The Pleasures of Collecting

by Gardner C. Teall

At any rate, Master Bernard set about the business diligently and persistently. Once he had made up his mind to a thing there was no changing him, so long as the thing he had set his mind to appeared to him better, more wise, or more righteous than that which would take its place. He became as persistent a potter as he had been (and as he was!) persistent a Protestant. Luckily it was for him that the Constable de Montmorency, who was sent by the king to quell an uprising in Saintes, was later to come across Master Bernard and to take up with his ingenious compositions.

Eight long, tedious, heartbreaking years succeeded this resolution, during the course of which his powers of endurance and splendid physical strength were put to a severe test in his attempts to find a suitable enamel for the objects he made out of the earth of the neighborhood, a sort of pipe-clay. Month after month and year after year came sorrowful failures when he was seemingly just on the point of success. Without caring that he knew nothing concerning argillaceous earths, he set himself to search out enamels, like a man who gropes in the darkness.

Whatever else he may have been, we can rest assured that he was thorough and practical in his craft. That so long a time elapsed before the results he hoped to attain were reached seems a proof to confute the theory often advanced that he had learned the secret of his enamel from the Hirschvogels in Nuremberg. If they disclosed any part of their craft to him when he was roving through Germany, they zealously guarded that of making white enamel, since for this he sought so long and arduously—indeed, through fifteen years of patient toil and discouragement. Abaquesne, at Rouen, had anticipated him, it is true, but it is just because it chanced to be his lot to have to seek out these things for himself that his works were endowed with marked originality.

All this time his family suffered in poverty. We can sympathize with his wife, certainly. That Palissy was quite out of his right mind she had no doubt. Was he not sacrificing everything for—what seemed in the face of his failures—nothing? It is hard enough to believe in genius in our own day, when miracles are no longer surprises. What, then, must have been the alienating doubts of Master Bernard’s whole family as they saw him, day after day, absorbed with his clays, his enamels, and his ovens, while they stood by, hungry and neglected! The colossal selfishness of the men who win against all odds is forgotten afterward and forgiven, and one is inclined to think Palissy’s plaint about the lack of encouragement of his friends and family more of a screen to his troubled conscience than anything else. When a man gives up the employment which supports his wife and children for the sake of obstinately attempting to discover the secret of making ornamental dishes like one he has seen years before, is there any wonder he is thought to be mad? Even in these days a family would ask that a commission in lunacy be appointed to look into his sanity.

And listen to his own testimony: “Another misfortune befell me, causing me great annoyance, which was that, running short of wood, I was obliged to burn the palings which maintained the boundaries of my garden, the which after being burned I had to burn the tables and the flooring of my house in order to cause the melting of the second composition. I was in such agony as I cannot express”—not a word about the agony of wife and children!—“for I was utterly exhausted and withered up by my work and the heat of the furnace; during more than a month my shirt had never been dry upon me; even those who ought to have helped me ran crying through the town that I was burning the planks of the floors, so that I was made to lose my credit and was thought to be mad. Others said that I was trying to coin false money, and I went about crouching to the earth, like one ashamed.” I think that what Madame Palissy did not say places her in the hierarchy of our marveling esteem! Howbeit I write of a hero and not of heroines. Here, surely seemed to be a second Columbus tossed on the stormy seas of derision.

But finally, in 1549, the success of the secret formula for which he had been striving was attained as the fires of his experimental oven cooled. It had been his agonized hope—the last straw held out by Providence. How differently they all regarded him now! Wife and children forgave him, friends returned to him, tradesmen were eager to give him credit, for Bernard Palissy had brought renown to their town, and they hailed him as a great man where but the day before they would have driven him to a madhouse. Quickly the fame of his achievements spread far and near, and almost immediately he found a munificent patron in Anne de Montmorency, the great constable, while to the king and the queen mother he became “worker in earth and inventor of figulines” by royal patent.

Is it any wonder he felt justified for all his sacrifices? He could now give his wife a prouder place than any she had ever dreamed of, and his children would be educated beyond all their companions. Surely it was worth these fifteen years of sorrow and suffering, he argued.

Ah, little blue book with the gilt morning-glories, the aniline frontispiece! Courageous, unflinching Master Bernard; brave, suffering madame!

When one remembers all these things every bit of Palissy ware becomes endowed with a double interest. It is distinguished in the earlier examples by its close adherence to natural forms, not, perhaps, to be considered exactly beautiful according to the canons of art in our day, nevertheless admirable in many of its qualities; and its fidelity to nature is so remarkable often that one forgives it its lack of esthetic attributes. One of the extant examples is a large plate executed in enamel faience. It is covered with fishes, reptiles, crustacea, and mollusks in the midst of the modeled representation of water, together with herbs and marine plants. It is remarkable for the minute execution of its details and also for the richness of the enamel giving life to these wonderful studies from nature. Indeed, these rustic pieces, so admirable in their original way, exhibit Palissy’s tendency to imitate nature with exquisite realism and a naturalist’s love for accuracy of detail. He himself was so pleased with his success that he tells us live lizards often came to admire his fabrications, and that a dog which he made (the same is now in the Dresden Museum), caused many real dogs “to growl on coming near it, thinking it to be alive.”

Palissy’s work was eagerly sought by all the great nobles, and the illustrious constable gave into his hands the task of decorating the Château d’Écouen, thereafter one of the marvels of its time. Alas! there remains nothing of this work, nor of the famous grotto in the gardens of the Tuileries, with the decoration of which Catherine de’ Medici had intrusted him. This was about the year 1565, after Palissy had taken his family from La Rochelle (where he had been for several years after leaving Saintes), to Paris to live. It was during the period that Master Bernard discoursed to the learned on topics in natural philosophy and was respectfully listened to at a crown a head, a large lecture entrance fee for those days. Palissy’s sons, Nicolas and Mathurin, were working with him in Paris, as entries in the royal accounts for the year 1570 show. Only a few decades ago workmen excavating in the gardens of the Tuileries unearthed the remains of Palissy’s old workshop, and later discovered some of his ovens.