JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE
AS MAN AND ARTIST.
In the month of June, 1856, the chances of a Civil Service noviciate compelled me to live for six weeks at Damvillers, a small town on the Meuse, half-way between Verdun and Montmédy.
Damvillers was formerly fortified, and had the honour of being besieged by Charles V., but there is now nothing left to recall the memory of those warlike days. The whole aspect of the place is peaceful and rural. The people are occupied with agriculture. Orchards now cover the ground where the fortifications once stood, and form a circle of verdure round the scattered houses, in a valley where the Tinte winds through osier beds and meadows. On the right a vine-covered mound like the back of a camel, on the left a succession of wooded slopes, enclose the little town. The grey, blue hills are low. The monotony of the fields and meadows is broken only by rows of poplars. The ill-kept solitary streets bordered by the labourers’ houses with grey or dingy yellow fronts, have the same washed-out look as the landscape.
For a young fellow of twenty-two there was nothing here particularly attractive. I spent my solitary evenings with my elbows on my window-sill watching the twilight descend upon the brown-tiled roofs which enclose the great square as with a horizontal frame. In one corner the large green waggon of a travelling pedler was resting by the side of rows of earthenware, whose polished surface reflected the lights from the window of the neighbouring inn.
My only amusement consisted in listening to the chatter of some girls sitting at the tinner’s door, or the shouts of the children playing at ball by the wall of the corn-market.
I little thought then that among these urchins, with torn pinafores and tangled hair, was to be found a future master of contemporary painting, and that the name of Bastien-Lepage thrown to and fro each evening by the children’s voices, and repeated by the echoes of the solitary square, would come to be known, and received with acclamations throughout the world, by all who are interested in Art and in Artists.
I.
Jules Bastien-Lepage was born at Damvillers, on November 1, 1848, in a house which forms one of the corners of that square of which I have just spoken; a simple, well-to-do farmer’s house, the front coloured yellow, the shutters grey.
On opening the outer door one finds oneself at once in the kitchen, the regular kitchen of the Meuse villages, with its high chimney-piece surmounted by cooking utensils, with its rows of copper saucepans, its maie for the bread, and its dresser furnished with coloured earthenware. The next room serves at once as sitting-room and dining-room, and even, at need, as bed-chamber. Above are some apartments not in general use, and then some vast granaries with sloping rafters.