Un cas de conscience
A Family of Fourierist Republicans, XI: A Case of Conscience
The Milliet Family
1871-1873
I — A Stay in Rome
The Villa Medici. — M. Ernest Hébert. — Joseph Blanc. — Jules Machard. — A. Mercié. — L.-O. Merson. — Maréchal. — At Pius IX’s. — Dom Marcello’s gallery. — The baths of the Tiber. — The clandestine amusements of Saint Agnes and Saint Polycarp. — A celebration at J. Blanc’s. — The “trattoria” of “the Hippopotamus.” — Saint-Gaudens. — Doctor Schiff. — Heil. — Father Navlet.
1
J. Nicole to Paul M.
Geneva, 20 October 71.
… I have seen Doret and Balavoine, who eagerly asked after you.
… At this very hour, I am preparing to go and settle definitively in Paris. There is my famous plan in the course of execution; it is unbelievable, after so many disappointments. I am bringing my mother along; she will come to set me up in my household and keep it going during the first months, until it runs by itself; as for me, I should never have had the heart, nor the means, to take on all of Paris. Inform Madame Milliet that I am definitely taking her advice, that we shall presume upon her kindness and so forth. She is so good and so well versed in those dreadful matters of practical life that she will indeed come to the aid of two poor provincials…
Paul M. to J. Nicole
La Colonie, 25 October 71.
… Tell Doret and Balavoine how much their kind remembrance has touched me. Those dear friends, I have neither forgotten them nor replaced them. Perhaps we should not agree in politics; yet, since I know of nothing more precious than the esteem of honest people, I hope that they may at least know that, in the terrible events in which I was involved, I always acted according to my conscience, and that I firmly believe I did my duty.
I am very happy to learn that you are coming at last to Paris; I only fear that we may not be there on the day of your arrival, for I was going to spend All Saints’ at La Colonie. Be that as it may, I fully intend not to delay in joining you; I ought to have been back long ago; my mother did not wish it, and you know what a well-behaved child is. I am, moreover, working a great deal here. Just think, it had been nearly a year since I had touched the brush. Family and art are two great consolations for one and for the other. I had been deprived of good friendship.
M. Charles Blanc, director of Fine Arts, having had the excellent idea of founding in Paris a special museum for copies of the masterpieces of painting scattered throughout the entire world, I at once submitted a request: to copy a fresco in Italy would for me almost replace the advantages of the Prix de Rome. M. Guillaume, director of the École des Beaux-Arts, had followed my studies; he was good enough to recall that I had obtained a few medals; thanks to his endorsement, my request was favorably received. I was charged with reproducing on canvas a fresco by Melozzo da Forli, preserved in the Vatican Museum, and representing the scholar Platina presenting to Pope Sixtus IV the plan of a new library.
Provided with official letters of recommendation for the two French plenipotentiaries, M. de Bourgoin, ambassador to the pope, and M. Fournier, ambassador to King Victor Emmanuel II, I set out for Rome.
M. Ernest Hébert was then director of the Académie de France.
Paul to his mother
Rome, 29 May 1872.
I came directly to Rome and, scarcely arrived, I had nothing more pressing to do than to go to the Vatican to see my Melozzo. I did not know that one does not enter the residence of His Holiness without a permit; I had to go and ask our ambassador for it. — One works only four hours a day in the Museums, that is little; not to mention feast days.
In the cheap eating-house where I take my meals, the oil-shadowed cooking does not fight me too valiantly, but there I meet a merry band of French artists. Joseph Blanc, who has finished his term at the Villa Medici, comes to dine with his dear comrade Andrea, nicknamed the Hippopotamus, an enormous cook, a sort of pot-bellied Silenus. I meet there Machard, M. Charming Narcissus, whom you must have seen at the Salon; (1) M. Sain, the author of the Excavations of Pompeii (a picture which my father copied at the Luxembourg) and other artists who are agreeable companions.
Paul to his mother
Rome, 1 June 72.
De Pury, who is spending the summer at Florence, has sublet me his studio; he leaves me his servant. He is a very intelligent model and one who looks like a decent fellow; he has already done me service in getting me settled.
(1) Now at the Museum of Chartres; its place would be at the Louvre.
Joseph Blanc has introduced me to M. Ernest Hébert. Very busy, the Director of the Académie de France said barely a few words to me; he invited me for Sunday to one of his evening parties, which are said to be of a rare dreariness. I shall go nonetheless, in order to renew acquaintance with those of the Prix de Rome whom I saw at the École des Beaux-Arts.
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 5 June 72.
I have already paid my tribute to the dreadful climate of Rome. I had to spend two days in bed, but an instinct told me there was nothing serious in it. Antonio, the model who sweeps my studio, has nursed me very well; he brought along his wife, who resembles a Virgin by Raphael and who is nursing a superb bambino. The bambino wanted to play with my watch, he made water everywhere, but no matter, I was very glad not to be completely abandoned.
My permit to enter the Vatican has not yet all the herbs of Saint John’s Eve; I am lacking, it seems, the signature of some Signor Direttore or other, so that I have not yet seen my Melozzo. What patience it requires!
On Sunday, M. Hébert’s evening party was as cold and as tiresome as I had been told. The pensioners are so bored there that they no longer come. However, M. Serpette, Prix de Rome in music, played a few fine passages from the Huguenots. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew awoke in me the memory of other massacres.
I have been disappointed in seeing the life that is led at the Villa Medici. Certainly, one cannot dream of anything finer than this palace, with its gardens, its statues, its magnificent walks. There are there all the elements of a charming society; well, a thousand petty regulations, interpreted in a narrow way, then the absolute lack of mutual goodwill and cordiality, the rivalries and the jealousies spoil everything.
I am assured that I am going to have at the Museum a ferocious guard who will have to be won over with gold. A photographer, who possesses a negative of the Melozzo fresco, asks me twenty francs to let me make a print from it; one must indeed submit to that. It is not on that score that I shall make economies, and as I wish to make none either on my canvas, nor on my colors, nor on my food, in order not to fall ill, nor on Antonio’s wages, who will nurse me well for that, I believe that my money is going to fly away. I write; decidedly I was wrong to say that my copy was being paid for too dearly.
Madame Milliet to Paul
Paris, 5 June 72.
… It is now two days that we have been going to the Louvre; we stay there from ten o’clock until four o’clock. M. Bourdon is very flattered by the cordiality of your welcome toward him, and he will make good use of it with the minister. Louise (1) is taking a true interest in her work. I believe he is an excellent teacher, but very despotic. He is a fanatic for gray; he claims that all the old masters prepared their pictures in grisaille.
6 June.
It is on Saturday that Nicole is to marry; we shall go to the temple of the rue Saint-Honoré, to attend the ceremony. I do not know whether they will go to settle at Geneva. Nicole already has here a rather fine position, secure, but not very lucrative. (1)
Paul to his mother
Rome, 8 June 1872.
Vexations follow upon vexations, and I do not foresee the moment when I shall be able to begin the Melozzo. I have only just learned that I have obtained my entry card for the Vatican Museum. At last, I have seen my Melozzo; it is a very fine painting, but in a deplorable state of preservation; the painting has been removed from a wall and badly re-glued onto canvas, it is falling to pieces. I must not think of making a tracing; were I offered permission for it, I would not risk it. The picture is placed between two windows, in such a way that it is very difficult to see. Formerly, one could make it turn on pulleys, in order to bring it into good light, but this dangerous moving is no longer permitted. I am going to write to M. de Bourgoin. I hope he will obtain for me from Cardinal Antonelli this permission. The guard of the Museum has given me the measurements of the fresco, but in Roman palms.
(1) Professor at the École des Hautes Études.
Louise Milliet to Paul
Paris, 10 June 72.
We went on Saturday to Nicole’s wedding. How a Protestant wedding is finer than a Catholic wedding, where one must always have one’s hand in one’s pocket for the offering, and where they make all sorts of ridiculous antics! The pastor, without being very eloquent, spoke in a truly touching manner. No paltry prayers in Latin, but an improvisation, in which he said things sensible and just; it had something familiar and fraternal about it; everyone was moved. He told them to love each other, that there is nothing finer than two young people who unite, and so on, and so on. It is not at all like J. B.’s wedding. Then he gave both of them a handshake and made them a gift of a Bible.
Paul M. to his father
Rome, 12 June 72.
The troubles continue. I have not yet obtained permission to make my copy the size of the original. I have written for that to the Ambassador of France, I have written to Monseigneur Antonelli, I shall write if need be to M. Charles Blanc, to M. Jules Simon, to M. Thiers, I shall write to the pope, and to the devil, but I shall indeed have to bring it off. What is painful to me is to be forced to call myself the “very obedient servant” of all these most illustrious Excellencies, whom I do not, however, respect much. I know well that these consecrated formulas no longer mean anything; no matter, it is vexing.
Paul M. to his mother
14 June 72.
A monthly dinner brings together the French artists with a few of the Prix de Rome. I found there young men whom I had known at the École des Beaux-Arts: Merson, Mercié, Tony Noël, Joseph Blanc, Jules Machard, etc.
The two newspapers that I am sending you are going to be devoured with thirst in the lair of the Hippopotamus. I am perhaps the only person in Rome who receives papers of every advanced opinion. The artists I meet here imagine that most of them are republicans, and they no doubt have dispositions to become so, but they care precious little about politics. Some of them remained in Rome during the war, that says it all.
I believe that the new military law will have good effects, as a transition, and while we wait for something better, but I hope that M. Thiers will not collapse everything for us; when he says that he wants peace for as long as possible, he ought to have but one aim, to put us rapidly in a state to retake Alsace and Lorraine. I care little about the billions, but France has sold Frenchmen, I cannot resign myself to this infamy; it does no honor to one who would deliver his daughter to brigands to save his own life. I know well that it was difficult to continue the struggle; it is none the less a great cowardice, and our country must be quite unconscious not to prefer death. I believe, moreover, that the Germans would not have resisted a supreme effort of the entire nation. I do not at all share M. Thiers’s view, I do not believe that the armed nation is an empty word, it is for me a great and fine idea, the only means of avoiding civil wars and coups d’état. The suppression of standing armies is for the Republic a question of principle, a question of social morality. Does Switzerland not give us the example to follow?
I thank my uncle for the revolver he made me a gift of. I hope I shall have no occasion to use it, but in certain cases an arm may not be useless, were it only to scoff at intimidation. A few days ago, Lematte, Prix de Rome, was going toward ten o’clock in the morning to Saint-John-Lateran — the church and the palace are within the fortifications, but at the end of a long deserted avenue. — He was stopped by four or five men, who took from him his watch and his purse. The police recovered only the watch. For the rest, such occurrences are becoming rarer and rarer; Rome is making progress in every respect.
In the morning, from six o’clock on, I draw at the Academy from the living model. In the evening, one does not dine at regular hours, but only after sunset; it is rather late in this season.
One forms a fine idea of the press here. The most advanced newspapers and those that are devoted to the pope agree in insulting the ministers and the government. They are going to let it be said, and they are quite right. What is more serious is that the workers are beginning to organize. A great association has just been founded at Ancona. It is an irresistible movement which no people will escape, because it is legitimate and because it will succeed; it will be a great good, provided that the aim is not overshot and that the stupid resistance of the employers does not bring about ruins.
Paul to his mother
19 June 72.
The articles of Louis Blanc in the Rappel pleased me greatly. I find that the radicals are truly very reasonable and very moderate people; that is what makes their strength. The result of the elections is certainly good, and the votes of the army are of good augury.
I have at last obtained permission to make my copy the size of the original and to turn the frame on its hinges. These are exceptional favors. If Monsignor Antonelli knew to what unbeliever he is granting them, I should not come out of the Vatican alive and the poison of the Borgias would season my macaroni.
It is a very curious thing to see, this residence of the pope. Here are well-preserved antiquities! Imagine a palace which is a city, a whole world separated from the world, and which remains such as it was several centuries ago. The costumes are magnificent: lansquenets in harness, graceful little pages, purple-clad cardinals, violet bishops, everywhere silk, moiré, and velvet, the grooms themselves are clothed in crimson satin. I saw all that the other day from the top of a gallery; the ceremony was superb: Pius IX was crossing the Loggias of Raphael in the midst of an enormous crowd of fervent devotees, hastened thither to pay him homage. His Holiness walked very briskly, blessing to the right, blessing to the left with the greatest activity, it was a veritable shower of blessings. People knelt as he passed, they kissed the trace of his steps, the old dowagers waved their handkerchiefs with frenzied cries: Viva il Papa-Re!
Sincere feelings have such resonance that this ridiculous spectacle seemed to me almost touching. Poor Pius IX looks like a decent fellow; he really believes himself a prisoner in the Vatican and never goes out of it. In fact, if he were to walk about in the city, there would perhaps be demonstrations for and against him, which would bring about disturbances.
Alix Payen to Paul
Paris, 19 June 72.
Truly you are very kind to write to us so regularly, your letters give us great pleasure…
Imagine that a few days ago I was coloring at the Luxembourg a photograph after Amaury Duval; an English lady, followed by a family such as the English alone have, jabbered to me a few unintelligible words in French; I answered her in English, and there she was asking me the price of my watercolor. At first I said I did not know and then I answered 70 francs, without thinking what I was saying, exactly as I would have said 100 sous. At once a gentleman ordered from me a second copy at the same price. But, as soon as they had left, it was a real comedy: the painters, men and women, came running to ask me first to serve them as interpreter, then they wanted to know how much I had sold my watercolor for. When I had satisfied their curiosity, there was a hurrah of disapproval. An old gentleman went so far as to say that it was stupid thus to spoil the trade. Madame Lemée said that they ought to be sold for 50 francs. — This morning I delivered my first watercolor to the Englishwoman and she ordered two others from me, but at 60 francs. You see that this is enough to give me hope. If you knew what my joy was, in the evening when I came home, to tell my mother of my success. I laughed all by myself; they could tell me as much as they liked that I had made a poor bargain, I was content all the same.
— I go every other day to Nadar’s, but since I entered there I have received only 5 francs so far. I am beginning to lose patience. — I speak only of myself, but I know that you take an interest in what I do; your advice is often lacking.
I have still to tell you a story which could have unfortunate consequences for that good M. Aubry: He left on the 11th, as a Cabinet courier, for Vienna. Now, the newspapers write that on that date a Cabinet courier, coming from Paris and going to Vienna, was stopped at the station of Strasbourg by a band of customs officers who had opted for German nationality. The Frenchman could not contain his indignation, and as a cry escaped his lips a German officer dealt him a blow with his fist; the others joined in and the poor man rolled on the pavement, all bruised. During this time the train departed, carrying off his dispatches, but not the man who was charged with them. At last they allow him to take the following train, but on condition that he will return in three days to constitute himself a prisoner.
Madame Aubry has received from her husband neither letter nor telegram, but the dates and destinations are indeed those of his journey. Perhaps, to give satisfaction to the Prussians, they will be forced to dismiss him. It is a very serious matter to have abandoned one’s dispatches. I should truly be very sorry if this turned out badly; they are such excellent people! they have shown me so much affection that I love them with all my heart.
Take good care of yourself and, if you felt yourself becoming a little ill, write to me, I would come very quickly to nurse you. — Mama is anxious to know whether the canvas she is sending you will please you. Farewell, my darling, I embrace you. Your sister who loves you.
ALIX.
Félix Milliet to his son Paul
La Colonie, 20 June 72.
… I read in a newspaper that the administration’s purchases at the Salon are about finished. There is talk of 500,000 francs, of which one portion goes for sculpture and the three others for painting. (1)
The Rappel announces three republican elections; this proves that the democratic spirit is gaining ground. I understand that, alongside art, political preoccupations find their place in your mind. It could not be otherwise in our epoch of struggle, of transition, and of renewal. It is, moreover, a necessity and a duty. There would be a misunderstood egoism in losing interest in the general life, and it is an impossible thing, when one has generous ideas and when one understands the great law of solidarity.
As for me, I lead here a rather useless life, it is true, but at least an occupied one; some little literature, some gardening, to which must be joined painting, with which I occupy myself every day for a few hours, there is my existence.
(1) The Duc d’Enghien by Jean-Paul Laurens, bought for 8,000 francs. — The Sleep of the Wallflower, 3,500 francs. — The Abduction of the Palladium by Joseph Blanc, 6,000 francs. — The Bearer of Bad News by Locanto de Nozy, 3,000 francs. — Daphnis and Chloe by François Laurenz, 10,000 francs. — The Spectacle of Human Folly by Glaize, 7,000 francs. — The Death of the Virgin by Becker, 6,000 francs. — The Hour of the Tide by Pierre Billet, 3,500 francs. — Winter Evening by Émile Breton, 4,000 francs.
Paul M. to his mother
25 June 72.
The new masters of Rome have carried out useful reforms; there is progress in activity and cleanliness, but they will have great difficulty in conquering the traditional apathy and in resurrecting the city of the emperors. Bad taste unfortunately plays a large part in the changes. In cleaning all the ruins, they have dusted them, washed them, scraped them, scoured them; not a blade of grass nor of moss left. It is better for their preservation, but the majesty of the ages is going away. What seems here of a deplorable taste is the invasion of the English garden; little cast-iron railings well polished, little artificial rocks very neat. Built at very diverse epochs, the monuments of Rome are not all of the best style; but the most baroque among them have such an amplitude that the modern constructions appear beside them cramped and mean. In their rage for cleanliness, the Romans will end, I believe, by whitewashing the antique marbles and the frescoes of the old masters. That would still be better than to repaint them, under the pretext of retouching them.
Where cleanliness would be quite in its place is in the restaurants; until now, no one complains of any, in this respect. The culinary art has remained very primitive; sauces are unknown and fried potatoes have been presented to me here as a great luxury, reserved for foreigners of distinction; in compensation we eat newborn kid, pigeons with flowers, and ewe’s milk cheese.
In spite of the Piedmontese, Rome will for a long time still remain picturesque. We were a thousand right at the top of the Colosseum in the moonlight; it was of a poetry full of severe gravity, of an imposing grandeur truly worthy of the Roman people.
Lying on the high stairs of the Capitol and of the Ara Coeli, nobly draped in their cloaks, slept groups of peasants who come to spend the night there to flee the malaria. It put me in mind of the time of the siege.
2
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 3 July 72.
At last, all is ready and I begin tomorrow. My great stretched canvas is superb and frightening. I have a brand-new carpet — an old one would have sufficed me — and an enormous step-stool, a heavy rickety contraption, hardly convenient to move about. They have turned my Melozzo toward the light and, now that it is well lit, I find it admirable; it is the finest piece in the whole gallery — note that one sees there Raphael’s Transfiguration. — Unfortunately the canvas onto which the fresco has been transferred is worthless; they are trying to restore it by gluing behind it several other canvases, then boards to prevent oscillations. Provided they do not risk making the painting fall!
Mercié has just been decorated with the Legion of Honor for his David. He is, I believe, the first pensioner to have received this distinction. He is only 26 years old and it is the first time he has exhibited.
Enjoy yourselves well at La Colonie and do not entirely forget your poor Melozzo the Second.
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 10 July 72.
… Almost all the pensioners of the Villa Medici are behind this year with their submissions. Mercié is working on an admirable group: Glory carrying off a dying young man.
I have made the acquaintance of a very distinguished artist, an American sculptor named Saint-Gaudens, and I am happy to find someone with whom I agree in politics, that is rare. He leaves unfortunately in a few days, but will return next winter.
I saw at Blanc’s a very well-made book that I am going to try to procure for myself; it is a true history of the Commune. The author, whose name I forget, is one who borrowed all his documents from reactionary newspapers. By thus assembling what they admit, he has formed the most overwhelming bill of indictment.
The monarchists are stirring a great deal; they are powerless, but what harm they do nonetheless to France, and how culpable they are at such a moment!
Here the clerical party is bestirring itself and is deciding to abandon its system of abstention. It is going to take part in the next elections and will get a few of its candidates through, by using the petty honest means of which the clericals are accustomed.
I have an idea that you are all this evening at La Colonie; think there of me as I have thought of you.
J. Nicole to Paul M.
Vernou-sur-Brenne, Tuesday 2 July 1872.
The moment to leave for the country came immediately after my marriage. Scarcely moved in, I had to move out fifty leagues from Paris and install myself in a grotto, the most romantic, the most charming, but not the most accessible nor the most practical of dwellings.
… I inhabit, or rather we inhabit, one of the best grottoes of Touraine, a primitive country of which
The inhabitant knows neither lime nor plaster, But in the rock that he hews for his bed Each one knows how to carve his lodging with his own hand.
As for me, thank God, I found my lodging already carved, a discovery to which, I confess, I was not insensible. It is a magnificent cavern crowned on the outside with a thick garland of ivy, wild cherry trees, and acacias; something quite perfectly set down so as to make an enchanted spot; one would say the beginning of a fairy tale. Within, vaulted rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen joined by a long mysterious gallery. The whole very comfortable, moreover, and sufficiently clean; we have a piano. In short it is a dream, and when I see myself in the rock, surrounded by my books, with my little fairy who comes and goes in her picturesque domain, I ask myself whether it is indeed I who am there.
… I hope that you are entirely recovered and that this impression of sadness and of quasi-abandonment which afflicts one so strongly far from one’s family has somewhat dissipated for you…
Allow me to stop there. I must go and draw water from our well: a water of a delicious freshness, but with an abundance of spiders less charming. Be that as it may, it is I who draw it. Farewell, dear friend.
Louise Milliet to Paul
Paris, 10 July 1872.
Alix dined yesterday at Madame Aubry’s, whose husband, released from prison, has come back to us fat and plump. The restaurateur to whom he had applied had real feasts prepared for him; he might protest as much as he liked, they brought him heaps of good things; and all that was very cheap. The population, excited by M. Aubry’s words, fell upon the zouaves. Two of them were obliged to enter the hospital. M. Aubry has not lost his place and his comrades have just given him an ovation.
At the Louvre I have resumed M. Bourdon’s lessons. M. Gleyre proposes to him to make a journey to Italy with him; he is very flattered by it. I have begun to lay in the planes on my painting, but it is more difficult than I thought. My grisaille was not dry enough. — While M. Bourdon was correcting me, a priest came to talk painting with him and to speak to him of the role of the artist; he too admires his method greatly. Between them the two of them ran down Courbet, first as a painter, then as a political man. They said a thousand horrors against the Commune, the Republic, the republicans, against Thiers and against Gambetta, of whom they made me atrociously afraid: Today, they said, it is war that runs in their heads. Honest people do not let themselves be led by scoundrels. Universal suffrage has caused all the harm; we would need a true government, a good king, anyone at all. And the good priest added with a honeyed air: We must sweep out all that rabble. It is quite charitable, quite Christian!
Paul to J. Nicole
Rome, 14 July 72.
I thank you for your kind letter. You know it, when one finds oneself far from one’s own, one is more sensible still of a testimony of sympathy and of affection. I have had trouble acclimatizing myself here morally and physically. The soft heat that overwhelms us often makes me envy the freshness of your enchanted grotto.
Tired the first days and almost ill, I have not found again, before the masterpieces, the vivacity of impression of my first journey, that admiration without a reservation, that almost mystical enthusiasm, that sort of ecstasy, with a complete forgetting of space and of time. — The terrible things that I have seen have not stirred anything in me, but on the contrary they have so strongly seized me that they have left in me a deep trace. I cannot forget them. I do not wish to, moreover, for all these events have their consequences which break forth; how could it be permitted to give oneself wholly to the things of art, so long as France is not delivered, how not to feel oneself full of sadness and bitterness when cowards still pile up their assassinations. I am surrounded by people who adorn themselves with the fine name of moderates, because they love only very moderately justice and liberty; I am often astonished to find myself so isolated, in agreement with them in theory and so little so in practice. It is that, instead of conforming their acts to their principles, it is their ideas that they bend according to their conveniences or their interest. What they truly love above all is rest, tranquility; they would like to enjoy themselves in peace, and leave to others the care of public affairs; numerous is this party of indifference and of egoism; it does as much harm to the country as the maneuvers, though indeed very culpable, of the monarchists. — I have lost many of my old beliefs, but I am happy to feel that there remains to me still the idea of duty and the ardent love of humanity. It is a whole religion, and that suffices to fill a life. After many vexations of every sort, I have at last set myself to work. It is an excellent thing, a regularly occupied life; I find in it a great repose, a great calm of mind. Yet I already understand the difficulty, the impossibility even, of making a good copy. It is easy to imitate the exterior aspect of a picture; but every work of art is like a living being, it has a soul, a hidden, ungraspable side. — I have to copy a very fine work by Melozzo da Forli. He is a master still primitive, naïve, of the second period, that of the naturalists. His picture is not a poem of religion nor of philosophy like the frescoes of Giotto; no emotion, no expression of the passions, no action, no reverie; but a striking truthfulness. In this simple gathering of portraits, each personage has been studied separately and seems taken from life. It is a young art, still a little stiff and dry, but quite full of that sincerity of conscience. It is simple and strong. Drawing firm, broad already; the individual characters are accented with a vigor full of emotion. One believes one lives with those people, one knows them, one is going to speak to them; it is the revelation of an epoch. An excellent study, above all for me who live too much in dream.
I speak to you of what surrounds me, but you know it, dear friend, I am happy in your happiness; you are worthy of it. I regard marriage as the accomplishment of the natural life, from which one has not the right to withdraw oneself, as a duty toward oneself and toward the normal social order of the world, toward the fatherland and toward immortal humanity. Yet I have not married. It is that on the other hand I have always considered love as a grave thing, and reciprocal union as a necessary condition for the union of the family. It is the most serious guarantee of the future. You have all that is needed to be happy, dear friend; receive for yourself and for Madame Nicole my congratulations and my wishes. Let me hope that your happiness will not make you entirely forget our old friendship.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 28 July 72.
You must absolutely all come to Rome. This journey would not only be a matter of pleasure; for Alix and for Louise, it would have a great usefulness. And then, you are not going to abandon me thus all alone for so long.
The heat is overwhelming, and I have my mind even more torpid than my body; whereas you, in that delicious Colonie, where it freezes in full summer, you enjoy a freshness that I envy; I spend my time watering my studio, and the water evaporates as fast, and I melt in torrents.
Every other day, with Mercié, Merson, Blanc, and a few other comrades, we take baths in the Tiber. The establishment, built of bamboo matting, is of a very oriental character. Merson is making a drawing of it for Le Monde Illustré, I believe.
These baths are very agreeable, and they are claimed to have healthful virtues. The water of the Tiber is muddy and not very inviting, but this mud is mineral, charged with the juices of medicinal plants and, what is more, blessed. The urchins who play all naked on the sand resemble little animated bronzes; almost all of them would make superb models. The stock has kept itself finer here than among us. What a difference with our poor little Parisian water-rats! Write to me often, your letters do me even more good than the waters of the Tiber.
After the bath, we go to some osteria in the country, to eat macaroni and figs with ham. These little evenings are very gay, above all when we have Merson and the musician Maréchal. The other day, they mimed for us a little scene the funniest in the world: You believe perhaps that the saints, male and female, painted or sculpted in the churches, are grave and keep perfectly their grave and devout bearing. Not at all! It is only before the world. As soon as they find themselves at night without anyone watching them, they hasten to come out of that tiresome immobility, they jest, they gambol, they perform a thousand follies. But a noise is heard! Quick, to your places! They at once resume their hieratic pose and their beatific expression. Our saints must be hungry and they eat greedily, they sing rather risqué refrains; if the service makes itself awaited, if they take too long to fill the fiaschi, one of them gets angry and hurls the most abominable oaths. But the other saint very quickly takes the plate which serves as a halo and sticks it behind the head of his friend. The latter, recalled to propriety, at once resumes his devout grimace and raises his fingers to bless. Sometimes, in their clandestine amusements, the saints get confused; Saint Agnes takes the halo of Saint Polycarp and, if they have drunk a little too much, they wear their halos askew. All that followed by risky jests, but said with such verve that one laughs until one’s sides ache. Only two grave professors from Constantinople, strayed into such mad company, remained dumbfounded and somewhat scandalized.
Madame Milliet to Paul
La Colonie, 9 August 72.
… We have this year an exceptional harvest, it is estimated at three billion more than an average year. We are in full harvest, and what a harvest! It is magnificent to see. — I read of the success of the imperial loan, it is prodigious! The enthusiasm was very great in Paris. There is France, the well-off and the timorous, rallied to the Republic. You know Thiers’s saying: “We were in England, here we are passed over into America; let us try to maintain ourselves there.”
I have just received your letter, dear child, give us your news quickly. You will do well to leave that dreadful city which I detest, since you are always ill there. Go and spend the end of the great heats at Bologna, at Florence, no matter where, the copy will last a little longer; never mind! Health before everything.
Alix is taking to Goupil’s photographs painted on albumen paper; it is much longer and uglier than on salted paper, but it is the fashion. I do not know whether she will manage to work for that firm; if she succeeds, she will be exploited, I see it in advance.
Louise Milliet to Paul
La Colonie, 14 August 72.
I have just received your photographs after the portraits by Holbein; I thank you for them; it is so lifelike, so well drawn, then one sees that they must have been striking in their resemblance; I intend to copy them, that will teach me to do portraits in a broader and bolder way.
Madame Pape, her daughters, and Mademoiselle Gleyre are enjoying themselves greatly at La Colonie; they play bowls and even billiards. We go on walks and we gather mushrooms. Everything is fresh and green; this morning there was white frost! — Mama has us do French exercises, Ades, Auguste, and me. She dictates difficult words to us and gives us definitions of them. I am stronger than they are, except for the terms of physics and chemistry. We often give funny explanations.
I read a little: mythology, L’Année terrible, The Organization of Labor, by Mathieu Briancourt, etc. In the afternoon I paint. I have begun the portrait of Jules; my grisaille is done, it is drying, but M. Bourdon wants, for the glazes, only Pozzuoli red and bitumen; that went well for a bronzed head, but my model is pale and fair.
While Jules poses, I sometimes lecture him on morals; he has great need of it. He says that he is also weary of life, that he wants to enlist, and that he will seek the first occasion to get himself killed. I believe that it is very bad to be a boarder in a school. In Switzerland they are quite right; family life is necessary. In those schools they are like prisoners and work against their hearts; they are taught a great many things, but no one occupies himself with raising their souls; they are indifferent to politics, know nothing of it, do not read the newspapers; they are not accustomed to think. They do not say to themselves: I find this just and this bad, for such and such a reason; they set themselves to deciding a question without ever having reflected on it. When they have false ideas, it is very difficult to dissuade them, because they do not know how to reason; they have neither faith, nor principles, nor convictions, so that one does not know from where to begin, nor by what end to take them.
I have read the Discourse on Method, but I am not enchanted with it. Descartes always has the air of having discovered marvels and wants to prove everything mathematically, even the absurdities. I have copied a few passages that are good. I have read the introduction by Jules Simon to help myself understand, but there are many words I do not know, such as anthropomorphism, materiality, adventitious idea, adequate, etc. He compares things I do not understand with others I do not know, such as the doctrine of Spinoza. — However, Jules Simon makes quite a few criticisms of his dear Descartes, when, for example, he refuses to affirm the immortality of the soul. Descartes believed that the soul could direct the movements of the body, “more or less as a horseman directs his horse.” He presents God “as acting according to laws.” And there are things for which I do not know whether he is right, but there are others where I see perfectly well that he is wrong; for example when he says that animals are machines. In Plato, the discourses of Socrates to his disciples are otherwise logical, sensible, and simple than those of Descartes.
We continue to play charades, but the actors are not in agreement. Madame Charlot and Madame Aubry love coarse farces; Mademoiselle Gleyre finds that there is nothing laughable in that. When Léon C… is here, the two bands can each do a charade, and we shall see who carries it off.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 18 August 72.
The exhibition of the submissions from Rome will take place in a few days; after that, I shall leave with Joseph Blanc to make studies at Pompeii. The excursion trains for Naples are very cheap and the month of September is still dangerous at Rome because of the fevers. Everyone is ill this year and the Vatican is, they say, a veritable hospital. I received yesterday a kind and long letter from Louise with which I am enchanted. It contains, it is true, a few absurdities, and still more spelling mistakes, but I have pleasure in seeing in her this activity of mind. Humility is her least defect, if it is one, which I doubt moreover. She carries in all things the trenchant tone which is of her age, but that is a defect of which any intelligent person promptly corrects herself, and it does not frighten me at all.
I see that the charades have resumed their course at La Colonie and that, this year, they are complicated by rivalries of actresses. Two troupes at once! That promises you brilliant evenings. Louise ought no longer to content herself with mute roles; I hope she will accustom herself to speaking in public. As for her readings, she tells me that she is reading Plato!!! I suppose it is a matter of the fragments cited in the Écho de la Sorbonne; she is not of an age to read the complete Dialogues. Yet, if she insists greatly on it, she may begin with the Apology of Socrates, the Crito, and the Phaedo. As for Homer, the Odyssey is easier to understand than the Iliad; let her begin with that; and you may also give her to read a few lives of Plutarch, that of Pericles, for example.
I have paid my doctor at the rate of two francs a visit, and I am assured that I have been very generous. Consultations are here very cheap, but the doctors are in a frightful ignorance of all their science, and I have, moreover, no desire to be ill. — Instead of sending me money, you ought indeed to bring it to me yourselves. One gains at 7 fr. 50 per cent, that is worth the trouble. One would make the journey expressly.
3
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 1 Sept. 72.
I thank Mama for the promise she made me to come to Rome, but the date of your journey seems to me quite far off; I hope that you will not make me languish so long.
You ask me to speak to you of the artists with whom I am in relations.
Among the painters, one of those who have the most talent is Joseph Blanc, an excellent comrade, Greek in cast, vigorous, stocky; he has eyes sparkling with mischief and intelligence. His vast studio is situated in the orchards of the Villa Medici, in the midst of the houses where swarm the numerous families of the servants and the gardeners. All this brood is artist from the cradle, the ragazzini know how to mold in plaster, each one how to carve blocks of marble, to cast bronzes, etc. There is also a band of little girls with whom Blanc fights battles with tomatoes and pieces of cocomero. He is very gay, and amuses himself like a child playing the drum. It is one of the means he employs to rid himself of importunate visitors.
Yesterday a great ball in the immense studio decorated with green garlands and Venetian lanterns, with blinds and old tapestries on the walls. The Prix de Rome in music turned the crank of a barrel organ, a drum accompanied it with its sonorous rolls. Later there made their entrance some mandolin players, then a few old women took up the tambourines, while the young people danced the tarantella and the saltarello. All that has much character, it was very picturesque and very gay.
Paul to Alix
Rome, 8 Sept. 72.
Among the habitués of our eating-house, one of the most original is Doctor Schiff, an American half French and first cousin of the celebrated neurologist. He has for Rome a veritable passion; he finds everything there admirable, the Romans, the Roman women, their types, their filth, and their manners. It is certain that the Hippopotamus is becoming almost clean; the doctor prefers the old osterie where they throw the bones on the beaten earth and where the hostess turns the salad with her hands. — Materialist, sceptic, socialist, and philanthropist, the doctor does much good around him, he is very learned and is an excellent republican. (1)
(1) It is he who saved me afterward from a continual fever, called a larvated fever, of which the Academy’s physician had understood nothing.
Heil is quite French, that is to say, light, amiable, talkative, mocking, and very amusing. He has wit, verve, learning even, but his convictions, like his science, lack a little solidity. His painting too is more brilliant than serious, but he has the qualities of a colorist, and his strange compositions recall — from afar — the fine descriptions of Salammbô, the Carthaginian style!
Jules Machard, some charming pictures by whom you have seen at the Salon, is endowed with a prodigious facility. He long ago finished his four years of pension, but he cannot decide to leave the Villa Medici, where he has the most delicious studio one could dream of, a little silent house hidden in the greenery. Everything succeeds for him, and yet he does not cease to lament. Has he a wish to leave his trinket? He has only to dash off a watercolor; he is paid seven or eight hundred francs for it. The sculptor d’Épinay flatters and exploits him; he is a fine connoisseur, on the lookout for all the young masters who will not be long in becoming celebrated. Machard thus squanders his great talent; he is offered important works of decoration and he loses his time doing little portraits of society women. He seeks too much to please and himself deplores turning into a Bouguereau.
I greatly esteem Father Navlet, an old painter of interiors, an excellent man, very obliging, very frank, very upright, and very disinterested, but full of pride and always furious. He has gray hair in disorder, accentuated, energetic features, and lightning glances, if one has the misfortune to speak of arts that do not please him; they are all idiots and thieves. But one must see his enthusiasm when it is a question of perspective! In his childhood, a simple little basket-maker, he was exploited first by his father, then by his employers; he still is now, he says, by Goupil (the celebrated picture dealer). By dint of perseverance and energy, he managed to learn drawing and painting, without a master; he has worked for celebrated artists, whose pictures he put into perspective; Gérôme and Cabanel have had recourse more than once to his talents. As he had exhibited a great bird’s-eye view of Paris, Delacroix, passing before this considerable work, exclaimed: “My word, I could not do as much!” Since then, M. Navlet is very sincerely convinced that he has at least as much talent as Delacroix; it is Delacroix who said so!
A serious affair at the Salon finished swelling him with pride; but the poor man has none the less great trouble in earning his living. He understands nothing of business, and his fine gold medal is at this moment at the pawnshop. He is fortunately sustained by ever-reborn illusions. He has just undertaken a great drawing of the interior of Saint Peter’s, a complicated and very difficult work; he explains to us with conviction that his drawing will be a masterpiece; he will make photographs of it; each print will be worth at least five hundred francs, the printing will be limited to two hundred prints: A hundred thousand francs! His fortune is made.
The other day, at the café, M. Navlet was telling us, a little at length, an anecdote of his childhood; our young painters, hardly polite, left, without waiting for the end of the story, and there is the narrator furious: “I augur nothing good of the future of those people,” he exclaimed, “they have no talent!” As if talent and politeness were not two distinct things. — Well, I have great fear that, on the Salon Jury, more than one artist judges a little after the fashion of Father Navlet.
Paul M. to his mother
Pompeii, 15 Sept. 72.
… I was forced to leave Rome, where I was not well, but I shall not be long in returning there. I am assured that, from the month of October, the climate changes completely and becomes very healthy. — I shall have some trouble in tearing myself from Pompeii, so much do the antique paintings interest me. The heat is crushing, but the sea baths permit one to bear it. I am lodged with Joseph Blanc in a little inn, at the very gate of the ruins of Pompeii; we live there rather well and very economically. Several pensioners of the Académie de France are at this moment at Naples. Mercié does not part from his darling, a great black greyhound which belonged to Regnault and of which you may have seen the portrait in the pictures of his former master. The animal is superb, but it is received neither in the omnibuses nor in the Museums; it is awkward for Mercié, who has made himself its slave.
Paul M. to his mother
Naples, 24 Sept. 72.
The letters that I wrote you from Pompeii must have arrived late. There is in the village only one single box, where the letters are collected from time to time, when one thinks of it. It is yet two steps from the railway, but you have no idea how the people of that country have remained antique in matters of civilization. I do not, however, wish to speak ill of Pompeii: I spent there a fortnight in the most agreeable fashion in the company of Blanc, who is a charming comrade, very learned and very artistic. We made at Pompeii studies of serious archaeology and, what is more… economies! We were lodged and fed for 4 francs a day; impossible to do it at less expense, there is nothing to buy.
We found a few curious inscriptions, but I should have needed the help of Nicole to understand them well, because there are many abbreviations.
At Naples, I have a vast room with a balcony giving onto the sea. The sun wakes us early in the morning; Vesuvius is before us with its light plume of smoke; at our feet a port, very busy, with vessels that come and go, those quays so animated, so gay, where there teems a noisy population, dirty but picturesque, half naked, for the heat is still as strong as in full summer.
Madame Alix Payen to Paul
Paris, 6 October 72.
… The Peace Congress at Lugano does not make much noise, however Garibaldi has just written to M. Gregg a letter in which he arranges little Thiers quite drolly.
These days the deputies of the right were patronizing a pilgrimage to Lourdes. It is a new good Virgin who has appeared to two children. There are hundreds of people who set out in great pomp to go and see a place where a supposed miracle is alleged to have taken place. The good newspapers speak of nothing but that. I had never believed that in France there were still so many imbeciles.
Jules Miot, in default, is condemned to the penalty of death, and has been posted up.
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 11 October 72.
During our stay at Pompeii, I helped Blanc to trace a fine mosaic and we said that it would be superb to reproduce in tapestry or in appliqué of fabrics. I believe there would be very artistic things to do in that genre, and then ladies who knew how to draw could make a good living.
What you tell me of the Barbier family increases my desire to renew acquaintance with it. Thank the doctor heartily for my prescription; but I am marvelously well now and have found myself the better for it. I cannot describe these patients to you immediately, but they have an appearance!
I have a few fragments of Gambetta’s speeches; I have noticed the reactionary newspapers that sought to turn him into ridicule, but their wit, which pierced through at every line, was very amusing. I fear, however, that Gambetta, if he comes to power, will quickly become a moderate and a politician, instead of remaining the soldier of his principles. What gives me pleasure is to see that the republican idea gains more and more and takes root in the country.
Louise M. to her brother Paul
Paris, 13 October 72.
We went the other day to M. Gleyre’s; he was working on his picture and we, I believe, disturbed him a little; so he did not pay me as many compliments as usual. What a discouraged and discouraging man! Were he condemned to hard labor, he would not work with less enthusiasm. But this time he was rather far advanced; it is a very pale grisaille, which he is in the process of coloring; there is one pink leg and the other half violet, but it is very tight in drawing and modeling.
He showed us a little painted sketch of which he intends to make a picture, when he has finished his Prodigal Son; it is Adam and Eve. They have just been driven out, they are happy, and they hold each other entwined; it is the springtime of life. The man is pretty, he is entirely in the half-tone, except for a little thread of light on the contours. Around them, there are gentle animals, does, birds. It is curious that M. Gleyre always paints graceful subjects, he who has such a bearish air.
I showed him my two portraits: the expression of Jules pleases him; he finds in him a naïve air, but both are in tones too violent, it hurt his eyes, for beside his picture, which is like a cream cheese, my paintings appeared quite garish. He says that a preparation must be monochrome. I cannot, however, do gray hair, when the model has it black as ink! — When I showed him my copy after a head by Pontormo, he said: “Ah! what a saucepan color! it is not a thing to copy, the color goes away as it ages.”
M. Gleyre asked after you with great interest; he envies your good fortune in being in Italy. — “Nothing prevents you from going there,” answered my mother. — “Yes, but I would like to be there at his age.”
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, Nov. 72.
You have a brother quite busy. With my copy at which I work the whole day and the Academy from 8 to 10 o’clock in the evening, I no longer even find the time to sew a button back on for myself, I forget to buy candles and I go to bed without light. Impossible to pay a visit, to read a newspaper. I am going to give up the reading room to which I had subscribed. I read no more. What is most painful to me is no longer to compose. When an idea passes through my head and I cannot at once make a sketch of it, it vanishes, and it always seems to me that it would have been superb. And if I have the misfortune to show a sketch to comrades, I listen to all the advice, and I end by demolishing what I had begun well.
Fortunately, for my copy, I proceed with an imperturbable method which astonishes myself. My canvas is excellent, the ornaments are tedious, but not so difficult as I would have thought; then it is a repose of mind. When one has discovered the recipe, one could almost execute that work while thinking of something else, as one would knit stockings. Yet there are the threads which annoy me and which I hardly succeed at. I have never had the least virtuosity. In a month my copy will appear finished to people who do not know about such things, but I shall still have much to do.
Imagine that I am on the best of terms with Dom Marcello, the secretary of Monsignor de Mérode, an old amateur of painting, very happy when he finds someone to whom to show his collection. He has Raphaels, Michelangelos, Leonardo da Vincis, Correggios, Titians, Andrea del Sartos… all of a problematic authenticity. I have noticed that his pictures change appearance from one visit to the next. If someone says: “the coloring of this head seems to me a little pale for a Titian,” a week later, the head has taken on golden tones quite Venetian. It is that Dom Marcello has up his sleeve “the most illustrious Gregorio,” the foremost picture restorer in Rome, at least! It is he, he assures, who painted one of the Titians in the Louvre. I allow myself to doubt it. — Each time that Dom Marcello has bought as contraband from a convent some old picture or other, he calls me and I must tell him whether it is by Raphael or by Leonardo da Vinci. Most often it is a simple van Croutten, and I may add that, at the auction house of the rue Drouot, the whole gallery would not sell for much.
You will see only at the next Salon the fine group by Mercié. I should be quite astonished if he did not obtain the medal of honor. Farewell, dear sister, study your Italian well and come quickly.
Louise to her brother
Paris, November 72.
… Jules Simon is not so stupid as he looks; he has just reformed instruction in the Colleges and Lycées. The old professors accustomed to their routine are not pleased. Are all these reforms good? I know nothing of it. He reduces greatly the study of Latin and Greek, in order to give time to more practical things.
Paul to his sister Louise
Rome, November 72.
Of Jules Simon’s circular, I know only what you have written me of it, and I would not wish to judge it on that, but I fear that teaching will become too practical and purely utilitarian. What there is of most beautiful in science, what elevates the mind, is the disinterested side which one seems disposed to neglect today. They will end by reducing natural history to the knowledge of useful or harmful animals; chemistry and physics to their industrial applications. That belittles science. In the same way great art tends to disappear before the applied arts. It is, alas, an inevitable movement.
II — A Case of Conscience
1
Madame Milliet to her son Paul
Paris, 1 Oct. 72.
I have to announce to you a thing which is going to surprise and afflict you greatly: you are condemned, by default, to deportation within a fortified enclosure and to the loss of civic rights. It is quite badly done in these times that I learned this; I have received for you neither summons to appear nor notification of judgment. Marie Chassevant had gone to the town hall and, while waiting for someone, she set herself to reading the marriage announcements, then the condemnations. When your name struck her eyes, she could not believe it, but there was no mistaking it, your age and your address were there. She came to warn me; your uncle was present. He went the next day to speak to the rapporteur of the judgment; the latter told him that, if you had presented yourself, you would have been either acquitted, or condemned to a light penalty, that it would have depended on your bearing before the council.
You are condemned for three things; for having: 1° exercised a command; 2° worn a uniform; 3° carried visible arms. You are not accused of having made use of these arms, which makes the case less grave. To your dossier are joined depositions of police agents saying that you are unknown and disappeared. My first impression was the fear of feeling you out of reach, but, on reflection, I am quite sad in thinking of the consequences of this condemnation for your future. One has five years to purge a judgment by default, failing which it becomes definitive. Let us hope that there will be an amnesty by then. Your uncle would not be far from urging you to come and purge your default, but not before the path of amnesties has been entered upon. If we had known there was a warrant against you, we should perhaps have succeeded in having an order of dismissal handed down; now, it is too late. What I fear is that this may do you harm in your work, and so I could not too strongly recommend you to speak of this to no one.
Tell me in your next letter, my dear child, first whether you returned in good health to Rome, then whether you have set yourself again with relish to your Melozzo. I urge you to advance it as much as possible while your head is calm. Plunge yourself into your work, that is the best thing there is.
Good courage and good health, dear child, it seems to me that, since you have been far away, I love you still more.
Your mother,
LOUISE.
My copy of the Melozzo fresco was already very far advanced, but my situation was becoming altogether false, and I thought that the place of a political convict was not at the Vatican.
Paul to his sister Louise
Rome, 11 October 72.
What my mother writes me on the subject of Melozzo (a nickname they had given me) did not astonish me beyond measure. It is a long time since I have known that individual, but I did not, however, think him dangerous to that point. You are quite wrong, moreover, to complain of our Holy Father. The prison regime, one notes, has singularly softened in Italy; the straw of his dungeon is not too damp and his fortified enclosure does not seem to hamper him much so far; he has even taken a liking to his forced labor. He is truly a quite unworthy criminal, he has neither scruple, nor remorse, and he mocks at the rest. In short, it is past all understanding, he claims that in condemning him unjustly, the Government has just founded a new sort of Legion of Honor, of which he is very flattered. My uncle is very good to occupy himself with him. Melozzo charges me to thank him for it, but he is astonished that there should be people to take an interest in such a malefactor. He greatly fears that his employers, whom he supposed informed of all his crimes, may have been ignorant of them until now, and he would make it a scruple to abuse this ignorance.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 20 October 72.
Reassure yourself, dear mother, I have written nothing and shall write nothing against the law. Your letter has only redoubled my anxiety. If I were as Don Quixote as you say, I would not have taken anyone’s counsel before warning M. Charles Blanc. You remember, I hesitated to make my request. Today everything is changed, and here is what I propose to you: to go to M. Charles Blanc and hand him on my behalf a letter in which I would say more or less this: “A council of war has just condemned me for the part I have had the honor of taking in the defense of Paris and of the Republic. If I am not mistaken, when you charged me with the task of reproducing a fresco, you had also for object to encourage the study of great art. I saw in your choice a testimony of esteem for which I am grateful to you; thus I make it a duty to myself not to let you remain ignorant of my new situation and to leave it to you to appreciate it. If you consider your administration as independent of politics and as foreign to the decisions of councils of war, I shall be happy to continue a work which interests me more than any other. If on the contrary you think that I no longer deserve the confidence which the recommendations of M. Gleyre and of M. Guillaume had earned me, you may at your pleasure break your engagements; for my part, I shall promptly restore the advances that have been made to me.” There is what I ought to say. As for purging my default, I shall not do it, so long as I shall have to deal, not with judges, but with enemies who are quite forced to find us guilty in order not to admit to themselves that they are so. I run great risk of losing my commission, and that would not be agreeable to me, but it does not stop me either. One single thing touches me: the sacrifice I would wish to make, since you would all suffer from it.
If I could finish my copy, I should then be in a much better position. I shall await events, that is perhaps the wisest course. Decidedly, the climate of Rome is quite debilitating; I should not have thought thus before.
I beg you to ask counsel of Nicole and of M. Gleyre. Here I keep the most complete silence. No one asks me anything, moreover, and it is useless to tell my affairs to people whom they interest very little.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 17 November 72.
… If M. Charles Blanc is ignorant of my condemnation, my duty is to forewarn him of it. If he knows it and pretends to be ignorant of it, it will perhaps be a clumsiness to tell him that I know. In any case he will be very quickly informed, and I prefer to take the initiative of a confidence, rather than to undergo the affront of a refusal.
I am quite sad at the idea of remaining so long separated from you, for I shall have to renounce my fine projects. I was not insensible either to the honor of having a place at the European Museum; then those eight thousand francs would have permitted me to undertake a great picture. It costs me, I assure you, to renounce all that, but I believe it must be done.
Nicole did not well understand my intention, or I shall have expressed myself badly; I hold not at all to the terms of my letter, I hold greatly to the substance.
The enemies of M. Charles Blanc could make of this story a weapon against him. It is permitted to give a commission to an artist without occupying oneself with his opinions, but he cannot give one to a convict; that would be to disavow the Government of which he forms part.
It will always be painful to me to accept money from those who condemn me. I blushed the other day, when Monsignor de Mérode, showing my copy to someone, said that I had been “sent by M. Thiers.”
I desire, if that is possible, that you procure the two thousand francs of advance already paid and that, if M. Charles Blanc receives it badly, you return them to him immediately. I think often of M. Delbrouck, and I tell myself that he, at least, would approve me. One must not abuse: a few scoundrels have slipped into our party, it is one reason the more to show that there are also honest people in it.
Before long my copy will be finished and will represent a certain value; I shall keep it in reserve in case circumstances should come to change. I hope, moreover, to arrive promptly at earning my living by doing little pictures.
Ch…, the brother-in-law of M. B…, is here in a position analogous to mine. His confidences naturally provoked mine, and now my secret is quite compromised.
Take care of yourself, dear mother, I am vexed with myself for giving you so many worries. Your son who loves you well.
2
Madame Milliet to Paul
Paris, 23 October 72.
Dear child, I have just come from M. Gleyre’s; he was good, amiable, affectionate. I happened on a good day. I see first, on entering, that I give him pleasure; he says to me: “You have news of your son? — Yes, and I come on his behalf to ask you for a consultation. — Is it a political consultation? — Ah, you know what is happening to him? — My niece told me of it at Madame Pape’s. Well, we are going to occupy ourselves with that; I know M. Picard and a few other personages; you will bring me the judgment; when all is arranged, your son will return, there will be no more than a formality to fulfill, etc., etc.” I let him speak and, when he had finished: “You are a thousand times good to take an interest in him thus, but that is not what preoccupies me, it is his position with regard to the Government and to M. Charles Blanc. — M. Charles Blanc! M. Charles Blanc! but he has nothing to do with that. — The position is, however, quite false…” M. Gleyre interrupted: “But not at all! M. Charles Blanc has a copy made; he chooses for that the most capable person; he has no right to require anything other than good work.” I asked him then permission to read him a few fragments of your letters, where you speak to me of this affair. “I recognize him well there, chivalrous! But you will do nothing of the kind, today you will not go to M. Charles Blanc’s, it would be a bad action. Artists must keep their liberty of conscience. But where should we be going? We would soon need confession certificates and professions of faith. Art is independent of politics and above all that. — But, if his commission is withdrawn from him? — One has no right to it, and that has never been seen, even were he a criminal. A political commission is in no way a stain, and your son has the purest conscience that I know. What he did, he did for the good. He is a saint, your son, he is a hero, he would deserve to be decorated for having remained with all those scoundrels and prevented them from doing evil. (1) And it is a pity that there were not a greater number of people who devoted themselves like him. And he would go and offer to return his commission, to confess himself guilty? Guilty of what? And to people whom that does not concern? Let him make his copy very well; let there not be the slightest pretext for refusing it.” Tell him well on my behalf that he should not trouble his mind with chimeras; that is not good for work. If, by misfortune, his commission were withdrawn, well, we should see. He would come and purge his default; he must get out of that with his head high… Above all let him know it well, on account of the place where he finds himself, and let him work hard. In any case, nothing is known, nothing has been notified to him and, all reflection made, it is better that he finish his picture before returning; we shall see at that moment.”
(1) The reader has been able to see, in the account, that these excessive praises were quite little merited. If I have cited them here nonetheless, it is solely to show with what facility legends were formed. Others have been made since, ardently calumnious, those, and they have just as easily found credence.
I cannot tell you the satisfaction I felt in seeing this man, habitually hesitant, manifest his opinion with so much fervor, dictate his orders, with the lucidity of an upright conscience and with an affection altogether paternal. He kept me afterward to speak to me of his family, then of politics. He regards the situation as very bad. The Chamber represents less and less the opinion of the country. He would like Thiers to remain all the same. Thiers will not wish to step outside legality. — They attack, they accuse, they will rather withdraw him himself. They will then appoint someone impossible who will bring us a revolution. He fears that the order of things will not pass without that.
I withdrew, happy in thinking of the relief I was going to bring you. He said to me as he was leaving me: “Tell your son on my behalf that his public or private life belongs to him; he owes account only for his work. I rejoice to see his copy, and above all let him do it very well.” — I came home to take down his words in shorthand and write them to you.
What a fine soul this man has, when he is willing to give of himself! He is painful to see in his old knitted waistcoat. He said to me: “I work without relish. — How so,” I said to him, “when one produces such fine things? — It is the fault of old age; I am bored. I go sometimes to the market of Saint-Germain, into the crowd, to try to catch a little life, at the contact of those people who have so much of it.” — I urged him to go to Italy; I know that he has had the desire for a long time. — “It is too much trouble,” he said to me, “then one must set out. And again: I believe that politics now interests me as much as art, and I have no need to disturb myself.”
If you have a moment of leisure, do put a word for him in one of your letters, for to write to him directly, he would believe himself obliged to answer you, and it would be for him a remorse, or a mortal annoyance.
I embrace you a thousand times.
LOUISE.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 27 November 72.
I cannot tell you how much your letter comforted me, how much I was touched by the goodness of M. Gleyre and embarrassed at the same time by the so exaggerated opinion he has of me. He heard speak of M. Delbrouck; tell him not to confound what I am with what I would put of my ideas; that has only too well shown my indecision and my weakness. I would have wished to leave it entirely to you to disengage me, but I see that affection blinds you on a question which is, however, very clear. It is a question of a political convict who accepts a commission from the Government. This false situation, I do not want it, and know that, if I have been long indecisive, since my mind is made up, I shall change it no more.
I hope that you will have gone to M. Charles Blanc’s, he must know where things stand. I have had carried to him immediately the enclosed letter which is definitive this time.
Do not be anxious, dear mother, I am very happy since I have seen clearly into my situation. You love me enough to make me yet one more sacrifice.
For an instant I had a wish to constitute myself a prisoner and to purge my default, but that would be to recognize the competence of the councils of war, and I do not admit that they should give us for judges the people who bombarded Paris, the authors of the summary executions.
Farewell, dear mother, good courage, and above all wait no longer. I embrace you all a thousand times.
To Monsieur Charles Blanc, Director of Fine Arts.
Monsieur, When you charged me with copying a fresco by Melozzo da Forli, I saw in your choice a testimony of esteem for which I am very grateful to you. Thus I should believe myself to be failing in my duty, if I did not forewarn you that a council of war has just condemned me for the part I have taken in the defense of Paris and of the Republic. In the position you occupy, it would be difficult for you to maintain to a convict the commission you have given me, and for my part, it would no longer suit me to accept it.
Please therefore consider our contract as broken and come to an understanding with my mother for the restitution of the two thousand francs that I have received as advances.
I am anxious to tell you that, when I addressed my request to you, to you whose opinions I know, and whose administration is moreover foreign to politics, I was completely ignorant of my being placed under accusation. I remained eight months in Paris without suspecting that I had been struck off; I followed the courses and the competitions of the École des Beaux-Arts, I even voted last 7 January, and I was able to assure myself that I had not been crossed off the list of electors. I had therefore every reason to believe in an appeasement.
I have the desire, if I can, to finish on my own account the copy at which I have been working for six months; after which I have the intention of purging my default. Perhaps then, the state of siege being lifted, I shall have to deal with justice.
Believe, Monsieur, that I none the less remain your obliged servant, and accept the assurance of my respectful sentiments.
P. MILLIET.
3
J. Nicole to Paul M.
Paris, 1 December 72.
Dear friend, the work with which I am charged and overcharged, since my appointment to the École des Hautes Études, nor the traces of my moving in ought to have prevented me from writing to you much sooner…
You are tormented by a sort of strong scruple, and I wish at all costs to bring you out of this state of anguish which leaves you no rest. On the other hand your mother, your uncle, and your friends, who in any other case would have been an authority for you in matters of conscience and of honor, completely disapprove the step you would wish to take, not regarding your scruples as well founded, and ask you at the very least not to precipitate anything. You answer to that that no one can substitute his conscience for yours,… that you alone are responsible for the decision.
I too recall to myself that a year ago, I experienced scruples analogous to yours, following a fever ill cured.
My mother, who saw rightly, asked me to wait a few months before taking my decision.
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Well, now that I am about out of the difficulty, I must indeed recognize that there are moments where conscience and imagination mingle so much one with the other that one can no longer be a good judge of one’s own conduct. It is a frightening mystery, but it is a fact.
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I have told you this long story because it seems to me that the situation has much analogy with the one in which I found myself. You have passed during these last two years through a succession of emotions too strong; you went to Italy in an unfavorable season, you have been ill, and you are alone. Your mother has therefore some reason to think that you are not in your normal state and that you owe it to yourself, to your family, and to your friends not to act precipitately. Consider that no one is asking you to abdicate: you will do what you wish, but what you wish in cold blood. Continue to work, finish your copy; to what does that engage you? If your scruples persist, you will always be able, I think, to make to the State the restitution of which you speak…
And then, calm yourself. I know well that that is precisely the great difficulty, but at least try. Write a great deal to your parents, do not shut yourself up in your ideas; go out, see someone, take walks, take exercise, and take care of yourself physically.
You have brave hearts who think of you, an admirable mother whose sole desire is that you be happy, good friends, myself among others, who love you and esteem you profoundly.
I should still have a remedy; it is prayer; it has relieved me on the worst days. You do not perhaps believe in its efficacy, but go on, try it all the same, it is the hand of a friend that pours you out this potion, I assure you it is good.
Come, courage.
Your friend who clasps your hand affectionately.
J. NICOLE.
In any case, do not write yourself to M. Charles Blanc. I have seen the letter that you charged your mother with sending him; it is truly hardly reasonable. Why take this tone? Your step itself does not call for it. Do nothing except through the intermediary of Madame Milliet.
My dear little wife sends you a kind remembrance.
4
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 1 December 72.
Your letter confirms me in the impression I had, when I went to Saint-Germain to fetch our friend Fernand (he was defending one of our friends before a council of war). There is nothing so undesirable as the habit of passive obedience and the respect of hierarchy; they make one lose the notion of that justice which is above the written law. I have no wish to present myself before those judges, who have remained enemies. We cannot come to an understanding. For them, the sovereign is the Assembly; for us, it is the people. For them, we were in revolt against the Assembly; for us, the Assembly was in revolt against the people. What would you have! Instead of praying. I have no pretension of converting them. So, from their point of view, I am guilty and their duty is to condemn me. Then, even supposing that I were acquitted, how long would the trial last? What would become of my picture? What harm for the copy, what anxieties for you! No, all that seems to me perfectly useless. Although I suffer greatly from my isolation, although I have great need to see you again and to live once more in your midst, I am not unhappy enough to be unable to take patience.
Madame Milliet to Paul
Paris, 2 December 72.
Your last letter has painfully surprised me, my dear child. I thought that you would attach more importance to the opinions of M. Gleyre. No matter, I am so accustomed to doing all that you wish that I mechanically took the road to M. Charles Blanc’s. I did not find him and no one could tell me when I might see him. (1) He has not come to the offices these days. Seeing that, I went to M. Gleyre’s to tell him my troubles. I found him very wrought up, very preoccupied with political events. On which side is Thiers going to cut the cable? They will demand that it be on the side of the right that constrains him in his attacks. — On your subject, M. Gleyre said to me: “Your son must be patient; within a month we may know of an amnesty, or of a civil war; M. Charles Blanc will perhaps no longer be in his post.” Then, looking me in the face, he said to me, as if speaking to himself: “But I am, however, an honest man, and your son may believe me when I tell him that the most timorous conscience has nothing to find fault with in his situation. None of my friends has ever shown himself scrupulous in matters of money, so it is not at all that which touches me for your son, it is a question of justice. This task that he has accepted, he has no right to renounce it. You must at all costs prevent your son from doing this folly, it is your duty, yours. — But how? — I do not know, but you must impose your authority. — Oh,” I said to him, “I have no other than that of affection and, if my son regarded it as his duty to cut me in four, he would do it. — Then there is no help for it,” he said. Then I read him the letter to M. Charles Blanc. “Your son,” he said to me, “is under a morbid impression. He will soon be reproaching them for not having had him sent for. He greatly exaggerates the importance of this condemnation. He found himself on a list, and he was thrown into the bag.” I rise to leave. “Tell him well,” he adds, “that the circumstances are too grave for him not to be patient. Obtain that he not write to M. Charles Blanc, that would be a bad action.”
(1) Former Prix de Rome in engraving, charged by M. Thiers with making in watercolor copies today preserved at the Museum of the Louvre.
Coming back here, I meet Nicole and I go up to his place to see his little apartment. He completely disapproves your letter. “I understand,” he said to me, “the state in which Paul finds himself, I have passed through it. It is isolation that causes this nervous overexcitement. The sole remedy is for you to go and join him. Obtain a delay, believe me, otherwise, later, he will regret the step he wishes to make you take.”
And do you believe, dear child, that this is not the thought of my heart? I am of Nicole’s opinion, I believe that isolation causes all the harm. I bitterly reproach myself for not having left, as I wished to, just after Fernand’s marriage. I wished to reconcile too many things and I have spoiled everything; but I am quite disposed to repair my wrongs and to advance our journey. You owe us so much for living alone, it makes you too unhappy. I think, however, my dear child, that you can rely, for a question of honor and of delicacy, on what men like M. Gleyre, your uncle, and your father think. They cannot definitively settle the question, let us leave it in suspense. Promise me, my dear child, to do nothing. Forgive me well for the worry I have caused you these times. I have been so unhappy to have my conscience in contradiction with yours! If we had been together, that certainly would not have happened.
I shall send you the day after tomorrow a registered letter. Your father has wished to write to you too. I embrace you very tenderly, my dear child, and till soon. Your mother,
LOUISE.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 3 December 72.
The newspapers that you sent me gave me great pleasure. The crisis seems calmed for the moment. The right feels its impotence and the left shows a skill which astonishes me. But what exaggeration in the general enthusiasm which the cunning little Thiers excites, playing his role of republican in spite of himself. In short, the movement is launched this time and I believe it irresistible. The duty of honest people is, not to follow it, but to put themselves at its head to direct it. Will Thiers understand that? I doubt it; I believe at least one can say: he will march or he will not be.
My copy advances. I follow M. Hébert’s advice. He is to come back in a few days to see M. Bellay’s copy (1) and mine. I was last Sunday at his evening party; he spoke to me in the most amiable fashion; I decidedly believe that he knows nothing and I tell myself that I abuse his confidence. If he knew what I am, he would perhaps turn his back on me. Perhaps too, if he knew me better, he would restore me his goodwill.
(1) Former Prix de Rome in engraving, charged by M. Thiers with making in watercolor copies today preserved at the Museum of the Louvre.
My resolution is not changed; I took it after mature reflection and in perfect health of mind; I am going to review it, although you have the air of believing me a little cracked (Nicole advises me to take exercise). You will recognize later that the course I have taken is the most frank and the most wise. Seeing that you remain unhappy, I have delayed the sending of my letter to M. Charles Blanc; but I find that I act badly toward him. I shall not forget you. I embrace you.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 4 December 72.
A relative calm has succeeded the agitation of these last days, but the right has not attained its aim, to halt affairs, to sow uneasiness, and to rally the timorous against the Republic. The Parisians are not the dupes of these maneuvers and the irritation is extreme against the right. It seems established that Ducrot was preparing a coup d’état; he had given his soldiers provisions for two days and cartridges; he counted on carrying off the little Thiers; Bazaine would have been delivered, etc. Do you see the Parisians fighting to get back their little Thiers? It hung only by a hair. Even now there are crowds at the stations on the arrival of the deputies; they cry: “Long live the Republic! Long live Thiers! Long live Gambetta!” Almost all the communes of France send addresses to M. Thiers to congratulate him on his resolution to maintain the Republic. There is talk of having monster petitions signed to demand the dissolution. They will indeed have to clear out. The aspect of the Chamber is sad to see; it is nothing but interpellations and insults: “Brittany wants its God and its King!” cries M. Dahirel. In short it is the putting into practice of that government of combat which the right was demanding. The present situation reminds me of that of 1851 before the coup d’état. Only we had not a little Thiers at that moment for President, and I believe that France would perceive more quickly a coup d’état made by the right. Bonaparte had passed himself off as a liberal; with the right there are no illusions to entertain, it is frankly reactionary.
I am keeping your letters, dear child, and if circumstances required it, I could show them. M. Gleyre and I assume the whole responsibility for the silence.
Nicole had said to me: “Have you asked counsel of Mademoiselle Marie Chassevant? She has a very sure feeling of the just and the unjust; her judgment is never warped by considerations of persons or of the usages of the world; she has often enlightened me.” Yesterday evening I was at Madame Pape’s; I knock at the door of Marie’s room and read her the last letters. “I answer on the spur of the moment, without saying to myself: is the judgment that strikes him just or unjust? If it is just, if the young man feels guilty, if he has remorse, let him come to expiate his fault. If the judgment is unjust, if Paul’s conscience reproaches him with nothing, why occupy himself with it? Why aggravate it by giving it bad consequences of which the judges did not think? — But,” I said to her, “what worries Paul is that he would not have been charged with this work, if the judgment had been handed down before his commission. — What did that matter to him? Not responsible. Here is a judgment which strikes an innocent man whom they did not even have summoned nor heard, it would be an injustice added to another.” I tell you this kind of judgment of Solomon, to make you see that all the persons to whom we have spoken of it are unanimous.
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For more than a month and a half we have had continual rains, which have produced a flood of the Seine such as there had not been for nearly a hundred years. It is frightening to see. In Paris the river is held in by the quays, but, at the two extremities, it overflows and causes great ravages; on the side of the Point-du-Jour above all, then at the junction of the Marne. This great humidity causes much illness.
I urge you to burn our letters, or at least to put them well away. Farewell, my darling, we all embrace you very tenderly.
(Reply to a lost letter)
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 6 December 72.
I am astonished and distressed to see you thus take my affair tragically. There is yet nothing in it so terrible, and we would be quite unjust to complain. Reflect upon what a series of dangers we miraculously escaped. Do you no longer remember that day when we were, together, within a hair’s breadth of a fire, and we wished to remain and die? It is indeed our dear mother who saved us that day by forcing us to leave Paris. Then we found a sure asylum; I was able to resume my works without being troubled; then fortune came to me beyond all hope, and certainly I had not run after it; I made a charming journey, studies which interest me keenly; I have formed agreeable relations… and I should complain! I ought to count myself very happy. — Come, a little courage and resignation, I beg you. Suppose I had not made my request or that it had been refused, what would have happened? Everything is for the best so far. We must only renounce a few fine dreams; let us do it with good grace and delay no longer.
Would my exiled father have accepted a commission from the Empire? Do you think a condemnation posted at the town hall can long remain secret? Understand then that there are cases where excessive prudence becomes clumsiness. My refusal would put under cover the responsibility of M. Charles Blanc; he would esteem me the more and would perhaps keep my secret; I would finish my copy and could hope that it would one day find again at the European Museum the place that was destined for it.
Madame Pape put it very well: it is when I accepted, when I made my request, that I should have had these scruples; but it is never too late to recognize one’s wrongs, above all when it is so easy to repair them, and I had then, in my ignorance of what was happening, an extenuating circumstance which I no longer have today.
What makes us not agree is that you love me too much. You find it improbable that I should be treated like a malefactor; you cannot take that seriously. I myself began by jesting about it; but it is none the less an insult that I receive; I use the only manner I have of answering it; and if I can, for my feeble part, contribute to rendering odious the decisions of councils of war, I shall be content.
Why do you absolutely wish to see in me two distinct persons? I am not an artist and a Jack-of-all-trades. The artist is not separated from the citizen; one cannot strike the one while sparing the other. It is an outrage in truth; you wish to persuade me that it is not my painting that has been condemned. That does not prevent that, were the painter to return to Paris, the citizen would be arrested.
I speak to you at great length of my affairs, but they preoccupy me less, however, than those of the country. How I understand thus the so ardent love of the unhappy old Europe that I love so much. It is so fine to feel oneself carried above oneself by the great common soul! I have good hope. I believe the right impotent to cast the country into the adventure of a coup d’état in order to have done with the definitive advent of the Republic. They admit it themselves, we are the rising tide that will engulf them; they can still condemn us: in spite of the prison hulks, in spite of the juridical assassinations, succeeding the summary executions, they will not prevent us from singing victory. These men have been vanquished, but the idea they defended triumphs.
Why must M. Thiers not have seen sooner this truth which he is quite forced to recognize today? The Republic alone could save the country. If, as early as 1871, he had pronounced the speeches he holds today, there would have been no civil war. If he had only said aloud what he was promising in a whisper to the ministers of the great cities, one would have arrived at a conciliation. He has been very culpable, but he seems disposed to redeem his faults and to keep at last his promises. Perhaps it is better, from many points of view, that the Republic should be founded by a man of wavering opinions, who would then cease to be frightened of the Republic.
You can imagine with what anxiety I await the dispatches. They arrive quite late, quite cooled, quite truncated. I know that many Frenchmen do not even suspect what is happening in Paris, so much has Rome a soporific power.
Tell my Bonti not to torment herself. Let her know well that I have not the least superfluous regret. I have the good fortune not to have taken any superfluous regret. I love study for itself and I continue my work without preoccupying myself too much with the future. If I can finish my copy, so much the better! If not, what would you have? it will be a misfortune; there are greater ones; a few thousand francs less.
I embrace you. — Your brother and friend.
Louise M. to her brother
Paris, 11 December 72.
Mama went on Monday to M. Charles Blanc’s and did not find him; she went back there today with a letter in her pocket to ask for an audience, in case she does not meet him. It is a great sacrifice she is making for you there.
The newspapers that we sent you have informed you of the political agitations. Petitions are being signed everywhere for the dissolution of the Chamber; I believe it will not last much longer. A newspaper compared Thiers to Don Juan between the two peasant girls; he courts now the right, now the left; he is a monarchist at heart and has not hidden it in his last speech, but in his quality of President, he is indeed obliged to defend the Republic; it is a false position.
Madame Milliet to her son
(same date)
I come once again from M. Charles Blanc’s without having found him. I left a request for an audience with my address, so that, if there were something new for you, my friend, they would write to me and he would have me sent for. (1)
(1) It is probable that M. Charles Blanc, informed of my situation, preferred to pretend to be ignorant of it.
Fernand to Paul
Le Mans, 11 December 1872.
My mother writes me that you persist in wanting to make your position known to M. Charles Blanc. Here is what Doctor Barbier told me to write to you on his behalf: “He is wrong, very wrong, to wreck his career by such a folly. He compromises in this way both his own person and that of his family. Let him believe my old experience.”
Now in my turn, I am not going to spare you, but be certain that it is my friendship that forces me to say it to you. If I anger you, no matter, we shall make it up later. Well, for me, this persistence on your part is quite simply a pose. You imagine that brothers and friends will be grateful to you for it, that you are going to pass to posterity; undeceive yourself, my dear fellow, you are young! In the family they have always set you on a pedestal; try then to come down from it a little, that will be better for you. You do not live in the real world, but in an imaginary world; you have your mind completely warped by all your German philosophy; come down a little onto this earth. You think you alone had the monopoly of uprightness of conduct? There are men like M. Gleyre, the Doctor, who tell you that you are wrong, bow then! Listen to them! Come down from your clouds…
So long as your crackbrained ideas did harm to no one, I said nothing; but today I want to try to stop you by crying to you: Think of your mother! Our poor mother has already suffered much in this life. It will be for her a cruel grief the more, if she sees you thus wreck your career. For, you must not conceal it from yourself, that is what it is. Spare her this suffering. I know that you are inclined to mysticism; I would not warn you that you are wrong, because you understand it very well yourself. Renounce for this time posing as a martyr; you will thus spare our mother a great grief.
Take in good part all that I have written you; it is a fraternal friendship that obliges me to write to you thus.
Your brother who loves you.
FERNAND.
Doctor Barbier to Madame Milliet
15 December 1872.
Dear Madame and friend, I learn that your Paul, in spite of your observations and the counsels of M. Gleyre, maintains himself in the will to make known to M. Charles Blanc the new position which is made for him by a political measure taken against him. This determination is truly distressing for all. He is going to break a career so well begun, and which promised him so glorious a future. What does he claim by acting thus? To satisfy a duty of conscience? — The commission which has been entrusted to him was not given to the political man, but to the artist whose merit is extolled, and who felt himself equal to the task he was going to undertake. They did not inquire into the opinions of Paul Milliet, but indeed into his artistic talent. He does a work for which they pay him the remuneration, that is all. It is not a grace nor a favor that has been done him, it is an act of administration; were the measures taken against him to be learned of, they could at most withdraw this commission from him, but he would have no reproach to address to himself. All the odium of this penalty would fall back upon the Government, but it would in no way diminish the personage of your son, neither artistically nor politically… By persevering in the conduct so exemplary that he has always maintained until now, and by making grow through work the faculties with which he has been so happily endowed, he does nothing but honor his party.
Let us admit, however, that, by a sentiment of duty, ill understood in my opinion, he persists in his determination. Oh then, there must be no subterfuge, one must act squarely. One must in no way hide the motive which makes him abandon his work.
But, in truth, allow me to say it to you in all frankness, from every point of view, in letting himself be led to such scruples, when prudence counseled the contrary, he commits the greatest of follies, and moreover he completely forgets the regard he owes to his family. You have already suffered much, dear lady, your son Paul was for you a great motive of consolation; you were with good reason proud of him, and he is going to overturn the future that he had made shine so brilliantly before your eyes; all that, I repeat it, in pure loss for himself and for his party.
I go further now. The noise that such an affair may determine, can it not have an unfortunate repercussion and harm his sister Alix and his brother Fernand? I know well that both of them, and you also, will make light of your individualities; but is it thus that one must understand the salvation of the idea? Paul wants the crown of martyrdom, when, I do not cease to say it again, neither he, nor his party have anything to gain from it.
I stop, for already I have by much exceeded the rights given me by my old friendship and my position as a former proscribed man who, I may say it and pride myself on it, did everything during my twenty years of exile to bear gloriously the burden of it.
Farewell, dear madame, quite all yours.
BARBIER, doctor.
Madame Milliet to Paul
16 Dec. 72.
Yesterday, dear child, I spent the evening at Madame Pape’s. Mademoiselle Gleyre told me that her uncle, who takes his meals at her house now, spoke to her almost every day of you. He said to her: “He has a rubber obstinacy, that boy; one thinks one has made him yield, then, not at all, it comes back little by little to the starting point.” He said to her again: “I believe, however, that I have a delicate conscience; well, I may dig as much as I like into this question, I do not see in his affair of conscience anything but a hare-brained judgment. What makes the great superiority of the Republic is that the monarchy employs only its creatures, whereas the government of all has the duty to develop the faculties of all the citizens and to employ their capacities, without distinction of opinion, for the benefit of all. Under the Republic, one may say that one works for France and not for such-and-such a minister. And this boy persists! but it is very bad. — And if he were rendering a service to Ch. Blanc! A wavering, indecisive character, who will indeed feel that this does not concern him, but then, since they come and tell him of it? — What is to be done? — He is going to write to Jules Simon, still more wavering and more indecisive than himself. They will have to say that they are refusing this picture because it is badly done. For, if there is a wrong, it is to have given the commission and not to have received it. We must not give to this scandalous sanctions, without histories. Why? For whose benefit? Let him not come and sing to us that his conscience orders him to do this! Is this not a great examination! He thus condemns himself for what he has done? No, decidedly that boy has a mental aberration.” And he added: “I should like to be able to say to him: Does one inquire into the opinions of all the workmen who work at the Louvre, or at the public monuments? But he is nothing else, he is not a functionary.”
It seems to me, my dear child, that when one sees a man of the worth of M. Gleyre have an idea so settled, on a subject which he has studied and dug into, putting into it all his conscience, one may tell oneself that in following his advice one does not do a useless thing.
I wished to write you all this this morning when I received your letter from the doctor. I send it to you, it will make you see the sentiment of an honest man and of a republican. It will make you see also, dear child, how much we all love you. Do you believe then that we would wish, at the price of anything whatsoever, to touch your honorability? — Come, do you remember that one day when it was very hot at La Colonie, you got up at four o’clock in the morning and that, all the while walking, you went to bathe in the ornamental pool, all the while telling yourself: “How unhealthy this is, what I am doing here!” I had not seen you that day, but I see you today; let me turn you back, my darling, you will soon thank me for my solicitude.
I have not yet received a letter of audience from M. Ch. Blanc. I hope he has something else more interesting to do than to receive an old good woman whom he does not know, and who has, moreover, disagreeable things to teach him. I would indeed wish that he leave me in peace this week and give me time to receive a letter from you such as we desire it. I think that for his part he has nothing interesting to tell me, since he has not had me called.
We embrace you a thousand times. — Your mother,
LOUISE. I shall send you newspapers tomorrow.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 19 December 1872.
I keenly regret not to be in agreement with you. You write me letters so good, so affectionate, that they would make me love you still more, were it possible. I weep in reading them; but why do you treat me like a sick man, like an overwrought person who must be calmed? I am very calm, I assure you, and far less overwrought than you. The cause that you defend with so much passion and eloquence, I cannot find it good. Yet if you ask me to wait a few days for the political crisis to be untied, I am quite willing. You will only deprive me of the merit of having taken the initiative of a refusal. Thank M. Gleyre and Nicole a thousand times; tell them how happy I am to feel myself surrounded by so much sympathy and friendship.
Fernand is mistaken when he believes that I occupy myself with what people will say or with posterity. The “brothers and friends” have nothing to do with that. Besides, those whom I loved most are dead; I care for posterity as for the year 50, but I do not wish to profit from an error and compromise people to whom I am obliged.
I am neither sad nor discouraged. I work a great deal, and then I am so happy to receive your letters, to feel myself loved by you as I am! Alas, dear mother, we are as obstinate one as the other. I thank you for having asked for an audience; I believe only that you did not do it in very pressing terms. For your part you will not be grateful to me, I hope, for not having written directly. It is not the wish that has been lacking to me, but I have too great need of your affection to do anything that could wound you.
Paul to his mother
Rome (no date).
I let myself be dazzled for an instant by the literary qualities of the Message and by that singular skill which M. Thiers deploys in parliamentary struggles. But I do not, however, share the general infatuation of which he is at this moment the object. M. Thiers plays, I believe, in the great questions, a game I do not see to be skillful. He is a tortuous mind who delights in shady situations; he will found the Republic only by falsifying it. He has not known how to create a single durable institution; his death would put everything back into question. Is this not the condemnation of the regime under which we live?
After having filched away the Republic in 1830, after having contributed to preparing the 2nd of December, M. Thiers, during the war, paralyzed the defense; he made the shameful peace, and, since then, he paralyzes or stifles every movement which could have made all the sacrifices be accepted; he amuses the country with his feats of dexterity and he lulls it to sleep.
After our disasters, the course to follow seemed all traced: it was necessary to arm the nation and to drill it promptly. Who then would have dared to refuse? — He disarmed the national guard. We needed to find ourselves allies. — Where are they? It was necessary to reclaim universal suffrage by spreading instruction everywhere. — Nothing has yet been done. — It was necessary to prevent the social war by granting to the workers what there is of just in their claims. — He found nothing better than to proscribe the International and to oppose the tax on income. M. Thiers is a baneful man. What did he do with his diplomacy when the mayors of Paris were attempting a supreme effort to prevent the civil war? What did he do with his moderation in that frightful repression? He has not even permitted us to forget his massacred friends, nor the prison hulks, nor New Caledonia, nor the knife of the Commission of Pardons. I see nothing in this that obliges me toward this Government and above all I do not see the duty of gratitude.
This commission had been for me a great artistic happiness. In accepting it, I conformed to that spirit of conciliation and of appeasement which was then in the desire of all. This conciliation, they do not want it; nothing makes one foresee a near amnesty. For my part, I have already done too much, I stop.
Thank M. Barbier for his letter so kind to me. I would like to answer him a few words: The commission of a work of art is a personal encouragement and touches closely on protection. “They could at most,” he says, “withdraw this commission from me.” It is precisely what would happen to me and what I wish to avoid. — There is one point on which I am altogether in agreement with M. Barbier: “There must be no subterfuge, one must act squarely.” I beg you, dear mother, go no longer to solicit the intervention of M. Charles Blanc; he has nothing to do with my political affair. Tell him the determination I have taken and present him my letter of refusal. Once again, I pose neither as a martyr in that; I assure you even that the sacrifice is not so great as you think. I have taken a liking to the trade of copyist. Even in a regular city which does not offer, it is true, the same pleasures as composition, but which has none the less neither the fever, nor the worries, nor the discouragements of it.
Madame Milliet to Paul
Paris, 21 December 72.
I have not yet received a letter of audience from M. Charles Blanc; when I receive one, I shall go; but I make every wish that he delay still and leave you time to make salutary reflections. I should then tell him quite simply that your picture is finished. — Do not occupy yourself then with what people will say, nor with what a few little servile minds may think. If they will not see the truth, they will think of it all they wish. Do you believe you can undeceive those who put bad faith into their way of seeing? As for being moved over the fate of that poor M. Jules Simon, frankly I have something better to do.
It must be a real nightmare for you when you receive our letters; fortunately you will find in them the expression of our tenderness, and that must help you to bear all that they contain of the disagreeable. How painful it is for me not to be able to be in agreement with you, dear child!
M. de Tucé to Paul
Paris, 26 Dec. 1872.
… Your mother reported to me her conversation with M. Gleyre, and I found in his opinion a sense so upright and so practical that I thought it might have some action upon you. Before knowing you, I was rather of the opinion that your mother should go and see M. Ch. Blanc and tell him your scruples, but I recognize that he is right, and I do not see that one could do M. Ch. Blanc a worse service nor anything more disagreeable. It is a thing that he must wish not to know, and which does not concern him. In spite of that, your mother went to his house; she was not received and did not receive either an answer to her request for an audience; he is very busy at this time of year.
You must none the less finish the work that he has given you, for there is nothing changed for him in the conditions of the bargain, nor for you either… You therefore deceive no one.
You wish, you say, to keep your copy, while awaiting better days; you are quite sure of doing it one day or another. You have not the right. It is precisely those who sent you who could make you reproaches, for you would not be keeping the bargain made with them: you asked to make this copy, you accepted earnest money, they facilitated your means of execution, they had your work supervised by M. Hébert; you have not the right to break the contract without having done all for the best of their interests. The procedures of bookkeeping do not admit either of these complications.
I have seen almost all your letters; you do not appear decided to purge your default, then you speak of the competition in which you desire to take part; that goes together with difficulty. There is still information needed concerning the requests to be made to purge defaults, in case you should change your mind.
In that case, I advise you to finish your copy, to have M. Hébert see it, and if he recommends to you that it is in a condition to be delivered, to send it to Paris.
With the political ideas that direct your conduct, in your personal sense, I have nothing to do, but you must think it over carefully, if you wish to return to France. — Neither I nor your mother would touch on this subject.
Farewell, I clasp your hand.
DE TUCÉ.
5
Louise Milliet to Paul
Paris, 28 December 72.
We paid yesterday a visit to Mademoiselle Gleyre; her uncle was at her place, he dines there every evening, he takes a great interest in you. — Mama said to him: “Perhaps you will be blamed for having recommended this young man.” — “Let them say what they like; I shall reply that I knew perfectly well what he was, that I recommended him and that I would do it again. I appreciate the painter, I am not a professor of politics.”
There is at the Sorbonne a course of drawing where I go. The professor, M. Gobert, pleases me well enough; he is a serious man and one who knows his business. He has good models. We are not many drawing from the cast, and the other pupils make such horrors that my drawing appears very good; it is perhaps the contrary which produces that effect. I hope indeed to have a medal.
I also follow the course of zoology which interests me greatly at the Sorbonne; we learn our lessons well; I do illustrations: heart, lungs, circulation, organs. In my last exercise I did the portrait of the professor blowing into a rubber larynx; I do not know whether he will be vexed with me; it is very lifelike. I also did a breast under a glass cover, but that goes as a counterpart; my uncle takes a great interest in my drawing and my zoology; every Sunday he sees me come and I ask his advice on the things that embarrass me. In the evening, with Alix, we go to Madame Pape’s or to the children of the Communards; there are great miseries there, women who are left with six or seven children on their hands.
It seems that the Jesuits are stirring a great deal. Those of Paris are jealous of the miracles of La Salette and of Lourdes; they have promised that Saint Geneviève is also going to work miracles at the Pantheon.
Farewell, my dear old stubborn darling, I embrace you with all my heart. Your sister and friend.
Madame Milliet to Paul
Paris, 30 December 72.
Dear child,
How sad it is to be thus separated! But I am sure that you will feel well that we think of you all day, that we speak of it, but not without joining to the expression of our affection a good number of vexing epithets, which I leave you to guess. — We shall not have half of our children with us on New Year’s Day. Fernand will be detained at Roquencourt by the regimental visits, and your uncle will go to Versailles to present his homage to M. Thiers. This evening, he dines at the Élysée with the President, and tomorrow he will come and tell us of that interesting repast.
We have received your letter, dear child; I thank you and am grateful to you for not having written directly. I know that it is for me that you did it. For my part I went three times to M. Ch. Blanc’s. I asked him for an audience that he has not yet granted me. You tell me that I must not have asked it in very pressing terms; it is certain that I did not put any insistence into it. You write to me: “He has nothing to do with my political affair.” You are perfectly right. It is to the artist that he gave the commission, but the artist accepted it, he must deliver it. There is in that neither obliged party nor obliging party; it is a contract which must be kept on both sides. Has it ever come into anyone’s mind that the painter was obliged to the one who orders a picture from him? There is reciprocity, and if the picture is a success, it is the purchaser who is the obliged party of the painter.
The price that has been promised you for your copy is inferior to that which is given to most analogous works. You will have spent three thousand francs to do it; the remuneration is only just… You may be grateful to M. Ch. Blanc for his confidence, but it is recognizing it very badly to wish to fasten on him a part of the responsibility. Now he can say: “I was ignorant of it.” When I have made him your confidence, he will no longer be able to.
I went to consult M. Juif; you know his affection for you, in memory of his son (a friend of Paul’s, dead during the first siege of Paris); you know also his discretion; I was therefore able to make him our confidences. He is a stubborn radical, that one; he is no centre-left. Well, I have the chagrin to tell you that he finds you even more radically in the wrong than we do. I read him your letter. He finds that you are partly right in what you say of the exploit, but that Thiers is the necessary man at this moment. Without him, we should perhaps no longer have the Republic. “But what relation has M. Thiers’s manner of persevering with your son’s picture? What! because there are vexations, crimes even, committed under this government, your son will refuse to deliver to it a work! But in what way does he serve it?”
With Alix we said: M. Thiers leans too much to the right, Paul cannot deliver his picture; oh, if he leaned to the left, it would be quite different, but he remains in equilibrium, so he keeps it.
M. Juif (1) wrote to Paul M.
Paris, 31 December 1872.
My dear Monsieur Paul, … I was in no way surprised at the prosecution of which you have been the object; I considered it as a recommendation; you will one day glory in it, but for the moment scruples torment you. Struck in the defense of a cause that you do not hesitate to serve, you wish to ask yourself whether you would not incur reproaches for having solicited favors from your political enemies. These apprehensions are not at all founded, in my opinion. The administration of Fine Arts has nothing political about it.
(1) Who became afterward the father-in-law of M. Guieysse, minister of the Colonies and deputy.
(M. Juif develops the same arguments as Doctor Barbier.)
In every respect, it is therefore fitting that you abstain. You will second thus the arrangements of madame your mother, whom I have seen quite sad. Her energy and her calm do not fail her in these circumstances. The actual situation must afflict her much more painfully than you, who must see in an assured future, distant at most by a few years, the recompense and the triumph of the great and generous aspirations of our century.
All yours, my dear Monsieur Paul, your affectionate,
JUIF.
Madame Milliet to Paul
1 January 73.
What a sad New Year’s Day! Of the two children who remain near us, Louise is suffering from a wisdom tooth that is coming through, and Alix, going yesterday to draw her fortnight’s pay at Goupil’s, learned a very bad piece of news: they are no longer going to make colored photographs. America, to which they were sent, no longer wants them. While waiting for something better, Alix paints in watercolor photographs on salted paper. Everyone finds them charming, but no one buys any. If she knew how to retouch portraits, she would be well paid, but it is a new apprenticeship. She is much saddened by it, I try to raise her spirits… I received the visit of J. Nicole, who came to ask for your news. He is a little more content with your situation; he urges us greatly to go and join you. Alas, I should much wish it, and that depends only on you. If you would renounce your unhappy ideas, we should leave as soon as you had your copy sent off. You tell us that when you have finished you will be able to have your picture photographed at the Museum of Copies, but it is M. Ch. Blanc who had the idea of this museum, and it is very probable that those who succeed him will not continue it. — Is it loyal to sell to another country than France, which facilitated the means of executing it? Is it right to put your parents into difficulty to satisfy a caprice, for I cannot otherwise qualify a scruple condemned by the most delicate persons? Is it right to wreck one’s career oneself? If you were logical, you ought not to desire to take part in the Rome competition…
P.-S. — It is M. Lenepveu who is appointed director of the Académie de France at Rome.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 5 January 73.
Decidedly you wish to overwhelm me by numbers: father, mother, brother, sisters, uncle, friends, Nicole, M. Gleyre, M. Barbier, M. Juif, Madame Pape, Marie Chassevant; I must hold my own all alone against these dear enemies. But how could they put themselves quite in my place and see things from the same point of view as I? — I beg you to thank M. Juif for the interest he shows me. I assure you, dear mother, that I make great efforts to range myself to your opinion. From the moment that there are engagements, the administration of Fine Arts ought to keep its own; but, if the Government has not the right to withdraw the commission from me, it cannot withdraw it without inflicting this affront. Liberty, that is what is just; let M. Charles Blanc recognize it, he must be made the judge of it.
Now, dear mother, in your ardor to support my interests, you say to me very hard things. I do not admit that you should treat as a caprice a resolution which M. Juif calls a respectable satisfaction, and as scruples which are far from being as exaggerated as you are good enough to claim. Do not speak either of a “career wrecked,” nor of wishing to put you into difficulty; I tell you again, whatever happens, I shall promptly get myself out of difficulty. I learn that M. Bin has requested for Joseph Blanc the commission of a copy after the great frescoes of Signorelli at Orvieto. If they obtained this enormous work, they could perhaps associate me with it.
I see you, dear mother, so anxious about my future that I do not wish to struggle against your desire otherwise than by persuasion. Weigh well my reasons; I wish that they may seem good to you; I leave it to you; what you will do will be well done.
Your loving son, accustomed to obey you.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 13 January 73.
You are indeed the best boy on earth, my darling, and your Bonti was quite hard for you, when she treated as a caprice a scruple exaggerated but very honorable. Her tenderness made impatient by your obstinacy is the cause of that fit of pique which you have already forgiven her, I am sure.
I have sent you a letter from M. Juif, another from your uncle, one from Louise, and one from me. You respect us and preoccupy us constantly; we are not, I believe, one hour without thinking of you; we should be so happy to bring back calm into your mind. Believe well then that we love you too much to urge you to do a thing that would not be of the most scrupulous delicacy. Come, a little courage, my dear child, and tell me that I may go to M. Charles Blanc’s to announce to him that your copy is finished and that you are ready to deliver it. As for reimbursing the advances that have been made to you, we regard this measure as both as extravagant and as out of place. May our conviction enter into your mind, my dear child, and soften the sacrifice that you are making us. We embrace you very tenderly and we all have a great desire to join you.
I was too weak to resist so many friendly objurgations. My parents had just lost a great part of their fortune. The sums I should have had to restore, I did not have. I told myself that, after all, it was for those who had given me the commission to take information about me. I took the course of the indecisive: to wait.
III — A Communard at the Vatican
Completion and dispatch of the copy after Melozzo da Forli. — M. de Courcelles. — Dom Marcello. — Letter of M. Charles Blanc.
1
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 6 January 73.
Yesterday we visited the Museum of Copies; there are already very fine things there and it is very considerable. We shall go back there, and Louise will give you an account of what we have seen.
Alix is without work at this moment; she is going to do a few watercolors after the Spring by Ingres at the Luxembourg.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 10 January 73.
I have just finished the gilding of my picture; I must now patinate it to attenuate its brilliance. M. Hébert has not come to see me as he had promised; it will be for next week; he is posing for Tony Noël, who is doing his bust. I rather dread his visit, for he is not going to spare me his observations, and I shall have to follow all his advice.
I have to tell you of a curious conversation that I had yesterday with M. de Courcelles, our new ambassador. Dom Marcello, secretary of Monsignor de Mérode, was serving him as guide in the Gallery of painting, and presented me to him, making my eulogy with his Italian exaggeration. M. de Courcelles complimented me greatly. “We discussed at length,” he said to me, “with M. Jules Simon, on the subject of the Museum of Copies. They fear to see there many mediocre works, but if all the copies are made like yours, that will present a real interest. When you have finished this copy, you must do others.” He then set himself to speak to me of art with an erudition that astonished me. He knows the best works of Melozzo da Forli. He spoke to me of the frescoes of Masaccio and of Fra Angelico, explaining to me, as M. Perrin might have done, the moral ideas and the allegories contained in those paintings. Saint Stephen, for example, distributes alms to all equally, like a sacrament. The first person who presents herself to the saint is Madame Poverty. He did not tire of admiring the idea of having given her a pink robe, and that naïve detail: a little child trying to steal from another the alms he has just received. “It is a little Victor Emmanuel,” he said, “but not very wicked, that one, rather mischievous.” — As I asked whether he was going to present his homage to the pope, M. de Courcelles answered that his appointment was not yet official, but that it is known here that it is a settled matter: “We prefer,” the pope is said to have remarked, “to accept from France good conditions with a good ambassador, rather than good conditions with a bad ambassador.”
I should be very content to have another commission, but this time you will not deprive me of the satisfaction of refusing it. — Is it not a very singular position, mine? Here I am on the best of terms with all those people without knowing why nor how. While keeping myself on the greatest reserve, I have it in my power to be polite.
May your next letter announce to me the day of your arrival. All yours.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 13 January 73.
Among the copies of the new Museum, there are some very mediocre ones. With Mademoiselle Gleyre we were saying that, for the glory of M. Charles Blanc, a few well-made copies would be worth more than heaps of mediocrities or worse still. There are, however, a few that are good; yours is found very good. If a copy is a success, is it not the artist alone to whom one will be grateful for it? Will one occupy oneself with his opinions? — Evidently not. Do me then the pleasure of telling the political man who is in you to go and sleep in peace, and leave the artist alone; his work in no way concerns him.
I carried your thanks to M. Juif. He said to me: “It is casuistry, all these scruples. An administration ought not to enter into questions of personalities; when it does so, pushed by political passion, it is wrong. You must not force people to commit an injustice, even when this injustice would be prejudicial to you.” He added: “Political justice is never just. One has full right to subtract oneself from the consequences of an iniquitous judgment. Has anyone ever reproached a man condemned by default for not coming to bring his head?” We have reread the passage of the letter where you urge me to go and submit the question to M. Charles Blanc; we have made together an examination of conscience more scrupulous than ever a priest had a penitent make; I made myself the advocate of your ideas, we examined all that a reasonable and inflexible man could give: “I shall pass quite easily over the money question,” I said to M. Juif, “if you believe his honor engaged. Do you think that I must make M. Charles Blanc the judge of this question? — No, a thousand times no,” he answered me. “As an administrator he must not enter into questions of persons, and as a man he is not your friend, for you to go and ask him advice. You would take from him the irresponsibility that he has until now through his ignorance, whether real or feigned. If something disagreeable happens, well, your son will bear it. There,” he added, “is what I said to my son and what I say to yours; let him hasten to finish his picture and to send it.”
As this way of seeing is completely ours, I could do nothing but yield to these good reasons.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 16 January 73.
I regret not to have succeeded in convincing you, but you will hear nothing, and I let myself be led like a child. — I am still waiting for M. Hébert, who does not come. I counted on going to dine here last Sunday, but he had closed his salon; guess why. — Because of the death of Napoleon III. He is in personal relations with the whole imperial family. The pensioners are furious, because the Italian newspapers claim that there is mourning at the pontifical court; in any case, next Sunday the mourning will be over.
M. de Courcelles, who has come back to see me, is more amiable than ever. If I am to believe Dom Marcello, he would like to have me copy those angels of Melozzo of which he is enamored, or else the Saint Stephen of Fra Angelico. They are certainly very fine things, but I would not wish to come and copy primitives all my life; I would rather study Raphael and Michelangelo. Besides, I shall probably have no commission at all and, as I would refuse, it is all the same to me.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 18 January 73.
The visit of M. de Courcelles gave me great pleasure. I met M. Gleyre and told him of it. He told me that M. de Courcelles is indeed a very distinguished scholar. He asks me whether your copy will be sent to Paris as soon as it is finished; they are in great haste to furnish their Museum with it. If it is so, I should rather wait to leave until this affair were finished. If on the contrary M. Hébert is not to send your picture until later, well, we shall leave at once.
By the way, we have not yet rejoiced together over the death of Badinguet! I know well that he was a finished man, but no matter, one feels a relief in feeling the earth rid of that maleficent being. The only funeral oration that one wants to repeat everywhere on his account is this one: “What a pity that he did not die a few years sooner!”
Paul M. to his mother
21 January 73.
At last here I am content! M. Charles Blanc is informed of everything. How? I know nothing of it, but I know, I am sure that he has received my telegrams, a telegram asking him for news of my copy. M. Hébert has given me a few good counsels; I shall work the whole week to follow them; after which he will come back once more, and I think that another week will not be too much to finish. He has an idea that hardly pleases me: he wants me to imitate in my copy an effect of light produced on the original by the window which lights it, by darkening in my painting the whole upper part. That is well done, it is true, but I shall indicate it as lightly as possible, because that becomes interpretation. The masters of that epoch did not know those researches of chiaroscuro. — M. Hébert was very content and is to write of it to M. Charles Blanc.
4:30.
I come from Madame Bin’s. Her husband has never been arrested, but he was called to Versailles before a council of war to render account of his conduct, and since then the government has given him commissions. I shall write to you tomorrow; I beseech you do no follies until then. I embrace you.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 26 January 73.
My last letter had just gone, when I received M. Hébert’s card giving me a rendezvous for the next day. I went to thank him, and his carriage took us on Monday morning to the Vatican. He received there two telegrams from M. Charles Blanc, who seems very pressed. — M. Hébert has given me a few good counsels; I shall work the whole week to follow them; after which he will come back once more, and I think that another week will not be too much to finish. He has an idea that hardly pleases me: he wants me to imitate in my copy an effect of light produced on the original by the window which lights it, by darkening in the painting the whole upper part. That is well done, it is true, but I shall indicate it as lightly as possible, because that becomes interpretation. The masters of that epoch did not know those researches of chiaroscuro. — M. Hébert was very content and is to write of it to M. Charles Blanc.
The account that you give me of your visit to M. Bin and to Joseph Blanc gave me great pleasure. It sustains one to feel oneself in community of artistic and political ideas with people whom one loves and esteems. Blanc has not only much intelligence, learning, and talent, he has also an excellent heart; he has known how to make himself loved by all who know him; we speak of him very often, and I am not the only one to miss him.
As for the reproaches that may have been made me about my situation, I shall confess to you that they are rather in my imagination than in reality. Here is what it comes down to. Before knowing the details I have given him, de Pury is said to have said: “These radicals are all alike. Milliet gives himself many airs, but when it is a question of earning money, they bow and scrape.” Evidently he was mistaken; I have neither cried out, nor bowed and scraped, but it is already too much to be suspected.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 25 January 73.
My poor darling, but you really have the air of a criminal who imagines that everyone is occupied with him. I am convinced that this telegram has no importance; consider then that it costs the administration nothing.
There is talk of revising certain judgments, I have been told; yours would probably be among those annulled; but until then, for the love of heaven, keep quiet! Send your picture as soon as possible, I shall await its arrival, and I shall know well how to bring the journey to its end. You will have to go afterward to wait at Florence, that will rest you.
Your father has spoken of your affair to M. Belin, councillor of the prefecture. The latter said to him: “Let your son accept commissions then as long as he is given any. The future is ours; what he does, he does well for the Republic.”
4:30.
I come from Madame Bin’s. Her husband has never been arrested, but he was called to Versailles before a council of war to render account of his conduct, and since then the government has given him commissions. I shall write to you tomorrow; I beseech you do no follies until then. I embrace you.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 28 January 73.
My last letter had just gone, when I received M. Hébert’s card giving me a rendezvous for the next day. I went to thank him, and his carriage took us on Monday morning to the Vatican. He received there two telegrams from M. Charles Blanc, who seems very pressed. — M. Hébert has given me a few good counsels; I shall work the whole week to follow them; after which he will come back once more, and I think that another week will not be too much to finish. He has an idea that hardly pleases me: he wants me to imitate in my copy an effect of light produced on the original by the window which lights it, by darkening in the painting the whole upper part. That is well done, it is true, but I shall indicate it as lightly as possible, because that becomes interpretation. The masters of that epoch did not know those researches of chiaroscuro. — M. Hébert was very content and is to write of it to M. Charles Blanc.
The account that you give me of your visit to M. Bin and to Joseph Blanc gave me great pleasure. It sustains one to feel oneself in community of artistic and political ideas with people whom one loves and esteems. Blanc has not only much intelligence, learning, and talent, he has also an excellent heart; he has known how to make himself loved by all who know him; we speak of him very often, and I am not the only one to miss him.
As for the reproaches that may have been made me about my situation, I shall confess to you that they are rather in my imagination than in reality. Here is what it comes down to. Before knowing the details I have given him, de Pury is said to have said: “These radicals are all alike. Milliet gives himself many airs, but when it is a question of earning money, they bow and scrape.” Evidently he was mistaken; I have neither cried out, nor bowed and scraped, but it is already too much to be suspected.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 29 January 73.
We are not of the opinion that you come here to take the Rome competitions; you would arrive at it in a state of disturbance and have arrived in the middle of it. As for undertaking a great picture, one would have to begin it with enthusiasm; if you are discouraged in advance, that is not the way to succeed. M. Bin and Joseph Blanc are of the opinion that you accept a second copy. If it were offered to you, I would go to M. Charles Blanc’s, so that he should know well to whom he gives the commission. He will indeed have to listen to me this time, willingly or by force. By the way, he has still not answered my request for an audience.
You must understand how, for the solution of all these questions, I should be desirous of seeing your copy gone, delivered, paid for. — How disagreeable that Hébert of yours is! There is a fortnight lost. Louise’s courses end on 15 February and the competitions (1) will not take place until the end of May; we should have had the time to make the journey during this interval. I do not know why your letters no longer reach us until the fourth day instead of the third. (2)
(1) For the teaching of drawing. (2) They perhaps passed through the black cabinet.
How the whole wardrobe must have need of a maternal review! We all embrace you very tenderly.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 5 February 73.
M. Hébert has come to see my copy; he found it very good and regards it as finished. He was as charming as could be and invited me to dinner for Sunday.
I do not have the intention of attempting the competition next summer; I should like to go with you to Milan, to Venice, or to Florence, but it is here that one sees the frescoes of Raphael and of Michelangelo, and there is nothing in the world that approaches that.
Mercié is back and works with ardor on his fine group; the Academy is a very agreeable artistic center. I go now every Sunday to M. Hébert’s evening parties and I am less bored there, since I know the pensioners better. What hardly pleases me is that one cannot laugh at one’s ease there until morning.
I have not seen M. de Courcelles again, but I had Dom Marcello, who told me that the former came to see my copy last Sunday, in the company of Monsignor de Mérode, of Monsignor Pacca, of Madame de Montalembert, and of Gregorio, the famous and too-skilled restorer of old pictures. Dom Marcello made me the most Italian of eulogies.
M. de Courcelles has, it appears, asked M. Thiers to exhibit at the Louvre four pictures from the collection of Dom Marcello; they are the supposed works (?) of Perugino, of Raphael, of Michelangelo, and of Andrea del Sarto. Nothing less than that! I believe they would cut a sorry figure in the Salon Carré.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 13 February 73.
Dom Marcello has come back to see me several times. He assures me that M. de Courcelles would easily have me obtain the commission of the frescoes of Melozzo which are in the sacristy of Saint Peter’s… I should have only a word to say. That word, I shall not say it. I do not wish to owe anything to those people. They are evidently ignorant of my position, but I do not think they will be ignorant of it for long. Not being able to give the true reason that makes me refuse, I have said, what is true moreover, that I desire to do a picture. Dom Marcello has an unctuous and obsequious amiability. By dint of fine words, of offers of services and even of real services, those Jesuits get one entangled. He would like to have a portrait of Raphael in the School of Athens copied, in order to compare it with the famous portrait he possesses, and which I believe to be a Raphael painted by the most illustrious Gregorio himself.
Louise M. to her brother
Paris, 15 February 73.
I greatly long to see your picture; I am sure that it will be one of the best copies in the Museum; you have already received much praise and, for you yourself to be content with it, it must be quite remarkably good.
In the matter of politics, you must know the good news: the abdication of Amadeo and the proclamation of the Republic in Spain. The right is bristling.
I go to paint at the Louvre on Thursday and Friday; my grisaille has been done for a long time, but M. Bourdon (1) does not come to let me put on the glazes; he becomes a driveller and a bore. He claims that there are hardnesses in my flesh-tints and makes me put on scumblings of white and vermilion; he stuffs it in everywhere, it destroys the drawing, and it must be done over. Then he makes me put on glazes again which he butters with his fingers, going beyond all the contours.
(1) Friend of M. Gleyre and a skilled copyist; he was a man of systems.
I do drawings of the Erinyes, a new piece by Leconte de Lisle, performed at the Odéon. Madame Marie Laurent is superbly stirring in the role of Klytaimnestra; Kassandra and Elektra are also very good; only Orestes is bad. Taillade is, however, a celebrated actor, but he has nothing that approaches that. The costumes were quite good, except those of the secondary women’s roles. They had peplums of several colors, a sort of little white pelerine that descended to the waist, and a yellow skirt, or else green and violet; and with that too many petticoats underneath for it to make pretty falling folds. The old men had superb white beards which had the air of being real.
Mama promised me that she would take me a second time to hear Madame Marie Laurent, to replace the ball of Rose’s wedding. I had no wish to go to it; it is not worth the trouble of spending money to dance with heaps of reactionaries or theologians of the Figaro; I shall amuse myself much more at the theater.
2
Paul to his mother
Rome, 19 February 73.
At last I have finished! I dispatch tomorrow my copy of Melozzo. I fear that you will be disappointed in seeing it. The style of this fresco is still primitive and the personages are not very sympathetic; all those people there are false and cruel, true scoundrels, beginning with Sixtus IV who sought to have the Medici assassinated. All of them already Jesuits; not one who looks frankly in the face. Behind the pope stands his nephew Sixtus, a young man in black; he is the only one in whom one takes an interest, because he was later Julius II. The big fellow in red is Cardinal Riario Sforza; the two others, behind Platina, are, I have been told, other nephews of the pope, and I quite believe that the little dark one had the great abbé assassinated.
I copied as faithfully as I could, without seeking to correct my model, which I find quite ugly. Would you believe that this art so sincere and so powerful is still very little appreciated? Many people, and even artists, pitied me for having to copy “such a monstrosity,” — that was the word. Evidently they do not look at it.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 20 February 73.
The proclamation of the republic in Spain continues to fill the whole right with rage; there is good hope in its viability, and, until now everything seems to go well. Here it is thought that the Prussians will have completely evacuated the territory at the latest by the first of September, and the right-wingers most clinging to their mandate will then find it impossible to prolong it beyond that; we have therefore the hope of being rid of them.
They agree too that the Chamber which succeeds them will be completely republican.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 26 February 73.
We went to visit the Villa Madama, one of the purest masterpieces of the Renaissance. Imagine that the vandal who today possesses this marvel has taken a fine hall, painted by Giulio Romano, to make of it a henhouse. One must be at Rome to encounter a negligence so revolting, such a contempt of art. (1)
(1) I was naïve; it is not only at Rome that one encounters vandals.
The carnival has been going on for a fortnight. The city, so calm ordinarily, and the inhabitants so grave, seem transformed. It is an animation, a gaiety, an exuberant folly. Much spirit and not the least disorder; much noise and no discordant cries; the carriages circulate in the midst of a thick crowd, without accident. In the Corso, horses at liberty run a race between two hedges formed by the spectators. Not the least jostling, each one stays in his place. In the evening not one drunken man! Our northern stocks are assuredly more brutal, our gaiety is disordered, and our ancestors barbarians.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 3 March 73.
I can at last feed myself on Michelangelo, and I gorge myself on him! I have already made a sketch of the Creation of the Sun and I now copy the Original Sin. I shall be very happy to come and see them again at Paris. Michelangelo grips me so much that, if I go this summer to Venice, it will be only out of reason; I am becoming like M. Perrin, and I disdain at this moment the colorists.
That intriguer Dom Marcello will not let me go; at the Sistine Chapel, he comes to have me translate into French a letter from the celebrated engraver Mercuri, a letter of accommodation, attesting that the famous portrait is indeed that of Raphael painted by himself. He will have this letter printed at the end of the catalogue of his gallery. While I was doing this bad copy, he invited me to come to his house; not having found me, he had his picture restorer make the copy of the portrait of Raphael which is in the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. M. de Courcelles is going to make a gift of this copy to M. Thiers. I prefer that it has been arranged thus; I shall not find myself mixed up in the more or less shady affairs of those Jesuits.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 5 March 73.
I think that your picture will arrive today in Paris; I shall therefore go tomorrow in search of M. Buon or to the Ministry of Fine Arts.
Paris, 9 March 73.
Here is indeed another affair; your picture is mislaid, lost, who knows! It does not arrive. Saturday I went back to M. Buon’s, who had not written to me: “But, my poor lady, we have no picture! What is to be done and what has become of it? The time limit is well past, I have written to the railway, no answer.” He added: “Go, I beg you, yourself to see at the railway, inquire.” I went there, I went to the customs, to Bercy where pictures often lie in arrears; I found nothing. I went this morning to the Messageries, there was nothing. I was told to have a receipt sent to me at once from the ticket office at Rome. You will make your application immediately, so that I can take the necessary steps. Provided the crate is not broken and the picture has not had some jolt on the way!
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 12 March 73.
How does it happen, dear child, that a picture which must have left after yours, the copy made by M. Chartran, has been since the 9th at the Palace of Industry, while yours has not arrived? I am going to go back to see M. Buon, who is much annoyed. Send me the railway receipt, so that I may take the necessary steps. It is only to you that such things happen. There must certainly be a fault somewhere. M. Buon, who is very surly, has been charming to me.
Farewell, I send you a handful of vexations.
Madame Alix Payen to her brother
14 March 73.
In her last letter, mama must have shown you her anger; we have sent you to the devil, we have given you the most frightful names, but the most deserved. We no longer called you anything but “the dear idiot.” I hope that the Museum of Copies will soon be open and that we shall be able to see your work there.
3
Madame Milliet to her son
Saturday 15 March 73.
At last it is found! M. Charles Blanc has seen it and accepted it. There was on the crate “consignment of M. Benner.” You gave me the occasion to see M. Buon as he often is, it appears, that is to say, hardly amiable. You ought to have put on the address: “Copy after Melozzo da Forli, consignment of M. Milliet.” I asked him whether M. Charles Blanc was content with your copy; he answered me: “Yes, M. Charles Blanc finds the copy well made, and he is satisfied with it, but he would be still more so if your son had not taken it into his head to imitate the spots of dust which are on the original and to dirty his picture.” (1) “I believe,” I said to him, “that it is on the advice of M. Hébert that my son did that.” Perhaps it was only a light glaze that could be removed, but I did not speak of it, not knowing your opinion. Now that your picture has arrived safe and sound, we should be very desirous to see this copy, while waiting to see the copyist.
(1) It was no doubt the impression of M. Buon rather than that of M. Charles Blanc.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 19 March 73.
… If in my copy I have imitated the spots and the effect of time, it is in no way from a puerile search for trompe-l’œil, it was a necessity for the harmony of the picture; there are destroyed parts, a hand for example, that I did not wish to restore. Forced to imitate the deteriorations on one side, I was led to imitate them everywhere, but I did it as soberly as possible, conforming in that to the instructions of M. Hébert and of all the artists I have consulted. I followed their advice all the more willingly because I am convinced that literal translations are good and not free interpretations. I therefore copied the defects of the model, the little faults of perspective, the heads which are not of a piece; Platina, for example, squints a little, he has a sort of nervous tic of the head; one will not fail to hold me guilty of those defects of my model, I expect it. I know very well what is lacking in my copy, but I think, however, that it brings the original close to those who shall have taken the trouble to study it.
We made last Sunday a charming excursion to Tivoli. We were nine in two carriages, our day was very agreeable and I often said to myself: it is truly gayer than New Caledonia. In the evening, although passably tired, I went to M. Hébert’s, who is to leave shortly. I did not wish to have the air of visiting him only when I had need of him. He had received a letter from M. Charles Blanc, who thanked him for the advice he had given me and who made him a eulogy of me, among other things. I saw that that gave him pleasure. Naturally M. Charles Blanc spoke of it only after my letter.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 30 March 73.
We shall not be able to see your copy until 15 April. I think that the delay in the payment proceeds only from the formalities. I went to M. Gleyre’s to tell him that your copy had arrived. He approves your having reproduced faithfully the little incorrectnesses of the model. I told him that M. de Courcelles was proposing to you to do frescoes in the sacristy of Saint Peter’s, that you had only a word to say, and that you had not wished to. He took a distressed air: “Ah! an artist, to refuse that! a picture that no one can see? is there no means of making him come back on his decision?” — With these means we have made each other too unhappy all winter, and I had vowed to myself not to torment you any more. If you knew, my dear child, how it grieves me to grieve you, and for six months I have done nothing else; but I can do nothing about it.
Louise M. to her brother
Paris, 17 April 73.
We have just seen your picture, which pleased us greatly. The personages are far from being pretty fellows, but one sees that they are portraits striking in their resemblance and that you copied conscientiously.
The power of attorney was found well done at the Fine Arts, but at the Treasury they told mama that it had to be legalized at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Madame Milliet to her son (same letter)
I went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to fetch your power of attorney, from there to the Treasury; there they told me: “Now it must be registered and stamped.” I went into two dens where two moldy old notaries stagnate; they scrawled yet something more which cost me 6 francs, then I went back to the Treasury. They told me: “These papers must be examined anew and notice given of the payment, come back in six days.” I got angry and they told me: “Well, come back in three days.” I am afraid they will yet find some obstacle. It is mightily hard to wrest from them the fruit of the operation.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 19 April 73.
At last, dear child, I have just received your money. So here is this affair finished. You have no idea of all the formalities that must be fulfilled. Today I had to present your papers in six offices, among others to the office of oppositions; that was the difficult Rubicon to cross. No obstacle arose, I drew your 6,000 francs intact.
Tomorrow I shall again go to M. Gleyre’s to ask him how he finds your copy.
The moral of all this, my dear boy, is that the judgment which so upset us is completely ignored, or if it is not, no more importance has been attached to it than it deserved, that is to say, none. Which does not, however, mean that you were not very culpable and extremely imprudent. — Continuation of the moral: your copy being found very good, you are no one’s obliged party; moreover, you can have others when you wish, which makes me not understand why you deprived yourself of it, if that suited you. In a word, it would be better to do a picture for the next exhibition.
We shall go on Monday to the wedding of Louise Juif; she marries M. Guieysse.
The rumor runs that the pope is very ill, if he is not already dead. The Museums are going to be closed.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 20 April.
… I am very glad that my copy pleases you, but what prevents me from attaching too much importance to your judgment is the knowledge that, if I had a daub, you would probably have found it superb all the same.
4
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 22 April 73.
You made me very happy yesterday, dear child; we went, Louise and I, to see M. Gleyre. He held out his hand to me and said to me: “I come from the Museum of Copies, I am very content with that of your son, it is very good; and how rare good copies are; most of them, you see, are calumnies against the painters; all the Flemings are frightfully bad, the Velázquezes are painful to see. When one sees a fine original picture, one tries to divine how the artist could have arrived at this result; but the copyists do not seem to have preoccupied themselves with that for a single instant, they have contented themselves with an approximation which renders neither the impression nor the handling, whereas your son has put into his copy the conscientiousness that he puts into everything he does. In seeing his copy, I believed I saw the original again, I found myself back at the Vatican, it is a true enjoyment.”
Not a copy, and those of Baudry are the only ones that he found very interesting. M. Gleyre is extremely difficult, it is only the more flattering for you to have satisfied him. “Thus,” I said to him, “Paul’s copy will not be a blot at the Museum. — But yes,” he answered me, “it will be a blot, but in the inverse sense of what one usually understands by that. Eh,” he added, smiling at me, “how well you did to force him to send this copy; it is excellent and that sets him very honorably. — Oh,” I said to him, “it is indeed thanks to you; for if you had not supported me, I would not have struggled against him as I have done.” — Well, everything is for the best. Now, he must do a picture, and if he has the courage to do it at Rome, one is there in the best conditions to do good painting. Only, if he has not had the fevers last year, he is going to have them this summer, he must avoid the great heats.
He was so good, so paternal, that I should have wished to be able to tell him the motive which prevents us from going to join you. (1) — “We must go and see him, that child,” he said to me. You are certainly, my dear, one of the persons whom he loves. His picture of the Return of the Prodigal Son is well advanced and, as I told him that I was going to announce to you that it was almost finished: — “Tell him well that it is a picture I have failed at, I have rendered nothing of what I wished to do; if I were younger, if I were at Rome, but I no longer do anything good.” It is sad to see a man so discouraged. I want to note for you yet another idea of his that struck me: We were speaking of I no longer know what copy after Giotto, and I said: “One must have faith to do those pictures. — Not at all,” he said to me, “Perugino was an atheist; one must have faith in what one does, and that suffices.”
(1) See chapter V.
I copy from the Rappel the subject set for the Prix de Rome, the competition called of the 36 hours; this subject was drawn from M. Cabanel. It is a passage from the poem (?): Super flumina Babylonis: “We have hung up our lyres on the willows of the bank, saying: One does not sing on the land of exile.”
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 20 April 73.
Your two letters cheered me greatly, above all the one where you speak to me of M. Gleyre and of his judgment on my copy. I feared that it would not be to his taste.
I have just seen Rabagas performed in Italian by excellent actors. The piece does not lack wit in the first acts; it has a great success with the Italians, very positive people; the piece seems made for them. It is the work of a malevolent and egoistic observer, who seeks to flatter the lowest instincts of the bourgeoisie, by making fall back upon a whole party the defects or the absurdities of a few ambitious men. To have the piece accepted in Paris, that was a veritable cowardice. When one shoots people, one might dispense with mocking them and insulting them. There would be a fine piece to be made for a man who had a little heart and who sincerely loved the people. Beside the ambitious man without convictions, one would have to show a man like Delbrouck, devoted unto death, and not make of good sense and of honesty the privilege of a single class and of a single party.
Louise M. to her brother
Paris, 28 April 73.
Mama has just received a letter which gave us great pleasure; it is entirely in the hand of M. Charles Blanc. I send you a copy of it, for fear that the original letter might be lost on the way. You will see that it is not because it is yours that we find your copy very good; M. Gleyre, who is so difficult, says that it is the best of all. — As for your picture of the Prodigal Son, it is well drawn, well modeled, but the movements and the expressions lack a little life; there are too many little details, then one sees too much that he makes use of the mannequin, which gives something cold and immobile. For the rest, he is more discouraged than ever; he tells you frankly that, were it not already nearly finished, he would not finish it. He says that one is very happy to have your age, because one admires the great masters and one has the hope of approaching them, whereas he, he knows just enough to see that he does not approach them, and he is too old to make progress. We were very content to see all the interest he takes in you.
MINISTRY OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, OF RELIGIONS AND OF FINE ARTS
Monsieur Charles Blanc to Madame Milliet
24 April 1873.
Madame, The copy after Melozzo executed by M. Milliet, your son, is very well made and conscientiously. Everyone is very satisfied with it, and I address to you, Madame, all my compliments. If you have nothing else to ask me, I shall dispense with sending you a letter of audience, to spare your time and mine.
Please accept, Madame, the expression of my most distinguished sentiments.
Charles Blanc.
IV — The Sixteenth of May
A marriage project. — Fall of Thiers. — An examination for the teaching of drawing.
1
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 3 March 73.
I have to tell you of an adventure which intrigues us greatly. Last Wednesday, I received the visit of Aunt Lise (sister of Madame Payen, the mother); she came on behalf of M. Bouillette to ask me for Alix in marriage for a writer whom she would not name. He is, she says only, a very well-known journalist, who has been a deputy. This gentleman knows that Alix has no dowry; he earns enough, he says, to do without it; he seeks only a pearl and he believes he has found her. Alix wanted to answer no, before knowing of whom it was a question; I thought that she might have regrets later. In the matter of well-known journalists, having been deputies, we hardly see any but Lockroy. There is indeed Glais-Bizoin, but he is 66 years old; your uncle claims jokingly that it must be Gambetta, and he calls Alix Madame the President; we are all intrigued.
I assure you that I have no desire to see Alix remarry; I believe her happy in our midst; all work is not, it is true, very assured, it is little paid, but she will never lack for anything with us; her absence would make for us an immense void, and we all desire to keep her. One is more difficult at her age than at 18, and it is probable that she will say no.
Nicole is soon going to be a father. This moment frightens him, and he beseeches his wife in good faith to delay it as much as she can.
Louise M. to her brother
Paris, 6 March 73.
Here we are back from that dear Colonie; we saw it again with pleasure, one is not bored there at all. We made tables turn with Madame Charlot, but as we are not mediums, only inferior spirits came. The Prussian who was killed and buried near La Colonie had to tell his story in a little wooden pedestal table, he never comes out of it, he answers only yes or no, not knowing how to speak French: he was a rascal, he is in the shadows. As he loves music greatly, M. Pouliquen played him a waltz, and at once he set himself to dance; he waltzed to perfection; all the while turning, he marks the three beats. Then we made an iron pedestal table turn; there came the wife of Clément, the carter, but as she knows neither how to read nor to write, she had trouble making herself understood. She told us that she had not died of a cancer, as was believed; she took the remedies that had been given to her for external use and swallowed them. Her husband was accused of having been the murderer; she told the story and said that her husband had been an accomplice in the crime, but that it was the miller’s wife herself who had killed her husband; he was in the stable, she dealt him a blow with a pitchfork to the head and said that it was a kick from a horse; then she married the gendarme who guarded her in prison.
The miller’s wife came again; she is a Russian lady, of whom Madame Jasikof had spoken to us; she gave us information about our first existences. I was asparagus, then fish, oriole, wood, an old shoe, and an eater. Madame Charlot was a medicinal plant, a cedar of Lebanon, then a woman; she is a new soul. All that amused us greatly.
We go to lectures by M. Chavée on man. He considers the whole man as a triangle, composed of electricity (yellow), of light (blue), and of caloric (red). Our nervous fluid can be concentrated in a table, it is that which has given birth to this mad belief in spiritism. The sensitive faculties are not in the brain, but in the medulla oblongata. Man is a coordination of spinal souls, subordinated to a cerebral soul, etc.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 6 March 73.
The story of the illustrious unknown who asks for Alix in marriage, without ever having seen her, seems to me quite romantic. I think he has not the pretension that she marry him without knowing his name. It seems to me that Lockroy would answer rather well to the description given. But is it not M. Bouillette who pushes for this marriage, and is it quite sure that the future husband thinks seriously of it? In general I do not much like journalists; I confess that there is one here who has told me so many ugly things about his colleagues that it has made me distrustful. Keep me informed of this mystery. I should like to see Alix come out of the precarious position in which she finds herself, and I claim at the very least a wedding journey to Italy.
I hear much spoken at this moment of the lectures of the Académie de France. A young scholar from the École Normale gives a course of Roman History which is said to be very interesting. A few Frenchmen, who regret like me the privation of all intelligent distraction, would have had great pleasure in attending it; we did not neglect to have ourselves invited, but in vain. It is, with these gentlemen the pensioners, a certain narrowness of mind that one encounters only too often among the privileged. Truly superior minds would avoid thus making others feel their superiority. Art and science are things that one can share liberally without losing anything of them.
I often regret the books that I left in Paris. If I had them here, I would have tried to organize, not lectures, but little talks. There are here a few young people whom that would interest, but it is always difficult to find an hour that disturbs no one.
Alix to her brother Paul
Paris, 21 March 73.
Here once again the journey to Italy is delayed, and this time (you are going to be vexed with me about it), it is I who am the cause of it. You already know that M. Bouillette was proposing a marriage for me to mama. As I had divined at once, it is indeed Édouard Lockroy who is in question. You know that I have no desire to remarry, and it is solely because it is Lockroy, whose ideas are so conformable to ours, that I decide to give a sequel to this project. All that we know of him so far is in his favor. You see already that he holds in no way to fortune, and yet his position is fine enough to allow him to make a rich marriage. He wants, he has told M. Bouillette, a wife who is reasonable enough to accept his position with all the disagreeable consequences that may flow from it, that is to say, prison, duels, exile perhaps; he wants a soul who understands and shares his opinions. He heard me spoken of at M. Bouillette’s and desired to know me. Before our seeing each other, I wished him to be informed of what had happened to Henri, and now, within a few days, there will probably be a solemn interview. You think how worried I should be. Is there anything more difficult than such a position? I laugh at it, for I imagine that it is not I who am in question. He is 35 years old, but appears 30. According to M. Bouillette, he is an only son: his father, formerly director of the Théâtre-Français, has a rather fine fortune; the son is received as the child of the house at Victor Hugo’s; you see that I should be there in full radicalness.
I should be, good for nothing as I am, in great difficulty, for I have no worldly experience. The wife of a municipal councillor must be able to do the honors; now, as fashion has it that I would be a poor figure for this office… and then, he too has the right not to find me to his taste. Louise is greatly interested in this romance, and poor Bonti always has a worry for one of her children.
When I manage to persuade myself that it is serious, I am tempted to find that it is too much so. However, I feel myself stronger than I have ever been, and if I accepted, it would be because I should believe myself sure of being the wife that this brave fellow so disinterested is seeking.
Mama is in good health; Doctor Barbier claims that agitations are good for her. In that case, we can pride ourselves, we three eldest, on helping her strongly to be in good health. Louise so far has not given her any torment; she works a great deal. As for me, I continue to daub photographs for Goupil.
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 26 March 73.
So decidedly you abandon me. It is a very hard disappointment for me. I should have been so happy to see you again after so long a separation; I was already counting the days, I was looking for apartments to rent… And then all of a sudden I must renounce all that. Believe well, moreover, that I am not egoist enough to see only this side of the question. This request for marriage at first astonished me, but one must not reject it in advance, if it is serious. Lockroy is not very sympathetic to me, not only for his wit and his talent, but above all for his political conduct. He is one of those who have the right to say that they did everything to prevent the civil war. I understand too the attraction that an active and intelligent life would have for you. One single thing frightens me: famous men are sometimes hardly amiable in their own homes and do not always answer to the idea one forms of them from their works. I have recently seen Hamon, for example, whose talent is so delicate, so poetic; he was in a coarse dressing gown, stupefied by drunkenness. Try then to know each other well, the two of you, before taking a decision. If my memories do not deceive me, it seems to me I have heard it said that Lockroy formerly occupied himself with painting and that he was a pupil of Gleyre. Has my father finished his copy of a picture very high up? What would he say if he were working in the Sistine Chapel? It is high as the towers of Notre-Dame and, at the least cloud that passes, one sees nothing more.
Speak to me of my friends and keep me informed of the political, literary, or artistic news, that interests us so much here! We are like marmots here in winter, we live on the old ideas that we have amassed in Paris and we drivel them over again.
Farewell, dear sister, good courage, I wish that you may meet someone worthy of you.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 30 March 73.
Nothing new for Alix. M. Bouillette has not come. The interview, owing to various circumstances, has been put off to next Saturday. I desire that they know each other well before engaging themselves. Lockroy has just been condemned for an article in the Rappel to a month of prison and 500 francs of fine. I believe that the marriage project is going to fall into the water, and I am very glad of it. What is certain is that, if it fails, 5 hours later we shall be on the way to Italy; if it comes off, we shall go to find you again as soon as it is finished.
M. Gleyre comes often to the Louvre to supervise his son and M. Bourdon, who claims to use only three colors (like the ancient Greek painters). He has already made him patient by using a fourth, then a yellow for which he professed a boundless horror. I told him the inconvenience that Louise finds in this method, one constantly loses one’s drawing: “That is precisely what exasperated me, when I tried it,” he answered me. “It has its good points, but one must constantly redraw.”
Alix is delighted, she has sold a watercolor after the Nymphs of Boucher; she asked thirty francs for it, it is for nothing.
Farewell, my darling, we all embrace you and we love you well, go on.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 8 April 73.
We are still at the same point with Lockroy; he is ill and rather seriously. I am assured that it is excess of work and that his health is not deeply impaired; this question is to be examined. I had the same scruples as you, and I explained myself rather sharply with M. Bouillette; he assured me that it is upon the reiterated insistence of Lockroy that he had decided to speak to me of it, that Lockroy greatly desires to marry. I believe that Alix has been represented to him as a heroine (1) and that he forms an exaggerated idea of her. Paris is going to have to elect a deputy; the mandate has been offered to him, but he has declared himself in favor of Barodet, the mayor of Lyon. They have just taken away from Lyon the right to elect its mayor; that has raised a great indignation. I hear good said of Lockroy on all sides and he is esteemed by his friends and his enemies; he was one of the Thousand who, in the Italian campaign, seized Naples with Garibaldi. It appears that he has a very fine and good character. What will you see of him, my poor darling, to help us to know him? We are certainly keeping ourselves on a great reserve.
2
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, April 73.
I have just visited the studio of Hamon, who is exhibiting a bizarre picture entitled: Sad Shore, Love consoles Ophelia. In a grotto near Capri, one sees rocks which resemble fantastic figures and make one think of Michelangelo. Hamon has been inspired by them, but he does not aim so high. He shows us a Styx for the use of fashionable people, not terrible at all; it is in sum a masquerade, and Ophelia is in the manner of Ingres, her brow girt with a crown of gold and holding her obol in her hand. Beside her a Breton nurse; a little girl who holds an orange; then, in the foreground, a little Love badly drawn who consoles a big doll; that is Ophelia! A few accessories are executed in a charming fashion, but the heads do not exist, so soft and effaced are they. The agreeable and fine color is broadly spread. What a pity to waste so great a talent thus on such a subject. In this picture there is truly neither simplicity, nor seriousness, nor sincere and strong impression.
(1) See the Annexe.
Paul to his parents
Rome, April 73.
At the Villa Medici they are preparing the next submissions. Blanchard will show you Hylas drawn by the nymphs; he has placed the scene at the edge of the Nemi. It is a good picture and probably a medal at the next Salon.
Lematte is painting a Nessus carrying off Dejanira. The composition is full of dash, but the execution is a little cold and certain pretty scarves seem to me of an elegance quite worldly for a subject which ought to carry us back to the epochs of primitive savagery.
Toudouze will have a woman lying in a shell, with a Love who drives a team of butterflies. Much good is spoken of this decorative panel which I have not yet seen.
Merson will send a very fine copy of a fragment of the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, and a ravishing little sketch, Saint Francis of Assisi with the wolf. The composition is of a very penetrating mystic poetry; a delicious impression of calm emanates from this gentle landscape of Umbria.
The bust of M. Hébert by Tony Noël is very lifelike and very colored.
But the capital work which effaces all the rest and will certainly have the medal of honor, is the Gloria victis of Mercié. A true marvel, one of the finest things I have seen, a complete work! The arrangement and the execution are worthy of the idea and of the patriotic breath which animates it. That poor Mercié has the fever; they have hurried him for the exhibition; he has set up lamps and works until midnight; the next day, his model poses at six o’clock in the morning; he hopes to be able to begin the molding next Thursday. It is a great pleasure to see a masterpiece come into being.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 21 April 73.
I have seen M. Bouillette again; he speaks of this marriage as of a settled affair. I do not know whether Lockroy imagines that he is going to be married without having been seen; he is mistaken. The interview frightens him; he claims that he will be stupid, that he is ugly, that, who knows what? affectations! His month of prison expires on 15 May; he is put up as candidate for the deputyship at Marseille and, if Marseille does not appoint him, he will be elected at Lyon. All that turns Alix’s head a little. We have been obliged to tell Euphémie Barbier that it was a thing fallen through; she was going to speak of it to everyone. I do not see the end of all this. However, dear child, if you felt yourself near to weariness or homesickness, quick, give the sequel at Geneva. Louise and I shall go to find you; I have need that you promise me that to reassure me and make me take patience.
Madame Alix Payen to her brother
Paris, 23 April 73.
I am quite distressed to be the cause of the delay brought to our journey. You know how desirous we are to see each other again, to see you, to embrace you after so long a separation. But I know you to be so much the contrary of an egoist that you will appreciate the reasons which detain us. I do not know whether the marriage project will be realized, but I would not wish to make it fail by my fault before knowing M. L. — I do not believe I am making illusions for myself, and I do not expect to find in this union a perfect happiness of which I do not feel the need; my desire is to be useful, occupied, to have the occasion to devote myself to someone whose ideas and character inspire me with esteem. M. L. has a very bad state of health, he is extremely busy; the active part he takes in political affairs allows one to foresee almost with certainty many torments, many anxieties; all that does not frighten me too much. I believe myself now serious enough to know how to fulfill the duties of this position. — A big question on which I should like to have your opinion: It appears that M. L. is a Jew; that is all the same to me as to Louise, to my father, and to mama, but my uncle and Fernand have a prejudice against that lineage. It seems to me, however, fine and intelligent. It has, it is true, the reputation of knowing how to earn money, but when it is honestly, I do not see where the harm would be. — I am persuaded, moreover, that L. does not practice and that he is a freethinker. He is put up for the deputyship at Marseille. Here the Barodet candidacy is keenly attacked and defended. The city of Lyon has decided to appoint a Parisian. This understanding and this fraternity among the three great cities is going to give much uneasiness to our Versaillais. Whatever the result of the Paris votes, it cannot be bad, since M. de Rémusat himself styles himself a republican candidate, but all my wishes are for Barodet.
Yesterday evening we were at Madame Bin’s; her husband was at Reims, as well as Blanc, where they are finishing the paintings of the theater which is said to be very fine. They will go afterward to Austria, to decorate an Egyptian museum, ceiling and numerous panels; then to Orvieto. I believe that M. Bin would be very glad to have them share his great works. Madame Bin was very amiable. Some time ago, she told us, a police commissioner, disguised as a proper gentleman, (1) came to tell her that two of her husband’s pupils were going to be arrested; she answered that they were traveling, which was not true, and they made their profit of the warning. M. Bin will employ these young people abroad. — You know the great studio of M. Bin; well, yesterday evening his wife had lent it for a Barodetist electoral meeting! There were MM. Clemenceau, Tony Révillon, Gambetta, etc., etc. I should have liked to attend that session.
(1) See the Annexe.
My uncle was very content with the success of your copy; you know how little demonstrative he is, but his joy was very great; he really loves us all well.
Paul to his mother
Rome, 26 April 73.
So here is Lockroy in prison and the marriage question necessarily suspended. In this connection, I am anxious to tell you that I have not the least prejudice against the Jews. One must never make a man responsible for defects which may be frequent among the people of his lineage. Nothing more absurd than to say: The French are frivolous, the English are egoistic, the Italians are treacherous and vindictive. Were Poussin, Corneille, Descartes, or Pascal frivolous? Is Garibaldi a traitor; have there not been among the English admirable examples of devotion? One must always reckon with the exceptions and they are fortunately numerous.
Louise M. to her brother
Paris, 26 April 73.
Paris is flooded with posters of candidates for the deputyship. Barodet and Rémusat are those who have the most votes; people get very passionate, and I am sure that there will be very few abstentions. In appointing Barodet, the former central mayor of Lyon, Paris protests against the unworthy measure which took away from Lyon its municipal franchises, and it affirms its fraternity for that great republican city. The citizen Barodet represents four principal things: dissolution of the Assembly; general amnesty; raising of the state of siege; integrity of universal suffrage. Everyone knows what he wants, there is no equivocation in his words. In his quality of former schoolteacher, one may be sure that he will demand free, obligatory, and secular instruction. He is reproached with being unknown, but how many known men have not shown themselves equal to their functions. For two years, the republicans have made enough concessions to the Government; the more one makes, the more the right will show itself demanding, it would bring us back to the times of feudalism; it is strong by number, oppose to it the strength of intelligence and of progress! Thiers does not fear the right; with his cunning and his skill, he does what he wants with it, he leads it like a flock, and it is amused to believe in its nullity, only to feel that, abandoned to itself, it would be capable of nothing. As for the left, it proves that Thiers is still necessary, that progress must be made little by little to be durable, and although the system of the see-saw is deplorable, let us still take patience! He wishes it thus. Rémusat is the candidate of the employers and of the reactionaries, he spends 50,000 francs for his election. In the popular quarters, they post: M. Rémusat, republican candidate, but in the aristocratic quarters, it is M. de Rémusat plain and simple. In short, he is the creature of M. Thiers; why add a nullity to all the nullities which already form the majority of the Chamber?
Papa has come back from La Colonie to give his vote to Barodet, and you are not crossed off the electoral list. This proves that little account is taken of the judgments of councils of war. M. de Rémusat has even sent you, as well as papa, a voting ballot and a letter which urges you to vote for him. — In literature, M. Albert has given us an exercise on La Salle; I did not do it; I had a wish to give him in place of it a parallel between Barodet and Rémusat; only it would have to be done wittily and I am not capable enough of it.
… Victory! Barodet is elected by a great majority! Here is what the newspapers have just announced: Barodet 180,156 votes; Rémusat 135,407. Lockroy is appointed at Marseille!
3
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 4 May 73.
It must be granted that you are very silly to wait until the last moment to ask me for money, and I beg you to note that I sent you some by instinct, thinking that you must no longer have any; you would have found yourself entirely without a sou, had I waited for your letter. — As for your desire to come back to make a tour to Paris, you must indeed think that I should be as desirous of it as you, but I do not believe it prudent. About every three months, a police commissioner has come to inquire of your health from the concierge; he has never gone up to my place and has even forbidden that I be informed of his visit, but you know the concierge and her amiable tone: “Quite sure that I shall tell his mother,” she answered him, “quite sure that I shall tell her, why then should I not tell her? it is abominable!” She is, I believe, completely ignorant of the judgment handed down against you. You have too many enemies in this Assembly, there would be no security. So you see with what unanimity the Parisians appointed Barodet, not at all for the man, for one does not know him, but for the principles he represents. Tell me whether you received the newspapers of diverse opinions that I sent you, so that you may see a little the state of Paris. Now we have fallen back into a flat calm, until the meeting of the Chamber. Lockroy is appointed at Marseille; as for the marriage, I could not say why, I am convinced that it will not take place. Alix will easily resign herself to it, since she does not know him. Lockroy is to come out of prison on 16 May and the Chamber meets on the 19th.
I saw yesterday Nicole, who sends you his friendly remembrances. The poor fellow leads a painful life, his wife is ill and suffers cruelly; he gives lessons all day long — one must live — and finds in the evening a wife unable to do anything, and a child who cries all night. His health resists rather well these trials; he no longer has the time to make imaginary griefs for himself, reality suffices.
It is Ranc who is put up as candidate at Lyon; you see that democracy is marching well. Thiers, vexed at first by the election of Barodet, was not long in resigning himself to it, but it is the deputies of the right who do not wish to go away; I do not know how they will set about making them decamp!
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 4 May 73.
… I have received all that you sent me, letters, newspapers, drawings, not counting a superb political tirade from the citizeness Zon (Louison) (1) drawn up in the style of a toast or of a last-hour proclamation; your manner of appreciating Rémusat is as cavalier as can be: “Why add a nullity to all the nullities which already form the majority of the Chamber?” She is priceless with that little important air of hers. A party chief would not speak otherwise, and M. Thiers had best watch out. Fortunately for him, she ends by saying: “Let us still take patience!” You see, if she came to lose her patience, what a cataclysm! In short, if the style is a little high-flown, the ideas seem to me just, and that is the essential thing.
(1) She signed in Greek letters Ζον.
Here the appointment of Barodet has produced a veritable consternation, even among good folk who imagine themselves republicans. For them, Barodet and Petroleum are all one. I was naturally very happy at the result of the elections. The figures are there, irrefutable proof of the progress of the republican idea in the country.
At the Académie de France, it is the moment of departures. Noël and Blanchard have already left Rome; Mercié, Machard, and a few others will not be long in following them.
Paul M. to his mother
Rome, 11 May 73.
The newspapers that you sent me give us great pleasure; all the young people I know pass them around and read them avidly. The Salon articles principally excite a keen interest. At the Académie de France they already have the catalogue and snatch it from one another. I beseech Louise to make me from memory a few sketches of the pictures that please her most and in particular of the great composition of Puvis de Chavannes. — The more I see the fine Italian frescoes, the more I feel myself drawn toward decorative painting.
I have led for a few days a disordered life; I do not go to bed until one o’clock in the morning, which hardly suits me. It is that I wished to hear twice the famous Rossi, in the roles of Hamlet and of Othello. He played Hamlet in an admirable manner; it was the first time I saw this masterpiece at the theater. Rossi seemed to me to understand the role of Othello less well. He had some movements of a superb dramatic power. He sought too much to take on the airs of a tiger and made of Othello an ugly coarse Negro.
Last Sunday, at the Académie de France, I heard M. Massenet, who played us on the piano and sang us some of his music. He is a quite young man, very simple in manners, without pretension and very sympathetic. Although he has little voice, he was much more interesting to hear than a virtuoso. As he felt his music, he made us understand it, and it pleases me greatly. Certain pieces seemed to me of a great beauty. I noticed, for example, in an oratorio, a chorus of common people who insult Jesus carrying his cross; it is of a striking character.
Madame Alix Payen to her brother
Paris, 15 May 73.
Do not fail to send us the sequel of the portraits of your companions of exile, that interests us greatly. After a year of separation you will find Louison exactly such as you left her, always absent-minded, forgetting her handkerchief, and sometimes saying the contrary of what she wishes to say. Each time that she has some absent-mindedness, I threaten to write of it to you, so that you may mock her.
The elections of Sunday have been as radical as the preceding ones; people await with impatience the reassembling of the Assembly. The rumor runs that, faithful to his system of the see-saw, M. Thiers is going to lean toward the right. The country shows clearly that it is republican, so the Government sees nothing better to do than to unite itself with the monarchists! It is stupid. The election of M. Ranc, who was a member of the Commune, is, you may well think, the last degree of abomination. The fact is significant enough. So one will have seen thousands of individuals deported, shot, and today the idea they defended is stronger, more widespread than ever; it arrives legally at meddling in public affairs. I rejoice to see the sessions of Versailles; if something interesting happens there, we shall send you that. How I should love to attend one of those sessions! If ever I know Lockroy, I shall ask it of him. Two illustrated newspapers have published his caricature; in the one, he is propped against the bars of his prison and a swallow brings him the mandate of the Cannebière. In the other, it is the Prodigal Son returning to the Chamber. Each time that I see the sun shine, I tell myself that it must be very tiresome to be in prison; but the moment of his deliverance is near now, and of ours too. Do not grow too impatient, a few days more, and we shall know whether we can go to join you; I am eager that it be yes. — There are still six vacant seats in the Assembly; it is frightful how politics invades us, when one learns with pleasure of the death of a right-winger; it is a relief to see them leave in detail, since one cannot send them away in a block.
Farewell, darling, I embrace you very hard. Your contribution for the condemned has been made. Till soon I hope. Your affectionate sister,
ALIX
At the end of the month, it will be two years since the sad events took place.
4
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 18 May 73.
You asked me for a few silhouettes of the habitués of the Hippopotamus, I continue then:
Rousset has been here for six years and has no wish to go away. He is a disciple of Courbet, a virtuoso of the palette knife. Personages, terrains, rocks, and the clouds themselves, everything is masoned solidly in blocks of colored matter laid on with the trowel. An excellent comrade, Rousset is a colorist and a very skilled landscape painter; little lettered, he experiences some difficulty in the arrangement of a composition, but triumphs in the execution of a “piece” of painting. He has undertaken a picture representing Washerwomen at the edge of the Nile.
Urbain Basset (1) is a charming fellow, timid, modest, a philosopher and an enthusiast. By dint of work and energy, he found the means to make enough economies to pay himself a fine journey. In Paris, as he is an excellent musician, after having carved marble all day, he would still go to play his violin part in the orchestra of a theater. Little concerned with what people will say, he travels most often on foot, knapsack on his back; his baggage is surmounted by a mandolin; he holds his light bundle in one hand and in the other the violin case.
(1) Today Director of the School of Decorative Arts at Grenoble.
De Pury of Neuchâtel, our former studio-master, is a tall and very handsome fellow, who would make a superb model (he has posed at the Gleyre studio), a very strong gymnast, an excellent horseman, rich, elegant; he is a sort of Don Juan over whom all the women rave, because he beats them (I speak of the models). He is very witty, although his wit consists sometimes in saying coarse filth with the most complete placidity; very gay at bottom, phlegmatic in the English manner, a disillusioned skeptic, jaded and a braggart of vices. He often relates with a great seriousness frightful horrors that he is supposed to have committed, and he never fails to add: “It is Milliet who taught me that.” M. Sain and other persons who did not know me swallowed at first this bad joke, and I pass for being profoundly corrupt. Pury has always been, moreover, an excellent comrade for me.
Today begins the exhibition of the submissions from Rome. I have not yet seen again Mercié’s group finished and molded in plaster, I know only that it can have done nothing but gain. Mercié had tried to put into the hand of his dying young man a bayonet; the effect was not happy, he decided on the hilt of a cuirassier’s saber. I should have liked to see at his feet a chassepot, the national arm during the last war, it would have been a date, but the harmony of the lines of a sculptural composition has requirements which come before everything.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 21 May 73.
Lockroy did not come out of prison until the 18th, I do not know why, and the meeting of the Chamber took place on the 19th. If the right and the left have not yet devoured each other, that will not be long in coming. The left had an outburst yesterday; Buffet has been reappointed President.
I send you a number of L’Illustration where Blanc’s picture is rather maltreated, but I believe that artists still like criticisms better than silence. — I went to the Exhibition with M. Barbier and Euphémie; they are hardly artists; they like only literary painting. The Museum of Copies pleased the doctor greatly; he found a chromatic effect to be had in seeing it on coming out of the Salon; the memory of all the nude women and all the heels-over-head poses which are of every color makes one find much pleasure in looking at the women of Raphael. The doctor asked me very seriously: why do the students who do the nude not study nature and the masters? Your copy pleased him greatly; he has seen the Museums of Madrid, of Lisbon, and of London; he appreciates the pictures of the old masters much better than modern painting, in which he seeks only what is pretty or amusing.
Paul to his mother
Rome, 25 May 73.
What a series of sad news! Fernand’s accident, (1) the illness of my father which is getting worse, it is dreadful to think of; your letter has dismayed me.
(1) A fracture of the fibula following a fall from a horse.
After the private misfortunes, the public misfortunes. The telegraph has just informed us of the crisis the Government is undergoing. Is it the prelude of a new civil war? I have trouble in understanding so culpable a folly on the part of the Assembly. What is it going to do? Where does it want to come out? Is Paris going to accept tranquilly these new masters? Will the army support these raving madmen? Are the Prussians not going to profit from the occasion? In spite of the newspapers, I understand the situation only by halves. What suffering to be far from Paris in such moments! I am ready to come back, not for long, I assure you, if things grow worse. — Yet another thing that saddens me, it is to read in the newspapers that it is my uncle’s cuirassiers who will have to maintain tranquillity on the boulevards.
Naturally here is the marriage put off and probably failed. — You understand that I leave it to you to decide whether your heart leads you to speak to me of painting or of journeys. Send me, I beg you, money at once; I may have need of it from one moment to the next, and in any case, I should not wish to find myself short as last time. — I embrace you, my poor dear mother. All yours.
Louise M. to her brother
Paris, 26 May 73.
M. Charles Clément has made in the Journal des Débats an article on the Museum of Copies, and says a few benevolent words of yours.
I continue my account of the Salon and send you a few sketches. A piece of stupidity to begin with: it is a picture representing a table with an inkwell, a pen, paper, and a bunch of pansies; it is entitled: “What is needed in order to write.” What an idea, to make a picture of a riddle! — I pass to the portraits. Carolus Duran has painted his son, a baby all dressed in blue velvet and blue satin on a blue ground and a blue carpet; the child holds a red camellia. It is a tour de force very skillfully executed and agreeable to see. — Mademoiselle Jacquemart has a portrait of Dufaure; it is well painted, but the model cannot have inspired her; he has a stupid air, little eyes covered by big bushy eyebrows, a big pendulous lip, and a big belly. — This time, I am going to make compliments to Monchablon, his portrait of M. Buffet is very well painted; a dry fellow, with a cunning and bad physiognomy; his white hair stands up in a tuft on his head; he has the air of an angry rooster. With one hand, he holds the Journal des Débats, with the other a pinch of snuff. Monchablon has also the portrait of Mme Dumas, a fine pastel. — Darier has two portraits of young ladies very well drawn and painted; to tell the truth it is the grayest thing there can be, gray dresses, gray ground, hardly amiable expression, very Genevan physiognomies. We met Darier at the Salon and he came to our house. One sees that he loves you well, but it is always the same nonchalant character.
By Barrias, a Helen taking refuge under the protection of Vesta. It is only an academy passably contorted; she would hardly be worth burning Troy for her fine eyes.
The Delilah of Humbert is remarkable and rather striking. One feels that he wishes to train this great talent, but it lacks ideal; his Delilah is a beautiful undressed Parisian, she is stiff; her face is expressive, her pinched lips give her a wicked air. The Samson is also too modern; he is not strong enough, they are bony and puny people. The poses are rather original, but of lines hardly harmonious. He did it on purpose probably, but the subject deserved better than that realism.
Scherzo by Bonnat. An Italian woman who holds her daughter overturned on her knees; it is ravishing in expression. The background would be appreciated in seeing the sketch I send you, but there were so many people looking at this picture that I had trouble tracing in secret a few strokes of the pencil.
Madame Milliet to her son
Paris, 28 May 73.
What unforeseen events! (1) I have sent you a mass of newspapers which must have reassured you. Paris is as tranquil as if nothing extraordinary had happened. It was truly curious that the Parisians should take up arms to support their former enemy! — The Republic is not put back into question, for the moment. The republicans say that France is with them and that they will triumph legally. That is very well, but one has just seen universal suffrage falsified and mutilated. Who knows what will come out of the new elections?
(1) The triumph of the right, Thiers overthrown.
For my part, I find what is happening very unfortunate. Fortunately the three monarchist parties, which came to an understanding to overthrow Thiers, will not be in agreement for long. Already they are making Mac-Mahon feel that he has taken a mannequin, and they have not allowed him to take a minister suspected of being centre-left. You can have no idea to what point the right detests Thiers. La Patrie calls him “a baneful man, a petroleur; it is impossible to bear him in France, he must be expelled.” Let them arrange it among themselves!
The money is ready to pay the Prussians; on that side all will go well; if we could once for all be rid of them, it would be a great relief and we should have a freer hand. The troops are confined to barracks, there are only a few patrols by precaution.
As I foresaw, the marriage projects are suspended indefinitely. The newly appointed radical deputies have been very ill received at the Chamber; Lockroy exchanged some very sharp words with a few members of the right; he has therefore a duel in prospect; it is not the moment to think of marrying. Ranc has been personally attacked by M. de Broglie; one does not know how that is going to turn out. It is a pity that, were it ever the moment to come back to France, you would not go far.
I saw Blanc, who sends you a thousand friendly remembrances; he charged me to tell you that he has nostalgia for Rome and that he is to go there in a month. He sends you all his compliments for your copy.
5
Paul M. to his sister Louise
Rome, 1 June 73.
Your idea of going to Geneva to prepare yourselves for the next competition hardly seems to me reasonable. (1) Why choose a city, charming it is true by its situation, by the friends we have there and by the memories it recalls to us, but which offers no great resources for the special studies you have need of? I could give you only theoretical advice which does not advance things much, and you seem to believe that it will suffice for you to look at me to find yourselves prepared for the competition. The essential thing would be to see many fine works of art, for imagination is hardly anything but transformed memory. Frankly the Rath Museum is not worth the Cluny Museum or the Sauvageot collection; then, at Geneva, how many visits to make, how many days agreeably employed, but quite lost for a useful tour in Italy. Florence is a small city, but quite full of the masterpieces of the Renaissance, of an elegant, firm, and nervous style, of a pure and charming taste.
(1) Alix and Louise had decided a little tardily to present themselves at the examinations for drawing teacher.
I see that Paris accepts with calm that puppet Mac-Mahon, and this resignation astonishes me. The last governmental crisis seems to me a misfortune. It is going to harm a situation from which it will be difficult to come out without a shock. The right is going to profit from its passage to power to do the most harm it can to the republic; it is going to protect the Carlists in Spain, to threaten Italy with an intervention to reestablish the pope, and to awaken all the hatreds that France has already drawn upon itself so many times. What are they going to do with Bazaine? The Bonapartists will doubtless not let him be condemned. I fear that it will not be long before new revolutions, and yet I cannot believe that Henri V is possible.
Farewell, dear Louise, I have here photographs which would be very useful for you to study for your competition; you must come and fetch them, and as quickly as possible; otherwise I shall believe that you abandon me altogether.
Louise M. to her brother
La Colonie, 11 July 73.
You must have divined, in not receiving a dispatch, that there was no good news to announce to you. Alas yes, we are both refused. I cannot explain that to myself, it is judged in defiance of good sense. My academy figure was certainly the best (drawn), it had a fine carriage and several persons had made me compliments on it; it must be the fault of the professor who did not see it; yet never in my life have I drawn so many lines and plumb-lines. Alix’s was very well shaded. — There will not be a new competition until a year or two from now; we shall have time to study. We prepared ourselves only twenty days before the examination, we could hardly hope to be accepted. (1)
(1) Louise M. obtained the following year the diploma of drawing teacher.
We were very content with the subject of composition: a cover for a herbarium book; but the paper they gave us was detestable, dirty and stained; impossible to erase the charcoal which remained encrusted in it. Into this composition were to enter geometrical ornaments and ornaments drawn from the vegetable kingdom; the personages were not excluded. I believe that my project would have been very pretty if I had executed it better, it is my weak point. But I did, as so many times before, thirty-six stupid things: I drew the rough draft entire, instead of doing only a quarter of it; while tracing onto my stained paper, I got into a muddle, and I had to ask again for a second sheet and begin over. You understand that all this fumbling was long, and I made bad blood for myself! There was no longer enough time for me to finish. — My border was made of a Greek fret with Pompeian foliage scrolls, on each side a vase of flowers; in the center a medallion with a head of Flora and my two little Loves. — There is only one side done, the other is only indicated, and even what is done is hardly done. At the top a little crouching Love that I plagiarized from you; he is nude in the midst of vine leaves.
Alix had copied the day before a book cover from her Journal of Fashions; it is indeed a bazaar. Her geometry was composed of angles and half-rounds; in the four corners she put flowers and bindweed leaves, in the center a medal with a young girl plucking a daisy; it was very pretty.
The oral test gave us a terrible fright; we had only one ornament to correct. I would have much preferred an academy figure; I would have dazzled the examiners by speaking to them of the olecranon process and of the great sternocleidomastoid. — There were three groups of examiners and among them M. Jobbé Duval, who is the finest fellow in the world. He is a tall thin man with all-curly white hair. He told us that we must not let ourselves be troubled, that account would be taken of our timidity. Those who had him as examiner were very content. Our examiners, without being pikes, were already rather disagreeable. We were made to draw our numbers by lot from the hat of an examiner. Everyone rushed forward, as if the first numbers were to be the best. We should indeed have liked to have Jobbé Duval, but we had a sculptor, M. Piat, who has hardly a very distinguished air; he is small, dark, fat, and marked with smallpox.
I had a very great fear before I was called, but once on the hot seat, I spoke without letting myself be troubled. They asked me how I would have set about doing the drawing we had to correct. I said: “I would begin by comparing the width of the capital with the total height, which makes me perceive that, in this drawing, the width is too great. I would draw the height in a vertical line in the middle of the sheet to serve as the basis for the symmetrical construction of the ornament. The beauty of the model has not been understood; the lines lack purity; the half-tones too dark give the drawing a dirtied aspect; one should have kept the impression of dazzling whiteness that a plaster cast gives.” I said that in the model the lines were simple, but without stiffness, that their contour lacked shapeliness. Fortunately I did not speak of the beauty of the Greek style; it appears that it is a Renaissance capital, of which I know nothing. They asked me the names of all sorts of parts of architecture; I said the shaft instead of the pilaster. The examiner told me, however, that it was very good.
It is only Jobbé Duval who gave 10’s; in the two other groups they gave no more than 8. If I had been with Jobbé, I would have had 10. They gave 5 to the copies that had passed, but those did not count for the others. As I had number 15 and Alix number 28, I told her by signs (according to the Grosselin method) the principal names, so that she knew them.
My dear Paul, it only remains for me to make you a thousand thanks for all that you have done for us. We have remorse in seeing how much we made you work; you gave yourself as much trouble as we did; if at least we had known how to profit from it! It is a little vexing to have been sent away so near the finish, after so little time of running. Yet there are some less able than we who succeeded. I had for a neighbor a lady who did a horror of an academy figure. Her Melpomene had a big cold-in-the-head nose, atrocious feet and hands; her whole face was tinted and her half-tones were as dark as the shadows; everything was retouched, and she was accepted! If that is how one must do it, it is truly not encouraging!
We are going to spend a few days at La Colonie, to breathe a good air perfumed by the roses, while waiting for you to tell us where to go and join you. We are going to find you very thin and burnt by the sun like a true Italian.
Till soon, my dear Paul, your sister and friend.
Paul M. to his mother
Milan, 14 July 73.
I am quite surprised and quite anxious not to have found here a letter from you. You write me that Louise is ill, then you leave me without news. At Florence, I went several times a day to the post office. Did you not receive the letter that I sent you at La Colonie?…
8 o’clock in the evening.
I receive them at last, your good, long, and charming letters; how I had need of them! Louise relates with great verve her examination; I am certain that she will succeed next time. At last I begin to tell myself that you are perhaps going to come. So it is indeed true that I am going to see you again, after more than a year of separation!
The project of going to wait for you at the top of the Simplon is perhaps hardly reasonable, but the journey is bearable and here is the passage from Louise’s guidebook which tempted me: “Simplon (Hôtel de la Poste), a village surrounded by high mountains which deprive it for several months of the year of the rays of the sun during winter; and the cold there is often excessive.” And further on: “The val d’Isella surpasses that of Gondo in desolate aspect.” Is that not seductive? I fear, however, that the mountain gorges, despite their altitude, are at this moment veritable furnaces.
Annexe to Chapter IV
The ninth cahier — (XIII-3) — was already printed when I found the following letter. It shows well to what degree of patriotic exaltation had risen, from the time of the first siege, the indomitable souls of our Parisian women.
Alix Payen to her husband
Paris, 24 January 1871.
Dear Henri,
I write to you without courage, although my letters do not reach you. I have a great longing to see you, and I am sad as a nightcap. On Sunday rifle shots were fired at the Hôtel de Ville. The replacement of Trochu by Vinoy contents no one. It is not a change, since they always combined their operations together. One hears it said aloud that the generals, who had no cannons at Montretout, found enough of them to train around the Hôtel de Ville. Indeed, there was there an apparatus of mitrailleuses, which one would have preferred to see turned against the Prussians. I see that I must lower my confidence in the Government. The generals have but one desire: to capitulate. They will not see that the models and the ladies have not yet given any true soldiers. Vinoy’s proclamation makes only too evident his slight hope of saving us. Ah! if Gambetta were here! I believe he would shake up all those people and would give a little of his energy to the most flabby.
I am full of black ideas: if Paris capitulates, the national guards will be led off as prisoners of war. Dear Henri, I count on you: even if your whole battalion surrendered, do not surrender! Defend yourself to the end, even at the cost of being killed. For my part, I promise you, I shall kill the first of those assassins that I meet in Paris, quite sure of giving you a pleasure in acting thus.
Farewell, my beloved darling, till soon, I hope; try to obtain a one-day leave. I embrace you very tenderly.
Your poor forsaken one.
ALIX
In another letter, written to her father, Alix Payen relates, with new details, her visit to the mother of Chanoine. (1) The reader will excuse a few repetitions.
(1) Cf. Tenth Milliet — XIII-7 — page 86.
Chanoine had just obtained permission to go and see his parents, who live at Clichy. This bad scamp so brusque, so coarse, is no longer the same when he speaks of his mother; one sees that he has for her a veritable adoration. As he has taken a liking to me, he wants to make me know her, and takes me to Clichy. On the way he tells me that he has spent a little too much of his mother’s money, and that he is going to be scolded, but that the good woman will be very content to see him. A few projectiles fall on the road before us, then, once in the village, Chanoine meets friends at every step. One must necessarily drink a glass of wine, and here we are entering the tavern and clinking glasses. In the end I get angry so that he decides to take up his road again. I do not wish to come home late, Henri would be too anxious. So here we are at the mother Chanoine’s. She is a tall good woman in a kerchief, with a wine-flushed face. She receives her son by abusing him and refuses to embrace him; and he, a quarrelsome and heedless fellow, sets himself to weep like a child. At last everything is arranged and they end by embracing each other. Both of them weep with tenderness.
You would have laughed if you had heard Chanoine make of me a pompous eulogy: “There is a plucky little citizeness for you, and one who is not afraid. She tosses off a glass of wine like me.” — On the way back, as he had not the air disposed to make as many halts as in going, I told him that I would recognize my road well to come back alone. Night fell quickly and was soon very dark. A few bombs pass over my head, it is sinister in the midst of this obscurity, on a bare, arid plain, without a stretch of wall, without a tree to shelter oneself. I no longer recognize my road; I am alone, completely alone in this black plain; I hear no noise but that of the cannon which thunders at intervals; I may well confess it to you, dear father, well, the plucky little citizeness felt an emotion which might have some kinship with fear. I set myself to running until I lost my breath… At last here are the houses, here are national guards! But I was not at the end of my troubles. For all indication I could only give the number of our battalion. Where was it quartered? I knew nothing of it. A brave guard takes pity on my embarrassment; he has the kindness to follow me all along our four quarterings, without success. At last I perceive the artillery park which is a few steps from our house, here we are saved! I would have embraced my guide with all my heart. I run to the barrack room, where I find my poor big fellow quite anxious; then I go back down to sleep with the canteen-woman.
V — 1872 — Marriage
1
I must now go back a little to relate the marriage of my brother.
Louise to Paul
Paris, 10 July 72.
We have just spent an agreeable Sunday at La Colonie. Euphémie and M. Barbier had come with us, and La Colonie pleased them greatly.
Early in the morning Fernand arrives on his Arab horse; he had brought along his orderly, a fat jolly fellow who calls Fernand “my lieutenant” and who slept in the hayloft, without wishing to accept the sheet that was offered him.
We were numerous, 30 persons at table. In the evening, Brigitte, always obliging, set herself at the piano to accompany Euphémie, who sang without making herself entreated. She has a very extended and very sympathetic voice. Everyone found her charming. There was a ball; Fernand danced with Euphémie, they are very good comrades.
We had had a wish to dine on the grass, but a threatening storm prevented us…
P.-S. — Good! here is Fernand who is in love with Euphémie; he wants to marry her in the same style. How will it turn out? I know nothing of it.
Madame Milliet to her son Paul
Paris, 15 July 1872.
Dear child,
Louise’s letter must have prepared you for the event that I announce to you today: Fernand is marrying Euphémie Barbier. It has been as unforeseen as improvised, and at the hour at which I write to you, Madame Barbier and your father are still ignorant of this big news. They saw each other twice in Paris, then Fernand came on horseback to La Colonie; it is there that their reciprocal passion developed in less than 24 hours. Arrived in the morning at eight o’clock, Fernand set off again the next day at four o’clock in the morning. Back at Saint-Germain, he writes me a most pressing letter — he must have Euphémie. I seek to know the opinion of the doctor and, without making a request, I let him glimpse that Fernand is in love with his daughter, in order to know whether this nascent liaison must be broken off at once, or whether they may be left to love each other. The doctor had perceived the reciprocal liking the young people had for each other, and he was delighted with it. It appears that on Sunday they had already spoken of marriage between them; Fernand was on duty for the week, Euphémie found pretexts to remain in Paris; at last, on Friday she throws herself on my neck and asks me whether I would indeed have her for my daughter. We made them observe that it was not a reason, because they had a ball in Paris at the end of the month, that they should know each other well now, and that they ought to take the time for reflection. They answered us that they knew each other perfectly and that they found themselves very well as they were. The doctor did not cease to repeat: “And his mother! What is she going to say?” — Upon this, your uncle arrives and Fernand presents his new niece to him. Your uncle believes at first in a joke; I had to affirm to him that it was indeed for real. He appeared very satisfied with it.
The fact is that Euphémie is charming, simple, natural, and moreover completely smitten with Fernand, even more than he with her… Fernand writes this morning to Madame Barbier. How is she going to take this hussar-style marriage? — It is Euphémie who decided her parents to live in the country, which neither one nor the other likes, then, scarcely settled in, she plants them there.
You must understand that, while seeing this marriage with great pleasure, I am not without a certain apprehension. I do not know Euphémie well enough. She was betrothed to a peer of Portugal, an immensely rich man, then she would have no more of him. The doctor told me this story, Euphémie too. I have every confidence in the loyalty of the doctor, but is Euphémie not a little coquettish? — I do not think the marriage can take place before two months. You will not be there, you, my poor boy, and I shall tell you in passing that I am very content that you are not in Paris. You all claimed that I was frightening myself wrongly; well, persons of your temperament have fallen quite ill there and have been obliged to leave for long journeys. God knows whether they will return!
Fernand to his brother
21 July 1872.
My dear Paul,
I ask your pardon for not having written to you sooner to announce to you the news that you must already know. I am marrying, I marry Euphémie. I am quite mad with joy. My word, I may well tell you this, to you, you know that I have already had quite a few women, but never, I can swear it, have I felt for any of them what I feel for Euphémie; it is a sentiment quite other, and which, I am convinced, is indeed true love. It took us like a thunderbolt, for she loves me on her side, I am sure of it. So I shall try to make her very happy. I say an eternal farewell to the mad life I have led until now and I shall have no trouble in remaining quiet, for I love her well… You will not be able to be a witness of my happiness, my dear brother, I miss you, I assure you; I should indeed have wished to have you beside me at that moment. You see, I had a sort of presentiment in sending away recently that hussy of whom I spoke to you.
I see by your letter that you are growing passionate for your Melozzo; so much the better, you will do something good. Do not let yourself be hoodwinked by the friars, and do not hesitate to make use of your revolver if you are attacked.
Your brother who loves you and embraces you.
FERNAND
Paul to his mother
Rome, 28 July 72.
… I await your letters with impatience to have news of the marriage of Fernand and Euphémie. Their reciprocal passion gives me good hope for their happiness.
Madame Milliet to Paul
La Colonie, 9 August 72.
… You must understand, dear child, that we should be very happy, all three of us, to go and find you again, but the marriage of Fernand will probably not take place before the end of October. The request to the minister will have to pass through six offices, to go, and as many to come back; then the publication of the banns lasts three weeks. Then, young man, you think it costs nothing to marry. I shall not be able to take the expenses from our income, and it would be unreasonable to go afterward and make the journey to Italy.
Paul to his mother
Rome, 18 August 72.
What embarrassments for a marriage! There are necessary formalities, but one could without inconvenience suppress half of them. Fernand is doubtless going to be forced to marry at the church, that would repel me terribly, and I should have to be quite smitten to resign myself to it.
Why should Fernand not make his wedding journey in Switzerland? Alix and Louise could accompany him and push on as far as Rome; when you had three of your children here, my father and you, you would decide to come too. Once for all you imagine that I am going to spend my winter all alone, and first of all, if you do not come, I warn you that I shall fall ill. For the moment I am marvelously well.
Paul M. to his sister Alix
Rome, 11 Oct. 72.
The day of the marriage is not far off; I charge you to embrace for me the married couple and the wedding folk. I have brought back from Naples a few pretty popular songs in the Neapolitan dialect; I rejoice to hear them sung by my sister-in-law.
Louise M. to her brother Paul
Paris, 19 Oct. 72.
The marriage finds itself yet again put back; there is always some hitch. They have, however, the air of being in a great hurry, both of them. They had to have the permission of the minister before publishing the banns. Fernand is still in search of his contract. The notary claims that he made it; but it has not arrived. Is it negligence or malevolence? After many fruitless steps, he has decided to have it made over a third time, that will be the shortest.
Louise M. to her brother Paul
Milon, 25 October 72.
I write to you from Milon (residence of M. Barbier). The marriage is fixed for tomorrow the 26th; the permission has at last arrived, Fernand is very happy; everyone is occupied with him, they admire all that he does and says, they nurse him, they coddle him, they spoil him! He lets it be done and accustoms himself very well to it. He is, moreover, so good a fellow that he has always known how to make himself loved.
Euphémie too has a good character, she is gay and always of an even humor, instructed, but not very serious; worldly life is the cause of that. She does not occupy herself with painting, but in music she is altogether an artist; she has not only a fine voice, she feels what she sings, one is moved on hearing her.
The doctor renders great services in the country; he has many peasants to care for, but he does not like those patients who never do what he orders them. His library is magnificent; when you come, you will find there a thousand things that will interest you; it is absolutely necessary that this leave Fernand indifferent. M. Barbier showed us a big packet of autographs of celebrated personages; they are for the most part letters very laudatory of him. He has many from Victor Hugo; he possesses also the pen with which Les Châtiments was written, it is in a paper sealed with the seal of Victor Hugo, a griffin engraved on his ring. M. Barbier gets along very well with Fernand; he will have a happy influence on him, for he is a man of great merit.
Mama went yesterday to Le Mans with Madame Barbier for the preparations of the great day. During this time, M. Barbier and I took Euphémie and Fernand to confession. The priest is a fat bon vivant, all filthy and who smells bad; it is said that he is rather fond of drinking. One day when he was tipsy, he met a peasant who was so too and made him remonstrances. The other answered with insults; then the priest threw himself on this man and gave him such a thrashing that in falling he broke an arm. The poor priest contented himself with giving the betrothed couple a few little counsels of morality; the chore was not too painful.
Fernand and his horse make a fine effect on the people, the peasants like them; the “little one” never makes the horse of honor… and one says in seeing it: “It is a fine beast!” The dog and the horse of Fernand are well cared for here, they are given great bowls of milk to drink. Euphémie has made for the horse little cockades of pink satin. It is indeed a fine beast. I have drawn it.
I shall write to you immediately after the ceremony. Here is our family increased; we shall have one sister more. But we are sad in thinking that you will not be there. You are loved well and we speak very often of you here. I embrace you.
Fernand to Paul
Paris, October 72.
… We all greatly regretted your absence on the day of my marriage, I above all, for, you see, on those days one cannot have too many friendly faces around oneself. — I left the next day, taking my wife to Paris. You know that we are at the camp of Roquencourt. It will be for Euphémie a little apprenticeship in the life of a trooper; but she takes it very bravely. You cannot believe how her love for me has changed her, transformed her; her parents no longer recognize her. The doctor and Madame Barbier love me much; so it is a true family for me. I see happiness laid up in store for a long time.
Paul to Fernand
Rome, October 72.
… I remember having formerly made sketches for two pictures which would have had this title: Marriage as it is. Marriage as it should be. — In the first, a man and a woman turned their backs on each other with anger, they are sadly chained to the same post, like two condemned men. In the second, a young man and his young wife are seated, contemplating each other with ravishment. She passes her arms tenderly around the neck of her beloved.
I am persuaded that your union with Euphémie resembles my second sketch more than the first. You have for each other that esteem and that affection which are the indispensable conditions of happiness. I am of those who do not believe in the inferiority of woman and who find it hardly equitable to ask of her a submission without reserve. Long centuries of servitude have perhaps made her lose the habit of initiative, and I grant that her functions are not the same as those of man, but they have an equivalent importance. Woman ought therefore to be treated by her husband and by the law on the footing of a perfect equality. (1)
(1) Fourier wrote: “In present society, woman is the victim of man.” This inequality is an injustice. “The best nations were always those which accorded to women the most liberty. Social progress is accomplished in proportion to the progress of women toward liberty.” Fourier demands that women may enjoy all the rights actually held by man. An eminent role seems to him reserved for woman in the constitution of social morality. Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte support with their authority the doctrine of Fourier on the emancipation of woman. Is it not interesting to note the agreement of these three great minds on this point so controverted? The chief of positivism considers women as “the spontaneous organs of the sentiment which alone presides over human unity. They are charged, with the assistance of the priest, as wives, with the moral education of humanity.” Whence an imperious necessity: that of not leaving women under the direction of people who teach an outdated morality, and of making known to them the conclusions of modern science.
Fernand to Paul
October 72.
… I have laughed well with my wife at your idea of treating her on the footing of equality. She knows well that she would not have the same duties nor consequently the same rights as a man. She understands perfectly that the husband must be the head of the community, that woman is a feeble being who has need of help and protection, and who, in return, must love well the man who gives her this necessary help and protection.
While waiting for the pleasure I shall have in seeing you again and in clasping your hand, I shall not forget the order for nephews and nieces. Only I do not ask for as many as you; two or three will suffice for my happiness.
[Closing note: The cahier’s table of contents follows in the original, with the printer’s colophon: the proofs of this ninth cahier of the thirteenth series were passed for press, after corrections, for two thousand copies and fourteen copies on Whatman paper, on Tuesday 19 December 1911; manager: Charles Péguy; composed and printed by unionized workers, Julien Crémieu, printer, Suresnes.]