Study and boudoir would like to know if Doris had any children. About two years afterwards I heard that she was "expecting." The word came up spontaneously in my mind, perhaps because I had written it in the beginning of the story. Reader, do you remember in "Massimilla Doni" how Balzac, when he came to the last pages, declares that he dare not tell you the end of the adventure. One word, he says, will suffice for the worshippers of the ideal--Massimilla Doni was "expecting." I have not read the story for many years, but the memory of it shines in my mind bright--well, as the morning star; and I looked up this last paragraph when I began to write this story, but had to excuse myself for not translating it, my pretext being that I was baffled by certain grammatical obscurities, or what seemed to me such. I seemed to understand and to admire it all till I came to the line that "les peuplades de cent cathédrales gothiques" (which might be rendered as the figured company of a hundred Gothic cathedrals), "tout le peuple des figures qui brisent leur forme pour venir à vous, artistes compréhensifs, toutes ces angéliques filles incorporelles accoururent autour du lit de Massimilla, et y pleurèrent!" What puzzles me is why statues should break their forms (form I suppose should be translated by mould)--break their moulds--the expression seems very inadequate--break their moulds "in order to go to you, great imaginative artists." How could they break their moulds or their forms to go to the imaginative artists, the mould or the form being the gift of the imaginative artists? I should have understood Balzac better if he had said that the statues escape from their niches and the madonnas and the angels from their frames to gather round the bed of Massimilla to weep. Balzac's idea seems to have got a little tangled, or maybe I am stupid to-day. However, here is the passage:
"Les péris, les ondines, les fées, les sylphides du vieux temps, les muses de la Grèce, les vierges de marbre de la Certosa di Pavia, le Jour et la Nuit de Michel Ange, les petits anges que Bellini le premier mit au bas des tableaux d'église, et que Raphaël a faits si divinement au bas de la vierge au donataire, et de la madone qui gèle a Dresde, les délicieuses filles d'Orcagna, dans l'église de San-Michele à Florence, les choeurs célestes du tombeau de Saint Sébald à Nuremberg, quelques vierges du Duomo de Milan, les peuplades de cent cathédrales gothiques, tout le peuple des figures qui brisent leur forme pour venir à vous, artistes compréhensifs, toutes ces angéliques filles incorporelles accoururent autour du lit de Massimilla, et y pleurèrent."
[CHAPTER IX]
IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS
There was a time when my dream was not literature, but painting; and I remember an American giving me a commission to make a small copy of Ingres's "Perseus and Andromeda," and myself sitting on a high stool in the Luxembourg, trying to catch the terror of the head thrown back, of the arms widespread, chained to the rock, and the beauty of the foot advanced to the edge of the sea. Since my copying days the picture has been transferred to the Louvre. What has become of my copy, whether I ever finished it and received the money I had been promised, matters very little. Memories of an art that one has abandoned are not pleasant memories. Maybe the poor thing is in some Western state where the people are ignorant enough to accept it as a sketch for the original picture. My hope is that it has drifted away, and become part of the world's rubbish and dust. But why am I thinking of it at all? Only because a more interesting memory hangs upon it.
After working at it all one morning, I left the museum feeling half satisfied with my drawing, but dreading the winged monster that awaited me after lunch. In those days I was poor, though rich for the Quarter. I moved in a society of art students, and we used to meet for breakfast in a queer little café; the meal cost us about a shilling. On my return from this café soon after twelve--I had breakfasted early that morning--I remember how, overcome by a sudden idleness, I could not go back to my work, and feeling that I must watch the birds and the sunlight (they seemed to understand each other so well), I threw myself on a bench and began to wonder if there was anything better in the world worth doing than to sit in an alley of clipped limes, smoking, thinking of Paris and of myself.
Every one, or nearly every one, except perhaps the upper classes, whose ideas of Paris are the principal boulevards--the Rue de Rivoli, the Rue de la Paix--knows the Luxembourg Gardens; and watching April playing and listening to water trickling from a vase that a great stone Neptune held in his arms at the end of the alley, my thoughts embraced not only the garden, but all I know of Paris, of the old city that lies far away behind the Hôtel de Ville and behind the Boulevard St. Antoine. I thought of a certain palace now a museum, rarely visited, of its finely proportioned courtyard decorated with bas-reliefs by Jean Goujon. I had gone there a week ago with Mildred; but finding she had never heard of Madame de Sévigné, and did not care whether she had lived in this palace or another, I spoke to her of the Place des Vosges, saying we might go there, hoping that she would feel interested in it because it had once been the habitation of the old French nobility. As I spoke, its colour rose up before my eyes, pretty tones of yellow and brown brick, the wrought-iron railings and the high-pitched roofs and the slim chimneys. As I walked beside her I tried to remember if there were any colonnades. It is strange how one forgets; yes, and how one remembers. The Place des Vosges has always seemed to me something more than an exhibition of the most beautiful domestic architecture in France. The mind of a nation shapes itself, like rocks, by a process of slow accumulation, and it takes centuries to gather together an idea so characteristic as the Place des Vosges. One cannot view it--I cannot, at least--without thinking of the great monarchical centuries, and of the picturesque names which I have learned from Balzac's novels and from the history of France. In his "Étude de Catherine de Médicis," Balzac speaks of Madame de Sauve, and I am sure she must have lived in the Place des Vosges. Monsieur de Montresser might have occupied a flat on the first floor. Le Comte Bouverand de la Loyère, La Marquise d'Osmond, Le Comte de Coëtlogon, La Marquise de Villefranche, and Le Duc de Cadore, and many other names rise up in my mind, but I will not burden this story with them. I suppose the right thing to do would be to find out who had lived in the Place des Vosges; but the search, I am afraid, would prove tedious and perhaps not worth the trouble. For if none of the bearers of the names I have mentioned lived in the Place des Vosges, it is certain that others bearing equally noble names lived there.
Its appearance is the same to-day as it was in the seventeenth century, but it is now inhabited by the small tradespeople of the Quarter; the last great person who lived there was Victor Hugo; his house has been converted into a museum, and it is there that the most interesting relics of the great poet are stored. I unburdened my mind to Mildred, and my enthusiasm enkindled in her an interest sufficient to induce her to go there with me, for I could not forgo a companion that day, though she was far from being the ideal companion for such sentimental prowling as mine. Afterwards we visited Notre Dame together, and the quays, and the old streets; but Mildred lacked the historical sense, I am afraid, for as we returned in the glow of the sunset, when the monumented Seine is most beautiful, she said that Paris wasn't bad for an old city, and it was the memory of this somewhat crude remark that caused a smile to light up my lips as I looked down the dark green alley through which the April sunlight flickered.
But I did not think long of her; my attention was distracted by the beauty of a line of masonry striking across the pale spring sky, tender as a faded eighteenth-century silk, only the blue was a young blue like that of a newly opened flower; and it seemed to me that I could detect in the clouds going by, great designs for groups and single figures, and I compared this aerial sculpture with the sculpture on the roofs. In every angle of the palace there are statues, and in every corner of the gardens one finds groups or single figures. Ancient Rome had sixty thousand statues--a statue for every thirty-three or thirty-four inhabitants; in Paris the proportion of statues to the people is not so great, still there are a great many; no city has had so many since antiquity; and that is why Paris always reminds me of those great days of Greece and Rome when this world was the only world.
When one tires of watching the sunlight there is no greater delight than to become absorbed in the beauty of the balustrades, the stately flights of steps, the long avenues of clipped limes, the shapely stone basins, every one monumented in some special way. "How shapely these gardens are," I said, and I fell to dreaming of many rocky hills where, at the entrance of cool caves, a Neptune lies, a vase in his arms with water flowing from it. Yesterevening I walked in these gardens with a sculptor; together we pondered Carpeau's fountain, and, after admiring Frémiet's horses, we went to Watteau's statue, appropriately placed in a dell, among greenswards like those he loved to paint. At this moment my meditation was broken.