"He said Oh! three times, after which he asked me for your address, and off he went without the slightest comment, leaving me exceedingly confused and irritated because I could not finish my dissertation on portrait-painting; for, after all, my dear Thérèse, if that handsome brute of an Englishman comes to see you to-day, as I believe he is capable of doing, and repeats to you all I have written you, that is to say, all that I did not say to him, about the faiseurs and the great masters, what will you think of your ungrateful friend? May he place you among the first, and judge you incapable of painting anything else than pretty portraits which please everybody! Ah! my dear friend, if you had heard all that I said to him about you—after he had gone! You know what it was; you know that in my eyes you are not Mademoiselle Jacques, who paints excellent portraits that are much in vogue, but a superior man disguised as a woman, who, although he has never made the Academy, divines and has the art of making others divine a whole body and a whole soul from a bust, after the manner of the great sculptors of antiquity and the great painters of the Renaissance. But I say no more; you are not fond of having people tell you what they think of you. You pretend to take such talk for mere compliments. You are very proud, Thérèse.
"I am altogether down in the mouth to-day, I don't know why. I breakfasted so poorly this morning—I have never eaten with so little satisfaction since I have had a cook. And then one cannot get any good tobacco nowadays. The government monopoly poisons you. And then I have a pair of new boots which don't fit at all. And then it rains. And then—and then—I don't know what. The days have been as long as days without bread, for some time past, don't you find them so? No, you don't, of course. You know nothing of this feeling of gloom, the pleasure that bores, the boredom that intoxicates, the nameless disease of which I spoke to you the other evening in the little lilac salon where I would like to be now; for I have a horrible light for painting, and not being able to paint, it would please me to bore you to death by my conversation.
"So I shall not see you to-day! You have an insupportable family who steal you from your most delightful friends! In that case I shall be driven to do some foolish thing this evening! Such is the effect of your kindness to me, my dear, tall comrade. It makes me so stupid and so good for nothing when I do not see you, that I absolutely must divert myself at the risk of shocking you. But never fear, I will not tell you how I employ my evening.
"Your friend and servant,
"LAURENT.
"May 11, 183—."
[1]Dans le monde des arts, comme dit our friend Bernard.
TO M. LAURENT DE FAUVEL
"First of all, my dear Laurent, I entreat you, if you have any friendship for me, not to indulge too often in foolish things which injure your health. I will wink at all others. You may ask me to mention one such, and I should be sadly embarrassed to do it; for I know very few foolish things which are not injurious. So I must needs find out what you call by that name. If you mean one of those long suppers you spoke about the other day, I think that they are killing you, and I am in despair. What are you thinking of, in God's name, to ruin thus, with a smile on your lips, an existence so precious and beautiful? But you want no sermons; I confine myself to prayers.
"As for your Englishman, who is an American, I have seen him, and as I shall not see you to-night or to-morrow, to my great regret, I must tell you that you were altogether wrong not to consent to do his portrait. He would have offered you the eyes out of his head, and with an American like Dick Palmer, the eyes out of his head means a goodly number of bank-notes, of which you stand in need to prevent you from doing foolish things, that is to say, from haunting gambling-houses in the hope of a stroke of fortune which never comes to people of imagination, because people of imagination do not know how to play cards, because they always lose, and because they must thereupon appeal to their imagination for the wherewithal to pay their debts—a trade to which that princess does not feel adapted, and to which she cannot adapt herself except by setting fire to the poor body she inhabits.