In and out of Three Normandy Inns

by Anna Bowman Dodd

"Why should they all be old?" we queried. We were near enough to see the women face to face now, since we were far out along the outer edges of the bed; we were so near the sea that the tide was beginning to wash us back, along with the fringe of the diggers.

"They're not—they only look old," replied Renard, stopping a moment to sketch in a group directly in front. "This life makes old women of them in no time. How old, for instance, should you think that girl was, over there?"

The girl whom he designated was the only figure of youth we had seen on the bed. She was working alone and remote from the others. She wore no coif. Her masses of red, wavy hair shaded a face already deeply seamed with lines of premature age. A moment later she passed close to us. She was bent almost double beneath a huge, reeking basket, heaped with its pile of wet mussels. She was carrying it to a distant pool. Once beside the pool, with swift, dexterous movement the heavy basket was slipped from the bent back, the load of mussels falling in a shower into the miniature lake. The next instant she was stamping on the heap, to plunge them with her sabot still further into the pool. She was washing her load. Soon she shouldered the basket again, filling it with the cleansed mussels. A moment later she joined the long, toiling line of women that were perpetually forming and reforming on their way to the carts. These latter were drawn up near the beach, their contents guarded by boys and old men, who received the loads the women had dug, dragging the whole, later, up the hill.

"She has the Venus de Milo lines, that girl," Renard continued, critically, with his eyes on her, as she now repassed us. The figure was drawn up at its full height. It had in truth a noble dignity of outline. There was a Spartan vigor and severity in the lean, uncorseted shape, with the bust thrown out against the sky—the bust of a young warrior rather than a woman. There was a hardy, masculine freedom in the pliable motion of her straight back, a ripple with muscles that played easily beneath the close bodice, in her arms, and her finely turned ankles and legs, that were bared below the knee. The very simplicity of her costume helped to mark the Greek severity of her figure. She wore a short skirt of some coarse hempen stuff, covered with a thick apron made of sail-cloth, her feet thrust into black sabots, while the upper part of her body was covered with an unbleached chemise, widely open at the throat.

She had the Phidian breadth and the modern charm—that charm which troubles and disturbs, haunting the mind with vague, unsatisfied suggestions of something finer than is seen, something nobler than the gross physical envelope reveals.

"I must have her—for my Salon picture," calmly remarked Renard, after a long moment of scrutiny, his eyes following the lean, stately figure in its grave walk across the weeds and slime. "Yes, I must have her."

"Won't she be hard to get? How can she be made to sit, a stiffened image of clay, after this life of freedom, this athletic struggle out here—with these winds and tides?"

One of us, at least, was stirred at Renard's calm assumption—the assumption so common to artists, who, when they see a good thing at once count on its possessorship, as if the whole world, indeed, were eternally sitting, agape with impatience, awaiting the advent of some painter to sketch in its portrait.

"Oh, it'll be easy enough. She makes two francs a day with her six basketfuls. I'll offer her three, and she'll drop like a shot."

"I'll make it a red picture," he continued, dipping his brushes into a little case of paints he held on his thumb; "the mussel-bed a reddish violet, the sky red in the horizon, and the girl in the foreground, with that torrent of hair as the high light. I've been hunting for that hair all over Europe." And he began sketching her in at once.