pupil’s card (n° 2000), I had installed myself in all simplicity of soul before one of the finest Greek vases of the collection; I was working with ardor, I can even say with enthusiasm, when, through hatred no doubt of Poetry, Prose appeared to me, under the figure of a guard adorned with his feather-duster. I had to pack up and quit the place. “You see,” said the guard, putting me politely out the door, “it is that here everything is new, everything is beautiful, so it is forbidden for artists to work here. In the afternoon (that is to say, when there are no longer any visitors, nor repose, nor liberty), you will be able to come with the public to admire the fine varnish of the woodwork and to sit on the velvet benches; as for these old broken pots, no one has ever taken it into his head to look at that. You may however make a sketch on the run, if you insist.” — Well, said I, and I piteously carried off my easel, my stool, and my [box]. At noon I came back. The guard reproached me on the size of my portfolio, and, to have peace, I was forced to ask him what was the regulation number of centimeters for a sketch. I was within the rules; I sharpened, it is true, my pencil on the ground, but I was standing and tired; the guard was content.

I come therefore, Monsieur the Director, to ask you for permission to sit down. I greatly regret to disturb you for so small a thing, but I shall yet see myself forced to have recourse to you again, if I wish to take a few steps to enter the neighboring hall, the Egyptian museum, for example; I foresee, in fact, that the government [will be] exactly informed of all the evolutions of my stool.

Think of it, Monsieur, I beg you, how many artists [recoil] before all the formalities to fulfill, the number of vexations to undergo. No one likes to ask as a favor the simple right to work.

I dare to hope, Monsieur the Director, that you will welcome favorably my request and that with your permission, I shall no longer see shamefully put out the door your very humble servant. P. MILLIET, Bachelor of letters, Pupil of M. Gleyre and of the Imperial and Special School of Fine Arts.

6 January 1864

The next day a courier, in brilliant livery and prancing on a superb horse, entered the courtyard of the house in which I still live. Confiding his mount to the astonished concierge, the official messenger solemnly brought me a great packet sealed with the arms of M. the Superintendent of Fine Arts. It was a summons addressed to me by this high functionary of the State. I went to the palace of the Louvre, a little intimidated, I confess, and preparing myself to ask indulgence for the little respectful tone of my letter, when M. de Nieuwerkerke came to me, affable, smiling, and received me with the simplicity of a great lord. It was he who almost made me excuses for the clumsiness of the guard, and he granted me at once the so-wished-for permission.

In my studies of archaeology, I have since had the happy fortune of receiving the lessons of MM. Homolle, Pottier, and Collignon, eminent masters who always showed me much benevolence and toward whom I keep a very sincere gratitude.

IV — Two Months at Florence

1866

ON THE JOURNEY. — FLORENCE. — “THE MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN” AND “PARADISE,” BY FRA ANGELICO. — “THE ANNUNCIATION,” BY SIMONE MARTINI. — M. BIN AND JOSEPH BLANC. — ANDREA DEL SARTO. — DRAWINGS OF INGRES. — M. MORO. — SIENA. — PISA.

1

“When my youth in flower rolled out its gay springtime,” I made to Florence a first journey which has left me charming memories. The photographs of the masterpieces were not then spread everywhere. Very ignorant of the history of art, I walked from discovery to discovery in an enchanted world, with a true ravishment. The fragments of letters that I transcribe here bear witness to an enthusiasm which lacks perhaps measure, but not sincerity.

Paul M. to his mother

                    Geneva, 29 July '66.

Never has the journey from Paris to Geneva seemed to me less long. I had for traveling companion a young abbé, preceptor of the children of M. de Nicolaï. We discussed theology, morals, literature, philosophy, metaphysics, etc. I was astonished to see how much, with [time and] instruction and [the life of small towns], the intelligence can keep narrow and false ideas, when one lives in a certain milieu. Political events arrive only through the Gazette de France; new works are diverted from their sense, interpreted, and refuted in tendentious and little faithful accounts. — M. de Nicolaï is having a magnificent chapel built, all covered with gold and with paintings. One of the subjects chosen by the painter, to the great indignation of the parish priest, is Adam and Eve. That brought us to speak of nudity in religious painting, of the use the Greeks and the great masters of the Renaissance made of it. The only good reason that one can give for the anti-hygienic usage of closed garments is the ugliness of our barbarian [stocks], etiolated by centuries of ascetic spiritualism. Nudity is acceptable only accompanied by beauty.

From Mâcon to Geneva, I again found myself beside a prelate. Decidedly the priests are traveling. This one was a [companion] of Flandrin and speaks of art as a connoisseur. I should be much mistaken if he were not some preacher of renown: broad ideas, wit, erudition, mocking the [infallibility] of the pope, knowing the lists of the mistresses of the emperor, making citations from Voltaire… I was quite astonished, and my astonishment [amused] him much.

At Geneva, I went twice to the Permanente (exhibition) to see the picture of Gleyre, Minerva and the Graces. Maliciously perhaps, my master sent it without any explanation, and the Genevans lose themselves in conjectures. No one understands anything of it, but I think of it with confidence, with enthusiasm; it is a true rage. (1) Minerva has picked up the [aulos] of Marsyas and, her cheeks puffed out, gives herself much trouble to draw a harmonious sound from it. The Graces mock her vain efforts and her grimace. Gleyre wished to say, I believe, that Wisdom and Reason have not much to do in matters of art.

(1) Last year, the exhibition of his Hercules at the feet of Omphale brought in four thousand francs, an enormous sum for a town then small.

2

                    Florence, 8 August 1866.

… What shall I tell you of the Simplon? Rocks, cascades, flowers that blossom alongside the snow, precipices, torrents—all that is splendid, but these aspects of the mountains are familiar to you. — There comes next the delicious valley of Domodossola, already all Italian by its cultures, its houses, its costumes, and above all by the beautiful type of the inhabitants. I saw workers who were returning in the evening from their work; they bore their garment negligently thrown over a single shoulder, and the prosaic overcoat took on the airs of a chlamys.

I passed the night at Arona. The lake Maggiore made me rival the Leman. At Milan, I did not stop for this time; it is a wholly Parisian city; I was [weary of] the pretty Milanese women with their black veil, their great eyes, their smile of Giocondas; one could believe oneself on our boulevards.

As far as Bologna, nothing remarkable, but from Bologna to Florence, the railway dashes with an astonishing boldness right into the middle of the Apennines. It plays with all the obstacles. Does it meet a mountain, it passes through the body of it: 46 tunnels, I believe; it strides over ravines and torrents. At last one discovers the Tuscan [bay]. For the first time, I perceived from afar in that cheerful valley the majestic dome of Saint Mary of the Flowers and the Campanile of Giotto! Here I am at Florence! — The city of flowers is indeed the country of marvels. Very early in the morning I was already on the Square of the Seigniory, all surrounded by masterpieces… (There follows a long enumeration)… And all that in the open air, in its place, in the full sun—they are the fruits of the soil; all that has been made for Florence, by Florentines.

Add still the historical memories, the prison of [obscured], the popular struggles, the torture of Savonarola, etc., and you will understand that this square leaves an impression that one does not forget.

Madame Milliet to her son

                            La Colonie, 8 August '66.

… You did not stop at Arona and at the lake Maggiore! When we make this journey together, we shall spend a few days there. For, you know, I am keeping a money-box, for a journey by the Saint-Gothard and return by the Simplon, with a dash on Venice.

La Colonie is on the rise for the moment; we have more requests than places. It seems that this spot has a particular charm which acts on the children and the women of letters.

Letters of Paul M. to his sister Louise

                            Florence, 9 August '66.

… Listen to my lesson: In the fifteenth century, gothic architecture had become flamboyant and the great lines of the monuments disappeared beneath the overload of an exuberant ornamentation. Brunelleschi was the principal initiator of the return to simplicity and to reason. That marvelous and triumphant evolution of art which one calls the classical Renaissance. At the contact of antiquity rediscovered, the brutal rudeness of the old Tuscans of the Middle Ages began to soften. It is an admirable moment, that in which qualities that seemed to exclude each other unite: art shows already a virile vigor, but it displays already an audacity full of fire, a virile pride, while still keeping the smiling charm, the freshness, the naïve grace of childhood.

The Florentine palaces are a faithful reflection of these contrasts: Look at their base solidly seated on rude bossages that resemble piled-up rocks, and you will have the idea of the prisons, of the fortresses that defy the assaults. But, raise your eyes toward the first floor, the piano nobile: elegant arched windows are separated into two parts by a light little column. — Above the cornice, broad overhanging roofs give, in passing, in summer, the freshness of the shade, in winter, a shelter against the rain. Why, with us, do too severe regulations forbid our architects these projecting crownings of an effect so picturesque?

The calm of the great horizontal lines seems to be the symbol of an imagination master of itself which subordinates itself voluntarily to reason. This equilibrium of the faculties, the Greeks possessed it to a supreme degree; the Middle Ages had lost and forgotten it; the art of the Renaissance rediscovers it.

… I have seen so many beautiful things that I am intoxicated by them and a little dazed. When you come to Italy I am sure that the Florentine masters will be to your taste. You will see how easy it is to make masterpieces. Nothing simpler… when one has genius; these masters quite simply copied what they had before their eyes. So, no [chic]! Make portraits of all the family, and try to have them be very lifelike. Make me little contours very pure, since you like them like that, but let them be in their place and not perpendicular. Remember that cleanliness is not the [guide] of art. No chic, and no caricature! Painters, you see, have no need to have wit. — Now, my dear, that your severe professor has given you his lesson, if you will kindly permit it, I shall address myself to mamma. It is a question of business; you who are an artist, that will not interest you.

… There is a visit that I delay as much as possible; it is the one I ought to make to the banker. You could not imagine the vexations that this cursed paper-money gives us. No one wants any of it. The notes are not [legal tender], that is to say that I am forced to receive them, but as for using them to pay, impossible! No one ever has change to give me; they prefer not to sell; money has disappeared. Each town issues notes that are no longer current in the neighboring town. Could you not send me some gold, much gold, in a registered letter? …

I mistrust art critics and their fine phrases. Do you remember having read in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Taine’s Journey. You will find there a superb tirade about a portrait that he entitles: The Nun of Leonardo da Vinci. I admired like you that sparkling style, so finely chiseled, which succeeds almost in describing the indescribable. There was that question “of the [obscured] of the lips which, on the immobile white face, seem a flower of purple opened on a sepulchre.” Is that pretty enough? Well, it is assuredly a question of a very beautiful portrait, but I saw neither red lips, nor white face, nor nun, and I recognize in nothing the painting of Leonardo; I find in it again neither his preferred type, nor his mysterious smile, nor his model more mysterious still.

I have set myself again to painting. To make a copy, I should have to renounce seeing anything else; I have preferred for this time to make sketches. Here the master draftsmen dominate; I undergo their influence and I am quite glad of it. The impressions come to me [so abundantly]; I need a long contemplation, but [my enthusiasm is] not [a flash in the pan]; I am rather a piece of tinder; admiration gains ground little by little and passes wholly through me. I am not ripe for a comparison; in the midst of these paintings where genius flows in floods, my poor brain makes on me the effect of a sponge; at first it comes back up onto the water scarcely moistened, but if one leaves it plunged and replunged so that it comes back up, the memories overflow, I am brimming with admiration. On my return, I count on taking a little studio.

I am not making great progress in Italian, but what do you expect? I could not deprive myself of the pleasure of a Swiss boarding-house. We have at table a Parisian [by descent], who lives in London and [claims] the frontiers of the Rhine, and a Prussian, who claims Alsace. You see that they are not about to come to an understanding. (1)

(1) It was in 1866. The Prussian amused himself much at the indignation of the Swiss when he predicted to them with a great seriousness that their country would soon be divided between Prussia, France, and Italy.

The old hatreds against the English, the military rivalry between Germany and France are sentiments of another age. I love Albrecht Dürer as much as Poussin; Goethe and Schiller are among my friends, like Mozart and Beethoven. If one saw things from a little higher up, I believe that, the feeling of European unity arising, while awaiting that of human unity, the wars between civilized nations would be considered as civil wars.

                            15 August 1866.

I am so much in the habit of giving you lessons that, before each picture, it is to you that I inwardly address my reflections. “This is in good taste, or at least in my taste.” I wish to choose what seems to me the best. I discuss with you, I divine what would not please you, or what you would not yet understand.

For the moment I am on cold terms with Michelangelo. As his pupils have not all turned out very well, I told him that I would call again, and I have decided to wait until I am stronger and more capable of profiting from his lessons. I hope that he will excuse me; [I do feel] indeed a little, I fear, for him a most respectful sympathy; but I had promised Fra Angelico to consecrate a week to him; that is not too much. I take great pleasure in the company of this excellent man and of his edifying personages. He has given to all of them something of his angelic sweetness; the little executioners themselves are of an elegance quite Florentine and kill people in the most amiable fashion. Thus here I am, for a few days more, plunged into beatitude.

                            20 August '66.

… You know it, I have a predilection for the old masters and it is here that one must study them. I admire their art, the so rare union of the most obscure observation with an ideal vision that transports us outside the real world. Their pictures are living dreams; their inspiration is a true hallucination; they recount to us improbable miracles, but they believe in them, and they are right to believe in them, since they have seen them. If the apostles had been painters, they would have painted thus.

The vocabulary of admiring epithets is quickly exhausted: graceful, charming, beautiful, sublime, delicious, marvelous,… I should need much better than all that. You see well that one cannot describe a work of art. However, as I do not pride myself on being logical, I shall tell you a few words of the Marriage of the Virgin, by Fra Angelico, one of my preferred masters; it is thought so clearly expressed that it is painting.

At the center of the picture, the priest, seen from the front, between Mary and Joseph, takes their hands to unite them. Without turning his head, he cannot prevent himself from casting a sidelong glance toward the beautiful young girl who advances with an expression of an admirable simplicity. No trace of false modesty, nor of learned timidity. She does not lower her eyes, and why should she lower them? Old Joseph presents the ring with a smile of wholly paternal goodness. He bears in his hand a rod that covers itself with flowers. Behind him the young rejected suitors mark their vexation; one breaks on the shoulder of his happy rival a friendly blow of the fist; another breaks on his knee his shattered rod, while a third raises his hand with a naïve gesture and seems to say with regret: “What luck he has!” On the other side, a gracious cortege of young women accompanies the Virgin. All that is so simple, without a shadow of malice, without the slightest pretension to wit, and it is delicious.

Paul M. to his mother

                            August 1866.

… Dante has described, with the somber power of his genius, all the horrors of hell, but the man who has best known Paradise is assuredly Fra Angelico. He has the air of one who frequents the house.

Often the charming visionary presents to us young monks, gentle like him and like him full of fervor, who let themselves be guided by the angels toward the abode of the blessed. There they go to find again, purified and ennobled, all the joys of which they were deprived on the earth. Already they clasp in their arms the half-diaphanous body of exquisite beings with long golden wings. On their cheeks they feel the gentle warmth of the lips of their guardian angel who welcomes them with fraternal caresses.

On a fresh meadow with tender grass, perfumed by the flowers of an eternal springtime, angels and monks, crowned with roses, take one another by the hand, and there they begin to dance in a ring, tranquilly, like good children, and they sing the praises of the Lord, to the sweet accords of a celestial music.

Already their feet scarcely brush the ground; their bodies become light and immaterial. A miracle! They now float in the air, they fly off like birds; they rise higher, ever higher, in a ray of sun, they mount toward the glorious splendors, toward the abode of eternal felicity.

Oh! what a delicious and pure dream! Happy he who has such visions and who knows how to paint them with so much charm, with a conviction so simple and so profound.

What enchants me is that I do not find in Fra Angelico the slightest trace of that fierce mysticism that I hold in horror. His dreams are those of a painter and of a poet, not those of a fanatical theologian. He has kept until old age the healthy, fresh, and lively imagination of a child. But the amorous visions represent the real nature from which they are directly inspired and not the abstract and fantastic conceptions of a rigid spiritualism. Calvin, I am sure, would have found [matter for suspicion] in presence of this Paradise, amiable, smiling, and somewhat profane. Are they indeed pure spirits, these young monks who [find so much charm] in music, in dance, and in the chaste kisses of the angels? That religion seduces me and disarms me, but is it not precisely by the human side that it keeps, by what remains in it a little pagan, a little sensual, although it be infinitely delicate in its naïve purity?

Paul M. to his father

                            Florence, August 1866.

… Do not go believing that I admire equally all the primitives. It has often been remarked, the finest periods of art, whether in Greece or in Italy, have been preceded by a period of mannerism. So too in France, the romance of the Astrée and the refinements of the Précieuses preceded the literary flowering of our great classics.

The School of Siena furnishes numerous examples of this research which is not yet the natural. I shall take one of them from the fourteenth century: Simone Martini retraced the mystical scene of the Annunciation in a curious picture that he painted in collaboration with Lippo Memmi.

Seated on a seat richly decorated with marquetry, the Virgin, long and slender, holds in one hand a half-closed book. With the other hand and with a startled gesture, she draws back over her bosom, as if to hide herself, a fold of a great manteau of indigo blue. Timid and shivering, she has at first turned away, as if to flee the celestial apparition, and yet already her head turns back and inclines languidly on her shoulder, which lifts with a sort of coquetry. The pout, which still remains at the corner of her little mouth, seems to ask a tender look from her long almond eyes, which envelop and caress with a swooning beauty the handsome angel kneeling before her. — This one is, like the Virgin, long and slender, with a mouth too small, eyes half-closed, too near the nose, and which look from the side in the most devout and amorous fashion. Aloft he raises, spread out, his great moiré wings; the celestial bird spreads its tail. Several garments, sumptuously superposed, [display] their rich and delicate embroideries of gold, and envelop, gloriously stifling him, the tall fair-haired youth who holds out his long neck with a beatific grace. [At the center of the picture, the halo set about with peach blossoms of a rosebush,] he is coquettishly crowned that day with his most flamboyant halo, a Sunday halo, and over the halo, with a second crown with points of gold, the insignia of the high grade that he occupies in the offices of Paradise. Naïvely the Hebrew words of the Angelic Salutation come out of his mouth.

The tenderness of the feeling and the brilliance of the color cannot make me forget the prettiness, the affectation, and the mannerism. The contortion of the attitudes answers to the excessive complication and to the subtleties of mystical thought. Certain Florentines have not always completely escaped this research, but Giotto, like the Greeks, in being inspired by reality, had known how to find a style more simple, more robust, and more healthy.

3

Paul to Alix Payen

                            Florence, 4 September '66.

Dear sister. I have received the good letter that contained a word from mamma and a drawing from Louise. It really seemed to me to be chatting with you. I recognize so well my [Bonli] who asks your advice, and pulls this way and that. The exchange begins to fall, but what good is it to make the bankers profit from it, who did not give it to us?

For Louise, I am delighted with the portrait of her maid; it is very lifelike and has much character. This devout peasant woman resembles the figures sculpted on our gothic cathedrals. I find that very strong, and there is in it [something that makes] me proud of my sister. Masaccio or Ghirlandaio would not have done otherwise… at her age. It is not I who advised her to do it; she found all alone the direction that the Florentine masters followed. Tell her no longer to copy the caricatures of the billiard-table; she needs fine models, like those I shall bring her, or, what is better still, let her continue to make portraits. On my return, if they are successful, I shall show them to M. Perrin.

She can also try a few little fellows, one who digs his garden, another who waters, etc., people who walk about, who discuss, children who play. — No doubt, she who has already launched into biblical subjects will disdain these familiar scenes, but when you come to Milan, I shall show you a fresco of the finest style, painted by Luini, and representing three young girls who play at hot-cockles. The ancients painted and sculpted girls playing at knucklebones. She has therefore great examples.

I made yesterday an agreeable encounter: It was on a rainy morning… Eight o’clock was striking on the clock of Santa Trinita. A young man, completely deprived of an umbrella, slipped between the drops as far as the church near his dwelling… Our hero stopped before a fresco of Ghirlandaio, drew from his pocket one of those album-pads that you know, and set himself to make a sketch.

CHAPTER II. — However, two travelers, by an evidently providential coincidence, were arriving at the same instant in the same chapel. The young artist, whom the long peregrinations have rendered less savage, approached the two noble strangers and addressed the word to them in these terms: “Pardon, gentlemen, I believe I have had the pleasure of seeing you at Paris…”

So as not to keep you in suspense, it is a young man named Joseph Blanc, who has just obtained an honorable mention at the last competition for Rome. As for his mysterious companion, he is none other than M. Bin, the author of the Furious Hercules.

I made myself their cicerone. In one day we have seen all that there is most beautiful at Florence. It is a true pleasure to find oneself with people who understand, who feel, who know how to admire. M. Bin aims very high and he has already much talent. He is charged with a magnificent work, the decoration of the Polytechnicum of Zurich. He wishes to see at Rome only the Sistine Chapel and the Farnesina. He travels with his best pupil who will help him in his great undertaking.

As for M. Prat, (1) his admiration for Florence had nothing exaggerated about it; his most hyperbolic praises seem to me now beneath the reality. I saw at Santa Annunziata the frescoes of Andrea del Sarto. He was quite right to recommend them to me; it is beautiful and simple beyond all expression. He who has not seen that does not know what Andrea del Sarto is. His frescoes are superior to his best pictures.

(1) [Almoner] of La Colonie and translator of Spinoza.

Paul M. to his mother

                            Florence, 11 September '66.

… Last Sunday, I went to the Protestant chapel to hear Boissonnas preach, a former Belles-Lettres member, at present pastor at Livorno. The sincerity of the convictions gives to the eloquence something persuasive. My friends do much good around them; they tear these merchants and these bankers from their daily preoccupations to transport them into a world more elevated, more noble, and more disinterested.

I have [learned with regret] that Doret has just been ordained pastor and that he is going to marry. That ages me and seems extraordinary to me, as if the past could not change.

I shall go to draw the money that remains to me at MM. Fenzi’s, bankers, who inhabit on the Square of the Seigniory an admirable palace, attributed to Raphael. I believe that at Florence, the bankers and the grocers themselves are forced to become artists.

                            16 September '66.

I saw at M. Gonin’s a few drawings of Ingres; they are delicious portraits in pencil. At the time when he was prix de Rome, Ingres had a somewhat difficult character. A pensioner at the Villa Medici, [they joked at him and tormented him]. One fine day, weary of living in this little sympathetic milieu, he went to settle at Florence. The father of M. Gonin, a man of wit, [helped] the young artist who had no other resources left than his pencil. It was then that he made that admirable collection of portraits.

M. Gonin possesses a country house near Florence. Friday they were doing the grape harvest there; the whole Swiss colony was there. I was invited and I saw the last bunches gathered. A great cart painted in red in the Etruscan taste was drawn by white oxen, with short hair, who seemed to be of marble. [Fair-haired] men, who seemed of bronze, led them, and these robust fellows with the rhythmic movements, slow and majestic, took without suspecting it the poses of statues.

We dined in the open air: the toasts were of a mediocre eloquence, but the little local wine is excellent.

4

Paul M. to his mother

                            Florence, 18 September '66.

For a week, I have been living at Santa Annunziata, in the midst of the frescoes of Andrea del Sarto, and my enthusiasm goes ever growing. I made first some sketches, then I set myself to paint. The drawing of this master is of an admirable fineness and suppleness; his color is clear, light, transparent, harmonious, like a Veronese who had taken on more gravity. Unforeseen arrangements of groups, natural gestures, living expressions, science without pedantry, native elevation, and nobility of style mingled with familiarity—I admire all that, and above all a young grace, a charm that penetrates you.

                            20 September '66.

If I went to see all the persons for whom you have provided me with letters of recommendation, there would no longer remain me any time for the masters who are my best friends. I have, however, decided to make a visit to that dear M. Moro. His villa of San Miniato is ravishing. — Superb sun. We are beneath the shade of a great green oak, while the children play on the terrace. A few gentlemen, dressed in elegant jackets of white flannel, smoke while savoring a cup of coffee, and the old memories crowd in throngs on the lips of our host.

You know it, he always has some interesting story to recount, or to tell. “These hills, today cultivated,” M. Moro says to us, “were lying fallow, thirty years ago. I made a golden bargain when I bought this long-abandoned property. I was young, I had few things, I acquired it for a morsel of bread; the workers who asked for work, I [took on], reserving to myself to choose later and to keep the best in my service. How many idlers or rascals I had to drive away! But, in working, I had the very great pleasure of discovering a few brave and honest workers, who have remained my friends.”

“The one I most regret is good Antonio, so strong, so intelligent, so skillful, so courageous, and so gentle! He was punctual as a Geneva clock; his probity went as far as delicacy, and when [it was a question of] the great trees of the bosco, it was he whom I charged to measure them and to sell them. A glance sufficed him to estimate the height of a tree, its diameter, and the price it was worth. A skillful expert would only arrive at this result after long calculations.

“Every Saturday, Antonio asked me permission to go to town, I know not for what affairs, and little curious by nature, I did not think to be astonished at these regular absences. — One day, I was seated at table here itself, with Antonio, become my confidant, and I began to speak to him of my projects of marriage, when two carabinieri came to pass by. In our gentle Tuscany, we rarely have need of these honest defenders of the law, but hospitality has its duties; I offered then a glass of wine, and we were going to clink glasses, when the brigadier, setting down his glass, said coldly: ‘There are people with whom I do not clink glasses.’ Antonio paled, rose without a word, and, casting at the brigadier a long look of reproach, he went away… I never saw him again.

“I have learned since that Antonio was a freed convict. Each week he had to have his presence verified by the police.” We were all in agreement in pitying poor Antonio. “All crime ought to be effaced by expiation. Is that not your opinion?“

5

Paul M. to his father

                            Siena, 26 September '66.

I arrived by night at Siena and I traversed the city by moonlight; nothing more fantastic: the streets mount, descend, turn on themselves, lose themselves in mysterious depths. Somber palaces, with their narrow grated windows, their enormous rings of iron, and their crenellations; only the first floor lights up with elegant ogives. Here, nothing has changed in four hundred years; everything recalls the hatreds of the parties and their bloody struggles.

— The square is in amphitheater and crowned by an immense semicircle of palaces. At the bottom, a fountain of white marble, with the admirable bas-reliefs of Jacopo della Quercia, well seen, well sculpted, very pretty, but on which time has put its venerable patina. (1) Further on, the Public Palace with its immense tower, narrow, slender, which mounts, mounts boldly, into the sky, to a vertiginous height.

Strange city! These fierce palaces are inhabited by the gentlest, the most affable, the gayest, the most carefree people in the world. I hear everywhere joyous songs and frank bursts of laughter.

Nature is, like the inhabitants, amiable and smiling. Never have I seen a more beautiful sky, a gentler landscape. It is like a tranquil sea whose waves are little hills, with a few white houses, dotting the russet grass. Everywhere woods all dark green, olive trees, palm trees, vigorous green oaks, then in the background, very far off, beautiful mountains turning blue, and all that smiling, drowned in the light.

The cathedral is a marvel, despite the displeasing motley of the marbles. The interior is of an amplitude that [astonishes]. The pavement is formed of immense engravings on marble of the most powerful character, a work unique in the world, which is being let to be destroyed. The crowd walks [over] the masterpieces without seeing them; soon there will be nothing left of them. They have covered with planks the most recent part of this pavement, the one that was executed after the drawings of Beccafumi. It is more correct and more skillful than the old part, but the rude contours of the primitives, still half-barbarous, reveal a much livelier imagination, a much stronger and more spontaneous invention.

The Libreria (library) is entirely painted by Pinturicchio. These frescoes of an astonishing preservation were made after the sketches of Raphael. (1) The school of Siena joins to a somewhat mannered mysticism the oriental taste for richly embroidered fabrics, for sumptuous ornaments, for vivid and harmonious colorings, heightened with gildings.

(1) This fountain, one of the masterpieces of Italian art at the beginning of the fifteenth century, has since been replaced by a cold and banal copy. A few fragments of the original bas-reliefs are happily preserved at the Museum.

(1) Is it not admirable to see a celebrated master, and in all the splendor of his talent, bow before the superiority of a nascent genius?

Paul M. to his mother

                            Siena, 28 September '66.

I am still quite moved by what I saw yesterday. Night was falling. I was wandering at random in the deserted streets, dreaming according to my habit, when a sorrowful spectacle abruptly recalled me to reality. On the threshold of a poor house, an old woman was seated, holding on her knees a tiny child. The sun, near to disappearing, lit with a last ray this silent group, which stood out against the somber background of the room. And I remembered the celebrated [words] of Leonardo: “The light and the shadow that spread over the faces of people [also] on the threshold of obscure houses.” But something mysterious emanated from the shadows. I glimpsed, by the uncertain glow of a little lamp of copper, the form of a young dead woman, stretched out on a great [bed].

The grandmother is old, very old, broken by age and by sorrow; however, with an infinite tenderness, her trembling hands gently clasp against her breast the newborn. Poor little pink being, astonished, he has but a breath of life, but he would wish to live. A silent tear flows down the wrinkled cheeks of the grandmother, who [does nothing more touching than this weakness devoting itself wholly to the succor of another weakness]. The old woman forgets herself, the old woman [clings] to the dead life; a single thought seems to give her a passionate desire: “to keep the family alive, to transmit a cherished offshoot.” Will you succeed in it, poor old woman? What can the alms of a passer-by do? Who will give your child milk and bread?

I was seized with anger against the society, stepmother, unjust, pitiless. To live, alas, it does not suffice to will and to love.

Louise M. to her brother

                            La Colonie, 3 October '66.

… I am going to enter the course of Mme G., third degree. I hope that you will help me a little, for I am afraid of being behind. I should much like to go to find you, but I should like even better that you come here, for I am amusing myself much. Sunday, there was a concert at La Colonie. The nephew of mother D. had brought excellent artists; they made for us learned music; the children slept and I who have no idea [obscured fifty blows of the fist on the poor old piano of M. Pouliquen and played for us the Marquise].

Paul to his mother

                            Turin, 5 October '66.

I arrive at Turin passably fatigued. Having left Pisa yesterday at half past 4 in the afternoon, I arrived at Parma at one o’clock in the morning. I awaited the day at the café of the station, stretched out on a table, after the example of several Garibaldians. From six o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock, thanks to generous tips, I was able to contemplate quite at my ease the Correggios of the Museum. It is an unwholesome delight for a studious artist to find such facilities. It suffices to give the mancia to Cerberus for him to close complacently his eyes. This [laxity] has its good side, in certain cases… — I should have wished to prolong my journey a few more days, but major reasons prevent me. I have moreover a great desire to see you again.

My last letter was dated from Siena; since then, I have seen Pisa. This city, like many others, is well above its reputation. I stayed there only two days and left only with regret, promising myself to come back to study at length the frescoes of the Campo Santo. In face of these paintings, so powerfully conceived, so living and so true in their naïveté, when the thought turns back to our Parisian salons, one is moved to smile with pity. I bought a few photographs, much fewer than I should have wished… always the major reasons! Pisa did not seem to me to merit its nickname “The Dead One”; I found it very animated and very gay. I [saw] there finer types of women, beauties a little pale and sickly, but full of nobility, with a certain mysterious air. I do not believe that one can drape a simple dress with more grace and taste.

At the theater, by turns, I heard rather mediocre music, but I saw a very pretty ballet, with a male dancer and a ballerina of the first force…

I am dropping with sleep… permit me to say to you farewell and until soon.

V — Madame Pape-Carpantier

CHILDHOOD. — “PRELUDES.” — “COUNSELS ON THE DIRECTION OF THE INFANT SCHOOLS.” — THOUGHTS. — THE SOCIETY OF THE HAWTHORN. — DISMISSAL.

1

From their arrival at Paris, my parents had been happy to renew acquaintance with madame Pape, whom they had known at Le Mans, and who had remained in relations with the Chassevant family. Her daughters became the friends of my sisters; one of her pupils married Jules Nicole.

At the moment of the war, madame Pape addressed to my mother and to me moving letters whose value one will better appreciate, if I recall here briefly the history of this superior woman. It will be for me to accomplish a duty of gratitude.

MARIE PAPE-CARPANTIER (1)

Yet another beautiful life wholly consecrated to the good, yet another beautiful soul where flowered goodness, pity, and devotion; yet another victim of wickedness and of calumny.

Four months before the birth of Marie, her father, a quartermaster-sergeant of the gendarmerie, [perished] in tragic circumstances. We shall cite a few lines of the account that madame Pape gave of this event after the memories of her mother:

On 31 May, my father comes home at four in the morning and throws himself, all dressed, on his bed. At five o’clock, he is awakened to inform him that some Chouans have just plundered the coach from Nantes to Paris. He must depart immediately with the two brigades to escort the coach.

My father rises in haste, embraces his wife and his children whom he was never to see again, and goes off in the direction of Courcelles.

A day of anguish! All at once, toward three o’clock, a triple gallop of a horse resounds in the silent street. My mother rushes to the window; the horseman was all blue, but she recognized him; it is M. doctor L… It is toward the [town hall] that he is running. “Oh! my God,” cries my mother, “there is misfortune.”

M. Carpantier had entered without mistrust with his little troop into the forest of Courcelles, a high stand of enormous oaks. At once burst out a furious fusillade which struck first the chief, then two men at his sides. The unfortunate ones had fallen into an ambush. The assassins took flight crying: “Long live the King!”

“Oh! oh! ‘Long live the King!’” adds madame Pape, “who will ever know what I felt in my childhood, each time I heard it ring out?”

M. Carpantier was the bearer of important dispatches addressed to Marshal Moncey. Transported into a neighboring house and feeling that he was going to die, he had a lamp brought, then, gathering all his strength which was rapidly declining, he burned one by one the letters with which he was charged, not letting his last sigh escape until after this duty accomplished.

“Toward evening, my neighbor, pale, trembling, entered our house. ‘Well?’ cried my mother, shaking her by the arm, for she saw well that this woman knew… — ‘Poor lady!’ answered the neighbor, clasping my mother in her arms. My mother understood. She fell [obscured].

“She remained eight whole days mute, immobile as a dead woman, without eating, without sleeping, her eyes dry, frightful! They spoke to her of her children, of me who was soon going to be born, of her husband… [They had hoped] to see her weep, cry out; all was vain… At last, on the eighth day, a sigh was heard, the tears flowed, howlings, rather than cries, escaped from her breast. My mother and I were saved!”

The widow, left without resources, had to provide by her work for the needs of her family, and ended by obtaining a place as linen-maid at the Prytaneum of La Flèche. She earned sixty centimes a day. (1)

Madame Carpantier already had a son and a daughter aged eight years.

A few days after the death of her husband, the gendarmes had discharged his pistols, but to spare the mother the noise of the detonations, they had made use of a ball-extractor. By a terrible fatality, one of the pistols contained two superposed charges, and the lower charge remained at the bottom of the barrel.

It was this weapon that the young maid seized while playing; then saying to my sister: “I am killing you,” she aimed and killed her. “Of whom, then, my God, was the father thinking, when he drove into his weapon that ball which was to kill his child?

To what, then, I shall rather say, was Providence musing, if she occupied herself with directing all our actions?

(1) Born at La Flèche (Sarthe) in 1815, died in 1878. Most of the biographical information that follows is drawn from the books of two faithful friends, M. Loubens and M. Émile Gossot (Hachette 1890).

(1) The odious exploitation of misery has not ceased. It is one of the most revolting blemishes of our social organization.

2

Among the first memories of Marie Carpantier, here, traced in a few verses, is a simple little picture, all full of truth and of grace:

As a child, when I saw, on opening my eyelid,
The snow on the [bonds], in the meadows, on the earth,
Wild I dashed off!… then, when with a thousand designs
I had marked its dazzling cloth,
To the maternal kisses I came back, weeping,
To warm again my little hands.

The childhood of Marie Carpantier was sad. The domestic tasks hardly permitted her to mingle in the games of the other children, and solitude developed in her the habit of reflection. Her first verses translate in a touching manner the emotions of the little abandoned one:

Mother, the day is ending, your hand must be weary;
Leave at last your work; let me embrace you!
I know not what tells me that I am going to amuse you,
Come, I am afraid of life and, mother, what tedium!
Just now I saw my little companions depart…
Joyous in passing they called to me:
Come running, they said to me…
And I, my eyes in tears, my heart all swollen with longing,
Could not answer them, and I fled away.

Those who have suffered cannot without indignation see an innocent suffer. One day Marie was walking on the old ramparts of La Flèche, when she perceived three big boys who were maltreating a feeble child. The valiant little one rushed upon these cowards who took flight, and she consoled their victim. It is this fine sentiment, pity, that is going to inspire her whole life.

She consecrated some time to softening the grief of an old lady of La Flèche, madame Pion Noirie, who had lost her children. This grateful lady had circulated in manuscript and later printed, under the title of Preludes, the first poetic essays of her young companion.

Gravely ill, Marie Carpantier was for a long time condemned by the doctor to an absolute rest. The fear of leaving her mother alone in this world inspired in her profoundly pathetic verses. The image of death haunted her: In her fever, she believes she sees lugubrious phantoms:

… covered with a long shroud,
Which the breath of night lifts with regret.
I [seem to] hear a long and [new] mysterious [sound]
Moan, calling me, at the foot of a black cypress,
And in spite of myself there returns this frightful thought:
If I should die, if I should die!

She invokes the friends who have protected her youth, she dreams of going off onto the hill to intoxicate herself with perfumes, to intoxicate herself with sun.

There, I should live, friends, for it is fear that kills.
Oh! fear, of my life has made a long death-throe!
This horror of death, whence has it come to me?
Before loving you I did not fear it.

M. Gossot rightly admires this last verse. It is friendship that makes life precious to us, in spite of its trials, and that makes us fear to lose it. But the young invalid struggles in vain against the frightful vision. The image of death pursues her:

Listen! listen to the dull noise of the tombs!
On the horizon already the shadows advance…
Sap iniquity even to its roots,
And replace, victors, on their throne in ruins
Justice and Humanity…

As for me, humble child, lost in the crowd,
A task less proud is given to my days;
Less proud, but gentler:

… Two natures in God, two loves to be merged,
Over the world, in torrents, pour the truth;
A few late flowers to make blossom;
To protect with my hands a dear old age,
And then, a sacred deposit committed to my tenderness,
A suffering heart to gladden.

The most illustrious writers of the time, Lamartine and many others, sent to mademoiselle Carpantier their congratulations. These letters, which all make the same praise, are astonishingly varied. We shall choose only a few passages which seem to us to characterize the temperament of each author:

Béranger wrote with regard to the Preludes:

I have admired the happy inspiration of them, the grace and the naturalness; I have above all been touched by the amiable and elevated sentiments of which they are the expression.

A little while after, as the young Marie had dedicated to him a piece of verse, he thanked her, joining to his praises some judicious counsels:

What perfection, mademoiselle, in the piece of poetry that you kindly consecrate to me! The idol is not worth such incense, and you have known how to make modesty, when you seemed to wish to borrow from me my poor [reed-pipe]… I do not doubt that these fine strophes have worthy sisters in your portfolio. Believe me, mademoiselle, cradle them long on your knees, before delivering them to the public. One always publishes too soon. Verses [become] of those fruits that ripen only long after the gathering.

Madame A. Tastu, who wrote later for this book a charming preface, wisely gives to her young friend the same counsel:

You tell me, my dear child, that they press you to publish: (the Preludes appeared only two years later) what is said to all the débutantes. But if you ask my counsel, I shall urge you to wait still longer… Work, and do not cut your wheat while it is grass, when you can have wine and a fine harvest. Believe always in my tender interest.

Chateaubriand, embittered and disabused, kept nonetheless still benevolence enough to read the Preludes and to address to the author the following letter:

You are beginning life, mademoiselle; I am finishing it, and I have had enough of it…; it is under the shelter of the name of madame Tastu that I have ventured to encourage you in the career that you follow; for ordinarily, I counsel no one. My love of silence makes me fear noise, even for the Muses.

A medal was awarded by a Congress to the author of the Preludes (1839).

3

In 1835, the Municipality of La Flèche having organized an infant school, confided the direction of it to madame Carpantier and to her daughter, then aged twenty years. Marie had found the task that suited best her generous nature; she devoted herself wholly to these poor children who have such great need to be tended, instructed, and loved.

When, in 1842, M. and madame Pape, administrators of the Infant School of Le Mans, withdrew, Marie Carpantier was called to replace them. (1)

(1) It is their son whom she married in 1849. M. Pape, officer of the Republican Guard, died in 1858.

In 1856, Marie Carpantier was working at a work entitled: Counsels on the direction of the Infant Schools, and madame Tastu, who had herself occupied herself with education, continued to give her judicious advice:

Speak the clearest language; indicate the methods easiest to put into practice; say only what must be said; march straight to the goal; avoid digressions and side-dishes; in short, think always, not of being eloquent, but of being useful.

Another time madame Tastu raises the courage of her young friend:

It is only fools who do not doubt themselves. Let us try to do well, above all; let us think of the work, not of successes—I mean successes such as a young and ardent imagination dreams of them. Courage, then! Do not torment your mind. You have done a good work, and you will gather the fruit of it.

The amiable woman was not mistaken. The book was welcomed with favor, adopted by the Royal Council of the University and by several Societies of primary instruction in France and abroad. The French Academy, on the report of M. Villemain, awarded her a prize of 3,000 francs in 1857.

Villemain wrote:

First instincts of moral dignity, and so to speak first point of honor of the soul excited from childhood, habit and taste of obedience issuing from the very development of the moral spirit, and destined not to destroy the will, but to render it judicious and firm, a repression more suited to characters than to acts in order always to improve instead of to punish—behold what devotion to duty and the sagacity of the heart discover and put to work in the narrow circle of an Infant School.

However, most of the academicians considered the book of Marie Carpantier as a childish manual, little worthy of their attention. Victor Hugo made remarked the elevated aim of it and the qualities of style; he even cited from memory a few phrases of it, and this intervention of the great poet carried all the votes.

Béranger, who had encouraged with so much goodness the Preludes, praised without reserve the Counsels and congratulated the author by a letter full of cheerfulness and of wit:

Mademoiselle, there is always something better to do than verses, however well one makes them… You have taken the good course; you occupy yourself with the education of childhood, and you acquit yourself of it as a superior woman; your book proves it. It could not be too recommended, too read, too meditated by those who devote themselves as you do to education…

Yes, certainly, there is better to do than verses! Ah! how many times have I said to myself that it was worth more to teach little children to read than to lose one’s time, not only in rhyming, but even in plying the trade of philosopher. Or again, how many times have I not regretted not being a good village doctor! Your little volume proves to me that you think as I do, but you act more consequentially. Honor to you! However, in the hours of liberty, rhyme still a few of those pieces that have made you known. There is too much poetry in a heart like yours to stifle it in you.

Madame Desbordes-Valmore, whose life was crossed by trials so sorrowful, wrote on 25 November 1847:

Very dear mademoiselle Marie, how much good your book has done me! I have read it with the most tender and the most serious attention, and often the tears have come to my eyes, as if I were penetrating for the first time into your intelligence; moreover, your written word is so true, only because your soul is truth itself. What happiness that you are like that!… I clasp your hands which the little children bless, your hands so sparing of punishment, and which will teach their little souls to become merciful in order the better to correct. I believe, in effect, that it is the secret of heaven (1).

I hope that my friendship is one no longer for you.

After her marriage, madame Pape received from Victor Hugo the following letter:

Madame, you send me a book that sums you up. You have condensed into a work so noble and so excellent the entire labor of your life. This noble labor will contribute still to the better, surer, and more skillful conduct of the new generations.

To replace the old notions by the actual notions, to give to actions motives drawn, not from tales and superstitions, but from the reasoned knowledge of nature and of reality, to make children have a presentiment of faith in God, not by chimeras and lies, but by the reflective contemplation of his immense work—behold the goal that you have proposed to yourself, a considerable goal, worthy of your noble intelligence and of your profound heart. I renew to you, madame, all my thanks for the sending of this excellent book. I hope that your example will be followed, and that other works on the model of yours will come to replace in our schools the bad teaching by the good, and imposture by truth. (1)

Be pleased, madame, to accept my respects.

“When one has there these letters signed with illustrious names,” adds M. Gossot, “one cannot defend oneself from a profound and sympathetic esteem for the author who merited such votes.”

The work of madame Pape marks, on the other hand, an important date in the history of the progress of teaching.

(1) See the fine book of Lucien Descaves. — The Sorrowful Life of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Nilsson bookshop.

(1) The great poet here rightly opposes the positive character of modern science to the dogmatic and erroneous teaching of the Church.

4

The problem of the education of poor children has always preoccupied upright minds who wish a more just distribution of earthly goods. At Paris, madame Jules Mallet generously endowed a maternal Normal School, which later took the name of Practical Course of the Infant Schools, and madame Pape-Carpantier was called to the direction of this establishment. It is there that during twenty-seven years of teaching she formed more than fifteen hundred pupils.

Great progress was beginning to be accomplished in teaching, thanks to the generous and bold initiative of a man of heart who was a celebrated historian and a great minister of Public Instruction (from 1863 to 1869), Victor Duruy. The celebrated report in which he asked for the gratuity and the obligation of primary teaching (1) was the origin of a veritable revolution. They did not dare immediately to realize all the wishes of the minister, but true ideas have a lasting life, and Duruy obtained a few important reforms: contemporary history was put on the program of the classes of philosophy in the lycées. Special teaching was organized for those who renounced the study of Greek and Latin. The École des Hautes Études was founded, and Duruy occupied himself also with zeal with the secondary teaching of young girls. It is there, in effect, the only means of attenuating in families the regrettable disaccord that subsists too often between a father [too often free-thinking] and a devout mother. The bishop Dupanloup clearly saw the danger of the competition. He attacked violently the minister and strove to reserve to the Church the monopoly of the education of girls, in order to keep in each family a few agents devoted to the cause of the clergy.

Duruy found in madame Pape a precious auxiliary for the execution of his projects. He asked her to give to the primary schoolmasters a few conferences which had a great success. These remarkable discourses (2) have for titles: The Object Lesson. — Bread. — Clothing. — Locomotion. — The Building.

It is not, it is true, to madame Pape that returns the honor of having organized the first Infant School, (1) but [more than] anyone in France, she has contributed to making pass into practice just ideas which, before her, had remained simple wishes, or had obtained only a very restricted local realization.

The teaching of madame Pape never has anything pedantic nor coldly didactic about it.

It is a mother surrounded by her children, and who chats with them. But it is a very rare mother, a mother ideal by her affection, by her exquisite knowledge of the little souls to whom she speaks, of their little faculties, of their little passions, and above all by the admirable art that she brings to making herself listened to and understood. (2)

The children, writes M. Loubens, [should not enter] the infant school, as for their pasture. These little beings, warmed on the maternal breast, find in the Infant Schools hearts of mothers who cherish them, in return for their affectionate and docile inclinations. It is by love that one initiates them—[as madame Pape understands it]—when she initiates them into the milieu that suits them, there where laughter is the amusement, where one makes them love their companions, in associating them all in the same games and the same joys, where one knows how to make them love a childish science that one distributes to them in little morsels accommodated to their feeble intelligence; where one makes loved the order that gives them repose.

An emulator of Pestalozzi, of Fröbel, and still more a disciple of Forster, madame Pape understood the importance of the first education of the senses. She imagined for this end ingenious pedagogical instruments. It is thus [that it is to her] initiative that France owes the adoption of these excellent methods, today practiced among all cultivated nations, and whose principle is to replace the cold and abstract teaching of the book by life, the contact, and the direct observation of the objects of which one speaks to the child.

It was a great joy for Victor Considérant to see realized a few of the conceptions of his master.

I have seen, says he, in the courtyard of the Infant School of the rue Saint-Hippolyte, a little garden all dazzling with flowers, and in the midst of the flowers a dwarf cherry tree, [no higher] than the children of [three or] four years, who were playing beside it. The cherry tree was covered with beautiful red cherries, that each of the children could have gathered by reaching out a hand. Well! none of these pretty cherries [was taken], none of these pretty flowers was touched, all these pretty temptations were respected! And note, if you please, that these little children are quite free, for often the director is alongside and remains two whole half-hours without appearing. Better than that! when the first [newcomers] arrive at the School, if they [lay hands] on the little garden, it is the others who teach them that one does not touch it, and that one does not touch it. There is not a scolding to make, a punishment to inflict.

When all these little children are amusing themselves in the courtyard, where they amuse themselves so much that they would forget to eat, if one did not take care, behold the master gives a stroke of the whistle… At this stroke of the whistle, little girls and little boys suddenly quit the game and come to put themselves in file, each in his rank: three hundred children, and babies of twenty-two months! and all keeps silence! At this single stroke of the whistle, my children! says the master, and at the second stroke of the whistle, all cross their hands behind their back. At the third stroke of the whistle, the master beating time with a wooden book, the two regiments of little girls and little boys set themselves to march, marking the step and singing to the tune of Marlborough:

We set ourselves on the march,
Mironton, ton, ton, mirontaine;
We set ourselves on the march,
For one must work;
In order not to grow bored.

Does the master give a stroke of the whistle, all stops, march and song. It is a perfect silence; you would hear a fly buzz… — When the measure resumes, the march and the song resume. It is marvelous. Go and see this Infant School, adds Considérant, and you will understand what one can do with masses so young, with song, with the regular step, with cadenced movement, with a use, still so feeble and so confused however, of the measured mode.

5

I can only give here a few short specimens of the Thoughts of madame Pape. She had found them in her heart, and, thanks to her ardor to preach the truth, they took in her mouth an accent [that] gave them a greater authority:

— Goodness is the light par excellence. If instruction did not have for result to render us more religious, more moral, better, it would be only a vain pleasure, an expensive curiosity.

— There is not a child who does not let himself be won by the affection that one shows him. Love each of those who are confided to your care.

— Try that one say of you—and it will be easy if you truly love—yourselves; love is the flame that attracts the flame.

— We are worth only insofar as we love.

— Little children incessantly ask for stories; it is a taste of which the mother and the schoolmistress must know how to take advantage for the education of their pupils. (1)

— I love all that God does in the world that surrounds me, and I try to make it loved by the little children, in order to render them good.

— I observe the admirable economy of his slightest works, and I make them remark it, in order to render them more intelligent. Each part is admirably made to accord with the others, and all to concur in the destination of the whole.

— If we consider the plant in its vegetation, we are struck to see that the first act of its life is to rise vertically above the earth, and to direct itself toward the sky. What it seeks on high is the light, symbol of science, and the warmth, symbol of love.

— The moral character to which the curved line refers is gentleness; the character to which the straight line answers is rigor. The one represents the course of practical life, all of necessity, of relations with our near ones, our fellows; a life full of considerateness for others, of reciprocal concessions, of mutual sacrifices. The other represents the theoretical life, the ideal, the bold idea, independent, absolute. (1)

In a charming narrative entitled: The Doors and Windows of our House, madame Pape studies the five senses; thus science penetrates, skillfully dissimulated in these amiable pages:

All that we learn with the help of our eyes is incalculable. We can sometimes deceive ourselves and see badly, but what we have well seen, we know well. If there are unknown things in nature, they are the things that no one has seen. (2)

Further on, with regard to hearing:

The word of man was made to say the truth and his hearing to hear it.

To lie to men or to speak to excite them to hatred, to disparage one’s neighbor, to mock what is good, to ridicule what is true, to put everything in doubt, to abuse ignorance or innocence, to poeticize evil, to apply oneself to seducing people of good faith, to calumniate God and nature—it is to betray the truth, it is at the same stroke to profane the hearing and the human word.

(I extract from a letter the following passage:

Yesterday we conducted godmother (mademoiselle Drulin) to the gorges of Apremont. It is a grandiose and superb disorder. But the necessity of looking at one’s feet is insupportable, and distracts the mind which would wish only to contemplate. Yet one must not walk [obscured] vipers. Brigitte and our young Swedish girls nearly set foot on one of them, quite near our house. Thus the necessities of life [chain] the pride of souls desirous of rising on high.)

— There are pebbles which, rolled and knocked together in the waves of the sea, have lost their points, their asperities, and have softened beneath the repeated blows of the waves, as the well-tempered souls soften beneath the repeated blows of trials.

I shall finish these too brief citations by a thought that sums up all the others:

What matters is that children learn to RESPECT LIFE.

This idea will take in the future an importance ever greater. It will suffice to found the true human morality. (1)

(1) One has in all times recounted stories to children, but madame Pape has been able to make of this usage a sustained method of instruction and of education.

(1) In one of her best works, the Secret of the Grains of Sand, madame Pape has sought moral analogies, drawn from the diverse geometrical figures, [in the] parabola, hyperbola, cycloid, etc. It is a new application of the theories of Fourier which shows the important role of analogy in the discoveries of moral science. (2) This ignorance, neither the metaphysicians nor the devout have the courage to admit.

(1) The respect of life is a rule whose consequences [are] considerable: abolition of the death penalty, of war, etc. Two exceptions, however: the [first owing] to the necessities of food, the second to the obligation under which men are to destroy harmful animals.

6

When I entered for the first time into the model Infant School directed by madame Pape, I was, like all those who visited it, marveling at the results obtained.

It is that, to her excellent method, she added that personal charm that nothing could replace. The important thing is not what the master teaches; it is the tone, it is the example, the practice of benevolence and of uprightness, with the sympathy that carries one along, and gives an enormous power of suggestion. I could not express by words the feeling of happy life, of reposing calm, that emanated from this childish class, like an atmosphere of maternal affection. Little fellows and little girls with the lively, intelligent look manifested naïvely by their gestures, their physiognomy, their exclamations, and their laughter, the astonishment, the ravishment that the pretty stories told to them excited in their little souls, and almost without their knowing it, they swallowed into the bargain a host of useful notions.

My sister Louise gave a few lessons to this childish class. Her precious talent as a draftswoman permitted her to trace freehand on the blackboard a lion, a cock, a dog, and there were cries of admiration, so much does the symbolism of line drawing answer exactly to the summary images formed by the brain of a child.

Besides her two daughters, Brigitte and Madeleine, we met, at madame Pape’s, mademoiselle Marie Chassevant, who invented an ingenious method of musical teaching for children. — My mother gave lessons of drawing, and mademoiselle Gleyre, the niece of the master painter whose pupil I was, a few courses of natural history.

The physiognomy of madame Pape expressed intelligence, gentleness, and goodness, although the firm mouth marked the energy of a strong will. It was in effect a nature passionate for the good and that knew how to remain mistress of itself. Her whole face was as though lit by brown eyes, with a penetrating look, full of frankness and of sympathy, that enthusiasm often illumined with its flash.

The great heart of madame Pape had such a radiance that she attracted numerous protégés, thus enlarging the circle of her family. There were first the three orphans left by her brother, then Léon C…, adopted son, and her [women collaborators]. While still very young, this adopted son of madame Pape enlisted, as I did, in the auxiliary Engineers, and took part, alongside M. Delbrouck, in the defense of Paris… Later, become an architect, he married the daughter of that heroic man who was our captain.

I had kept so charming a memory of my passage through the Society of Belles-Lettres of Geneva, that I proposed to madame Pape to organize at her house meetings of the same kind. The idea pleased her, and she knew how to realize it at once with great success. Seeking a gracious name for our group of students, [among whom the women students] formed the majority, she baptized it Society of the Hawthorn.

The parents attended our weekly sessions. They presented their observations and their benevolent criticisms to our literary attempts; one recited, one played a few scenes of comedies, sometimes a whole play; music and dance were part of the program, and it was with regret that I had to renounce these agreeable meetings, when I left for a second journey to Italy.

Madame Pape-Carpantier to madame Milliet

                            Paris, 17 July '69.

Dear lady and friend. I write to you from my bed, from which I go out only a few hours a day. I cannot yet come to you at La Colonie; it is a reality! My daughters are as distressed as I am. Tomorrow there will take place at the Sorbonne a very attractive session: that of the distribution of the prizes of the Society for Elementary Instruction; this session will be presided over by Jules Favre, who will speak for three quarters of an hour! I have a place of honor and I shall not be able to occupy it; judge of my regrets! Ah! truly, the work that I have so much done for the rejected of this world, the work and the enemies! By good fortune, however, a few good women friends like you are granted to me, and that helps to accept the rest.

Goodbye, dear lady; give my most sincere friendly regards to your excellent son; embrace Louisette for me; recall me to the memory of monsieur Milliet, and believe me, dear lady and friend, your very keenly affectionate. MARIE PAPE-CARPANTIER.

7

The extreme moderation, I was going to say excessive, of madame Pape, in her language and in her writings, did not preserve her from the jealousy, nor from the hatred of the devout. She had nevertheless numerous and powerful friends: Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the philosopher Adolphe Garnier, madame the maréchale de Mac-Mahon, in short Victor Duruy, the former minister. One is astonished that such authorities did not suffice to protect her against the calumnious insinuations.

But the Jesuits did not pardon her her republican opinions, nor that very high religion, which refused to shut itself up in the frozen formulas of a narrow orthodoxy. They pardoned her still less her respectful affection for a great poet, madame Ackermann, sorrowful muse of pessimism, who has sung in admirable verses her revolt against the cruel God of the Catholics.

Shadowy intrigues brought about the dismissal of madame Pape, of this noble woman whom her life of devotion had merited the esteem of all those who knew her well. (1)

Let us leave, says M. Gossot, all the odiousness of this disgrace, which made a scandal, not only in France, but in all Europe, to the minister who had the sad courage to sign it, (2) ignorant no doubt, as of many other things of his trade, that the first of his duties was to defend, against a party blinded by hatred, the functionaries who did the most honor to the University.

The profound sadness of madame Pape manifests itself in a letter written on 24 November 1877:

We must drag out life, however heavy this cannonball may be to us. Courage alone can lighten the weight of it. After all, all that lasts so little! A few years pass, and we are finished. This thought is sometimes a consolation. (3)

One must read in the work of M. Loubens the long and touching series of letters which, on the occasion of this crying injustice, manifested at once the admiration, the gratitude of the former pupils, and the indignation of honest people. The testimonies of sympathy arrived in throngs to the victim of the clergy. The articles of the journals and the personal approaches of the friends of madame Pape ended by enlightening the minister who, better informed, did not however wish to have the air of recanting by going back on his decision. Madame Pape was named Inspectress general of the Infant Schools; but these new functions put an end to her active and personal role. The house where she had so long taught was not given back to her, and it was for her a profound grief. She said to madame Milliet: “Do not repeat it to my daughters, but those wretches have killed me!”

(1) Ignoble insults were launched by the clerical and reactionary journals. However, on the representations of maître Lachaud, Paul de Cassagnac was constrained to a retraction. (2) M. de Cumont. (3) Madame Pape died on 31 July 1878.

ANNEX TO CHAPTER V (1)

Madame the maréchale de Mac-Mahon to madame Pape

                    Versailles, 13 December 1874.

I have been so painfully affected by what you told me, and so touched by your dignity in this disgrace, that I have employed myself with the Ministry. I have made it remarked that one is there vexed by what has happened in your regard and desirous of repairing it as far as possible.

I have taken it upon myself to ask you whether you would accept a position of Inspectress that one would make as fine as possible. I hope that you will not refuse me to contribute to repairing an injustice.

Accept, madame, all my most distinguished compliments. Maréchale DE MAC-MAHON.

Reply of madame Pape

Madame the Maréchale, Your goodness penetrates me, and I should believe myself wanting in all the sentiments that are due to you, if I did not accept the effects of it.

Here, madame the Maréchale, is what was my situation before the first of October last: named Inspectress general in 1868, following the Halphen prize that the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences awarded me, on a report of M. Drouyn de Lhuys, I remained at the direction of the Practical Course of the Infant Schools organized by me in 1847 and 1848.

During the course of these 27 years, my salary had been progressively raised from 3,000 to 5,000 francs. I enjoyed besides the lodging, heating, and lighting.

Permit me, madame the Maréchale, to refer myself to you alone to appreciate whether the propositions that will be made can be considered as a compensation and a reparation.

You show yourself so solicitous of justice and of my lot, that I leave with confidence my dignity and my interests in your hands.

Be pleased to accept, madame the Maréchale, with my lively gratitude, my highest and most respectful consideration. MARIE PAPE-CARPANTIER.

On 24 December 1874 the maréchale de Mac-Mahon wrote to madame Pape to ask her whether she would accept being sent on a mission, as general delegate. An indemnity of 3,000 francs would have been allotted to her, apart from the expenses of the rounds. Here is the reply of madame Pape:

Madame the Maréchale, my salary for inactivity having been fixed freely by M. the Minister, my [position was] modified by him. If it were improved on your desire, it is to you alone, madame the Maréchale, that I should be indebted for it.

As for serving the apprenticeship of the rounds, I am very little fit for it, and I had [obtained] the exemption from the rounds [as] the reasoned condition [following from] being inspectress general. The time and the shock produced in my health by the blow that has been dealt me do but give more force to the motives that had for me value as early as the year 1868.

And then, madame the Maréchale, this position of an Inspectress general in inactivity coming to fulfill missions following the general delegates in activity would take from her in advance all credit, all consideration in her rounds. It would be for me an aggravation rather than a reparation.

And yet, madame the Maréchale, a reparation at least moral has become to me more desirable than ever. They spread the rumor in the University that it is for bad administration that I have been replaced. I cannot believe that the Ministry, without having informed nor questioned me, is trying to justify itself by such a calumny. From wherever it may come, however, I have at heart to see it denied, and it is not in accepting my diminishment that I should attain this goal.

Believe, madame the Maréchale, that I appreciate your generous efforts as they merit, and that I should wish to be able to accept anything whatever that came to me through you, but the honor of a life like mine has its exigencies.

Pardon it me, madame the Maréchale, and be pleased to accept the assurance of my respect and of my most profound gratitude. MARIE PAPE-CARPANTIER.

(1) I am grateful to the daughter of madame Pape, madame Brigitte Gelle, who kindly communicated to me the following letters.

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[The cahier closes with the printer’s note: the proof for printing was given, after corrections, for sixteen hundred copies of this eighth cahier and for fourteen copies on whatman paper, on Tuesday 14 March 1911. The manager: Charles Péguy. This cahier was composed and printed by unionized workers; Julien Crémieu, printer, 13 and 15, rue Pierre-Dupont, Suresnes.]