His Masterpiece Part 15

Sandoz and Claude had begun to walk round the plaster figure. Bongrand replied with a smile.

'Yes, yes; there's too much fulness and ma.s.siveness in parts. But just look at the articulations, they are delicate and really pretty. Come, good-bye, I must leave you. I'm going to sit down a while. My legs are bending under me.'

Claude had raised his head to listen. A tremendous uproar, an incessant crashing that had not struck him at first, careered through the air; it was like the din of a tempest beating against a cliff, the rumbling of an untiring a.s.sault, dashing forward from endless s.p.a.ce.

'Hallow, what's that?' he muttered.

'That,' said Bongrand, as he walked away, 'that's the crowd upstairs in the galleries.'

And the two young fellows, having crossed the garden, then went up to the Salon of the Rejected.

It had been installed in first-rate style. The officially received pictures were not lodged more sumptuously: lofty hangings of old tapestry at the doors; 'the line' set off with green baize; seats of crimson velvet; white linen screens under the large skylights of the roof. And all along the suite of galleries the first impression was the same--there were the same gilt frames, the same bright colours on the canvases. But there was a special kind of cheerfulness, a sparkle of youth which one did not altogether realise at first. The crowd, already compact, increased every minute, for the official Salon was being deserted. People came stung by curiosity, impelled by a desire to judge the judges, and, above all, full of the conviction that they were going to see some very diverting things. It was very hot; a fine dust arose from the flooring; and certainly, towards four o'clock people would stifle there.

'Hang it!' said Sandoz, trying to elbow his way, 'it will be no easy job to move about and find your picture.'

A burst of fraternal feverishness made him eager to get to it. That day he only lived for the work and glory of his old chum.

'Don't worry!' exclaimed Claude; 'we shall get to it all right. My picture won't fly off.'

And he affected to be in no hurry, in spite of the almost irresistible desire that he felt to run. He raised his head and looked around him; and soon, amidst the loud voices of the crowd that had bewildered him, he distinguished some restrained laughter, which was almost drowned by the tramp of feet and the hubbub of conversation. Before certain pictures the public stood joking. This made him feel uneasy, for despite all his revolutionary brutality he was as sensitive and as credulous as a woman, and always looked forward to martyrdom, though he was ever grieved and stupefied at being repulsed and railed at.

'They seem gay here,' he muttered.

'Well, there's good reason,' remarked Sandoz. 'Just look at those extravagant jades!'

At the same moment, while still lingering in the first gallery, f.a.gerolles ran up against them without seeing them. He started, being no doubt annoyed by the meeting. However, he recovered his composure immediately, and behaved very amiably.

'Hallo! I was just thinking of you. I have been here for the last hour.'

'Where have they put Claude's picture?' asked Sandoz. f.a.gerolles, who had just remained for twenty minutes in front of that picture studying it and studying the impression which it produced on the public, answered without wincing, 'I don't know; I haven't been able to find it. We'll look for it together if you like.'

And he joined them. Terrible wag as he was, he no longer affected low-bred manners to the same degree as formerly; he already began to dress well, and although with his mocking nature he was still disposed to snap at everybody as of old, he pursed his lips into the serious expression of a fellow who wants to make his way in the world. With an air of conviction he added: 'I must say that I now regret not having sent anything this year! I should be here with all the rest of you, and have my share of success. And there are really some astonishing things, my boys! those horses, for instance.'

He pointed to a huge canvas in front of them, before which the crowd was gathering and laughing. It was, so people said, the work of an erstwhile veterinary surgeon, and showed a number of life-size horses in a meadow, fantastic horses, blue, violet, and pink, whose astonishing anatomy transpierced their sides.

'I say, don't you humbug us,' exclaimed Claude, suspiciously.

But f.a.gerolles pretended to be enthusiastic. 'What do you mean? The picture's full of talent. The fellow who painted it understands horses devilish well. No doubt he paints like a brute. But what's the odds if he's original, and contributes a doc.u.ment?'

As he spoke f.a.gerolles' delicate girlish face remained perfectly grave, and it was impossible to tell whether he was joking. There was but the slightest yellow twinkle of spitefulness in the depths of his grey eyes.

And he finished with a sarcastic allusion, the drift of which was as yet patent to him alone. 'Ah, well! if you let yourself be influenced by the fools who laugh, you'll have enough to do by and by.'

The three friends had gone on again, only advancing, however, with infinite difficulty amid that sea of surging shoulders. On entering the second gallery they gave a glance round the walls, but the picture they sought was not there. In lieu thereof they perceived Irma Becot on the arm of Gagniere, both of them pressed against a hand-rail, he busy examining a small canvas, while she, delighted at being hustled about, raised her pink little mug and laughed at the crowd.

'Hallo!' said Sandoz, surprised, 'here she is with Gagniere now!'

'Oh, just a fancy of hers!' exclaimed f.a.gerolles quietly. 'She has a very swell place now. Yes, it was given her by that young idiot of a marquis, whom the papers are always talking about. She's a girl who'll make her way; I've always said so! But she seems to retain a weakness for painters, and every now and then drops into the Cafe Baudequin to look up old friends!'

Irma had now seen them, and was making gestures from afar. They could but go to her. When Gagniere, with his light hair and little beardless face, turned round, looking more grotesque than over, he did not show the least surprise at finding them there.

'It's wonderful,' he muttered.

'What's wonderful?' asked f.a.gerolles.

'This little masterpiece--and withal honest and naif, and full of conviction.'

He pointed to a tiny canvas before which he had stood absorbed, an absolutely childish picture, such as an urchin of four might have painted; a little cottage at the edge of a little road, with a little tree beside it, the whole out of drawing, and girt round with black lines. Not even a corkscrew imitation of smoke issuing from the roof was forgotten.

Claude made a nervous gesture, while f.a.gerolles repeated phlegmatically:

'Very delicate, very delicate. But your picture, Gagniere, where is it?'

'My picture, it is there.'

In fact, the picture he had sent happened to be very near the little masterpiece. It was a landscape of a pearly grey, a bit of the Seine banks, painted carefully, pretty in tone, though somewhat heavy, and perfectly ponderated without a sign of any revolutionary splash.

'To think that they were idiotic enough to refuse that!' said Claude, who had approached with an air of interest. But why, I ask you, why?'

'Because it's realistic,' said f.a.gerolles, in so sharp a voice that one could not tell whether he was gibing at the jury or at the picture.

Meanwhile, Irma, of whom no one took any notice, was looking fixedly at Claude with the unconscious smile which the savage loutishness of that big fellow always brought to her lips. To think that he had not even cared to see her again. She found him so much altered since the last time she had seen him, so funny, and not at all prepossessing, with his hair standing on end, and his face wan and sallow, as if he had had a severe fever. Pained that he did not seem to notice her, she wanted to attract his attention, and touched his arm with a familiar gesture.

'I say, isn't that one of your friends over there, looking for you?'

It was Dubuche, whom she knew from having seen him on one occasion at the Cafe Baudequin. He was, with difficulty, elbowing his way through the crowd, and staring vaguely at the sea of heads around him. But all at once, when Claude was trying to attract his notice by dint of gesticulations, the other turned his back to bow very low to a party of three--the father short and fat, with a sanguine face; the mother very thin, of the colour of wax, and devoured by anemia; and the daughter so physically backward at eighteen, that she retained all the lank scragginess of childhood.

'All right!' muttered the painter. 'There he's caught now. What ugly acquaintances the brute has! Where can he have fished up such horrors?'

Gagniere quietly replied that he knew the strangers by sight. M.

Margaillan was a great masonry contractor, already a millionaire five or six times over, and was making his fortune out of the great public works of Paris, running up whole boulevards on his own account. No doubt Dubuche had become acquainted with him through one of the architects he worked for.

However, Sandoz, compa.s.sionating the scragginess of the girl, whom he kept watching, judged her in one sentence.

'Ah! the poor little flayed kitten. One feels sorry for her.'

'Let them alone!' exclaimed Claude, ferociously. 'They have all the crimes of the middle cla.s.ses stamped on their faces; they reek of scrofula and idiocy. It serves them right. But hallo! our runaway friend is making off with them. What grovellers architects are! Good riddance.

He'll have to look for us when he wants us!'

Dubuche, who had not seen his friends, had just offered his arm to the mother, and was going off, explaining the pictures with gestures typical of exaggerated politeness.

'Well, let's proceed then,' said f.a.gerolles; and, addressing Gagniere, he asked, 'Do you know where they have put Claude's picture?'

'I? no, I was looking for it--I am going with you.'

He accompanied them, forgetting Irma Becot against the 'line.' It was she who had wanted to visit the Salon on his arm, and he was so little used to promenading a woman about, that he had constantly lost her on the way, and was each time stupefied to find her again beside him, no longer knowing how or why they were thus together. She ran after them, and took his arm once more in order to follow Claude, who was already pa.s.sing into another gallery with f.a.gerolles and Sandoz.

Then the five roamed about in Indian file, with their noses in the air, now separated by a sudden crush, now reunited by another, and ever carried along by the stream. An abomination of Chaine's, a 'Christ pardoning the Woman taken in Adultery,' made them pause; it was a group of dry figures that looked as if cut out of wood, very bony of build, and seemingly painted with mud. But close by they admired a very fine study of a woman, seen from behind, with her head turned sideways. The whole show was a mixture of the best and the worst, all styles were mingled together, the drivellers of the historical school elbowed the young lunatics of realism, the pure simpletons were lumped together with those who bragged about their originality. A dead Jezabel, that seemed to have rotted in the cellars of the School of Arts, was exhibited near a lady in white, the very curious conception of a future great artist*; then a huge shepherd looking at the sea, a weak production, faced a little painting of some Spaniards playing at rackets, a dash of light of splendid intensity. Nothing execrable was wanting, neither military scenes full of little leaden soldiers, nor wan antiquity, nor the middle ages, smeared, as it were, with bitumen. But from amidst the incoherent ensemble, and especially from the landscapes, all of which were painted in a sincere, correct key, and also from the portraits, most of which were very interesting in respect to workmanship, there came a good fresh scent of youth, bravery and pa.s.sion. If there were fewer bad pictures in the official Salon, the average there was a.s.suredly more commonplace and mediocre. Here one found the smell of battle, of cheerful battle, given jauntily at daybreak, when the bugle sounds, and when one marches to meet the enemy with the certainty of beating him before sunset.

* Edouard Manet.--ED.