The hope that the change might be good for Jules was enough to give her courage to face this upsetting of all her old ways of living. Sometimes only, when she was carefully arranging the linen in the trunk, the tears would rise to her eyes and a quiver of pain pass over her lips.
Upon the chairs and against the walls were placed the recent studies brought from Damvillers, and one felt one’s heart tighten at the sight of these last works, where nature had been observed and rendered with incomparable skill, penetration, and charm. They were The Frog-fisher, The Little Sweep, The Washerwoman, The Pond at Damvillers, The Edge of the Wood, The Church at Concarneau, and that study of A Midnight Sky so original, with the clouds scattered over an azure that was almost black.
At this moment Bastien-Lepage came in, and on seeing him walk with difficulty into the studio, I was distressed at the change that had come over him. His thin face had become quite bloodless; the skin of his neck was peeling off; his hair seemed to have no life in it. His questioning blue eyes expressed an anguish and weariness that was heartrending. “Well,” said he, after having embraced me, “are you looking at my studies? When people see them at George Petit’s, they will say that the little Bastien could paint the landscape too, when he gave himself the trouble!…” When I said to him that his long absence that morning had made his mother anxious, he added quite low, and taking me into one corner of the studio: “When one is going to take a journey so far, one must prepare for it…. I wanted to put my affairs in order. Poor little mother!” he went on; “she has been very brave! Down at home she used to spend whole nights in rubbing me for my rheumatism, and I let her think that it did me good…. Now, perhaps the Algiers sun will cure me.” Hope alternated with discouragement. During breakfast he recovered a little. I was to go to Spain at the end of March; he urged me to change my plans, and to join him in Algiers. We ended with a half-promise. We tried hard to appear gay; we clinked our glasses as we drank to the hope of soon meeting again, but each one felt his throat tighten, and turned away to hide from the other his moist eyes. I left the house in the Rue Legendre with my heart full of the saddest forebodings.
Jules left the same night for Marseilles. They had a good crossing, and his first letter, dated March 17th, was reassuring:—
“My dear friends, there is no getting out of it; you must come, for a thousand reasons. Here it is just like May in Paris. Everything is in flower; and such flowers!—heaps of them, everywhere. The verdure is delicate and grey, and, like patches, always well placed; the outlines picturesque and new, the trees very dark green. And in the midst of all this, upon the roads, the Arabs, of astonishing calmness and splendid carriage, under their earth-coloured and ash-coloured draperies—ragamuffins as proud as kings, and better dressed than Talma. They all wear a shirt and burnous; not one is like another. It seems as if each one, at every moment, gave expression to his thought by his manner of draping his garment. It is once more the triumph of blank truth over arrangement and conventionalism. The sorrowful man, whether he wishes it or not, in spite of himself is not draped like the gay. Beauty, I am convinced, is exact truth: neither to the right nor to the left, but in the middle.
“All this without telling you we have hired a house at Mustapha Superior. It is half Arab, half French, quite white, with an interior court opening into a garden twice as big as that at Damvillers. The garden is full of orange-trees, and lemon, almond, fig, and a quantity of other trees, the names of which I do not know and probably never shall. All this, not trim like a park, but left a little à la diable, like our garden at home. Then we have the right of walking in a magnificent garden which joins ours. We have at least eight rooms; in counting them I thought of you. In all directions round this house there are delightful walks within reach for invalid limbs; in short, it is a Mahomet’s Paradise, … ‘moins les femmes.’ I have said nothing about Kasbah, the old Arab town—my legs have only let me see it from a distance as yet; but, my good friend, imagine that against a morning sky you have, sometimes in the palest rose, sometimes in silvery grey, sometimes in faint blue, and so on—everywhere against the pearly sky—more or less elongated rectangles, placed irregularly, but always horizontally, in the manner of a line of low hills, and you will have the delicate colouring of the old town. One would not suppose it was a town with habitations, so delicate is the tone of it, but for some little holes of rare windows placed here and there. One could not have a sensation more unexpected, and never a sweeter and finer joy. So you must come! My mother is counting upon it, and what, then, am I? What new things you could say about all this! The sea was very fine at the beginning and end of our crossing. Midway some of the passengers suffered: my mother and Felix among them, but they got some sleep. We were twenty hours in crossing, and we were not tired on arriving. Come, set off; start!… A good embrace from my mother and from me.”
His first letter, as may be seen, was full of ardour. The climate of Algeria did him good at first, and his sufferings seemed to be relieved.
“I am preparing myself bravely for the ordeal by fire” (April letter to Ch. Baude); “may my rheumatism take flight and depart with the coming attack of the sun! When it is hot here, it is still quite bearable. Apart from these calculations about the heat and these health experiences, I am happy, even excited, by all that I have seen; and yet I have only seen what any bagman might see who is busy about the selling of his goods; but it has been enough to give me great delight. What remains of the old Arab town is marvellous; one holds one’s breath when, at a sudden turn, the vision reappears. For those unhappy eyes that only see the colours on the palette, it is white; but picture to yourself a long hill, rather high, with a depression in the middle, and sloping as if to the sea, and this hill all covered with elongated or elevated cubes of which one cannot distinguish the thickness; all this remaining unnoticed by the eye that is ravished by the delicate tone, rosy, greenish, pale blue, making altogether white tinted with salmon.
“If one did not know it beforehand, one would never dream that amongst these cubes of plaster thousands of men are walking, talking, sleeping—men of noble manner, proud and calm, and with something very like indifference or contempt for us. And they are right. They are beautiful, we are ugly. What matter is it to me that they are knaves! They are beautiful!…
“Yesterday I went to take a bath. I had to go three or four hundred steps through streets full of merchants. In a passage a Jew was selling silks, pearls and corals; in front of his shop, not two yards wide, were three Arabs—an old man, another of middle age, the third about seventeen. There they were, seated, attentive, calm, wishing to buy, consulting together, making scarcely a gesture with their hands, always kept at full length, but sitting quietly, never hurrying, reflecting enormously, and keeping all the while under their burnouses the softest, gentlest attitudes. The youngest was superb—so handsome that mama was struck with it. ‘They are like beautiful statues,’ said she. I could not understand the scene and the relations that united these three Arabs. It was clear they were come to buy; they had come down from the higher part of the town. They were poor, for the youngest was in rags, and the burnouses of the others, though not in rags, were very much worn; but they took such pains in counting the little pieces of false coral that it was clear the Jew was selling dear to these big children a thing of no value. The one of middle age was counting on the table, with his flat hand by groups of five, the little pieces of coral which he chose as he counted them; thus adding each time five pieces to the heap that he drew towards him.