"Allons donc, blagueur"—from the students—"what do you know about acting?"
"Moderate your language if you please, messieurs. You would not laugh if you knew the position I hold in the theatrical world—" With much dignity—"I am of the Théâtre Français."
"Shut up, tais toi" cries one.
"To be sure you play the fool," shouts another.
"Il n'y a pas de tais toi, messieurs; but I must be off and study my part. To-night I am on with Mademoiselle Rachel. I am cast for 'Le peuple murmure.'"
To return to the daughter, I must say she was the most useful little studio drudge I ever knew. Her appearance was against her, for she was plain and generally unkempt and untidy; the cleanest parts of her apron were the holes, but for all that she was an ever-handy little monkey of all work. She would roast chestnuts on the stove according to her own particular system, and would feed that stove with heterogeneous fuel that it would not have taken from another hand. She would water the garden—a sort of shelf suspended outside the window—would drench unsuspecting but indiscreet cats, and was generally of an aquatic turn of mind. One very hot day we came upon her unexpectedly, and found her perched upon a high stool, her dress tucked up, and her bare feet on the chair rail. She was contemplating with evident satisfaction what she called le réservoir. It looked very much as if she had been utilising it as a footbath, by way of refreshing herself, but that may or may not have been the case. There was an empty pail that told the story of the reservoir. She had sprinkled part of its contents over the studio floor, forming a quantity of little quivering black pearls, as the water licked up the dust; the rest she reserved to make a pool where the hand of time, or the foot rather, had produced a deep hollow in the red brick floor. The cement of time must have been at work too, to weld the bricks into a compact mass, for the water did not seem to percolate through to the neighbour's ceiling, but stood its ground to bear witness to Rosa Bonheur's aquatic genius.
After this success she had visions of gold-fish and fountains and of les grandes eaux de Versailles, and she wanted more snubbing than ever.
But water or no water, the heat in the studio remained intolerable. It soon began to tell on Claude, who was not of the most robust, and who was simply overworking himself. He did not like being told so—artists never do; he had got into difficulties with his picture, and now that it was in distress he would not leave it.
It really needs as much patience and perseverance to mature a picture as to rear a child. All goes smoothly for a while, and one's offspring, picture or baby, is a source of happiness. Then comes a hitch, an illness, and everything seems darkness. But just as a father does not give in and say, "Oh, this baby is no use, pitch it aside," so a true picture parent does not gash the canvas of his own painting with a knife, or cast it away because it has the scarlet or yellow fever, or because it tells of a crooked leg or a deformed limb. On the contrary, he sets to work and tends the patient with soothing oils, and with the whole arsenal of remedies his palette affords. Wonderful are the cures that have been effected on canvas, and little does the public know, when it admires the completed work, how desperately the artist has had to struggle at times to preserve even a spark of vitality in it, and how narrowly it escaped destruction at his hands.
Claude had got into a phase of despair. Several studies he had made lately, especially some for the head of the daughter of Jairus, he considered absolute failures.