“What a lovely group?” he said to me. “How I should like to paint that child!”
While waiting for dinner we walked in the Bois de Boulogne. The acacias and hawthorns were in flower. The lawns, newly shorn, gave out a perfume of mown grass. Jules, joyfully drawing in this air impregnated with country odours, laughed like a happy child.
At that moment all was going well with him. His Mendiant had had a great success at the Salon; his last visit to England had been very prosperous; his head was full of fine projects for pictures. “It is good to be alive!” he exclaimed, as he played with a flower he had plucked from the bushes…. On the way back he gave himself up to all sorts of roguish fun. Mounted on the prow of the boat he sang, with his full voice, the Chant du Départ.
The vibrating tones resounded powerfully between the two sleeping river banks; the sky was splendid, twinkling with innumerable stars. From time to time Bastien lighted a rocket and sent it up overhead, shouting a loud hurrah!
The fusée mounted slowly into the night, showering down many-coloured sparks, then fell suddenly and sank in the dark water. Alas! it was the image of the short and brilliant years that remained for him to live.
IV.
On the death of Gambetta, January 1, 1883, Bastien was commissioned to make a design for the funeral car in which the great orator was to be conveyed to Père Lachaise; he spent a week in the little room at Ville d’Avray, painting the picture representing the statesman on his deathbed. The cold was extreme at this time, and, his work scarcely finished, he went away, feeling ill, to Damvillers, where he hoped to finish the great picture he had began of L’Amour au Village.
His native air, the simple life, and his mother’s loving care restored him, and he began to work again with his usual eagerness.
Muffled in a warm jacket and a travelling cloak that covered him down to the feet, he made his models pose for him in the piercing days of February, in the little garden where he had already painted the portrait of his grandfather. In March the work was well advanced, and he invited me to go and see it at Damvillers before it was sent to the Salon. I left Verdun on a freezing afternoon, accompanied by the old friend who had walked with us through the Argonne, and we were set down at Damvillers at night-fall. Our hosts were awaiting us on the doorstep; the grandfather, always the same, with his Greek cap and white beard, and his Socratic face; the painter and the little mother, with smiles and outstretched hands.
Around them Basse the spaniel, and Golo and Barbeau were bounding and barking joyfully to give us a welcome.