He had scarcely been six weeks at Damvillers again when he lost his father, who was suddenly carried off by pulmonary congestion. Death entered the house for the first time, and it was a rude shock for a family where each loved the other so well.
“We were too young to lose such a good friend,” he wrote to me; “in spite of all the courage one can muster, the void, the frightful void is so great, that one is sometimes in despair….”
“… Happily remembrance remains (letter to M. Victor Klotz), and what a remembrance it is! … the purest that is possible;—he was goodness and self-abnegation personified; he loved us so!… What is to be done? We must try to fill the void with love for those who remain, and who are attached to us, always keeping in mind him who is gone, and working much to drive away the fixed idea.”
And indeed he did work furiously: at Damvillers, at a Job that remains unfinished, and at Paris at the full-length portrait of a lady, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1877.
He had left the Rue Cherche Midi and had settled in the Impasse du Maine, where his studio and his apartment occupied one floor of a building, at the end of a narrow neglected garden, whose only ornaments were an apricot tree and some lilac bushes.
His brother Emile, who just then came to an end of his study of architecture in the school, lived with him.
His studio was very large, and was simply furnished with an old divan, a few stools, and a table covered with books and sketches. It was decorated only with the painter’s own studies and a few hangings of Japanese material.
I used to go there every morning at this time to sit for my portrait.
I used to arrive about eight o’clock, to find Jules already up, but with his eyes only half awake, swallowing two raw eggs, to give himself tone, as he said.
He already complained of stomach trouble, and lived by rule. We used to smoke a cigarette, and then he began to work. He painted with a feverish rapidity, and with a certainty of hand quite astonishing. Sometimes he would stop, get up and roll a cigarette, would closely examine the face of his model, and then, after five minutes of silent contemplation, he would sit down again with the vivacity of a monkey and begin to paint furiously.