“How far along are you?”
“Still in the prelude. There is no hurry. A lifetime is hardly long enough for the completion of such a work and I have only been at it some ten years.”
It must be a prodigious opera that demanded such efforts! For that matter, one could see, merely by looking at Gallus, that he was breaking down under the weight of so vast an undertaking. His frame was puny, stunted, sickly, like a pear tree that my father had ordered rooted up from the court. A lock of hair fell across his stormy brow, and when he passed his hand through his disorderly locks a shower of scurf would fall upon his shoulders. Though the season was warm he wore a black velvet coat, and around his neck an enormous blue scarf such as women wear, the spots upon which were innumerable. All my aunt’s benzine would not have sufficed to clean them. But I told myself that artists could not be expected to dress like other folk,—for if they did they might not be known to be artists. This dirty little man, who looked peaceable enough, would sometimes fall into a fury, and figuratively drag through mud and dirt by the napes of their necks certain abominable criminals such as Ambroise Thomas, and Gounod, who were guilty of having fraudulently robbed him of public admiration, and irremediably corrupted the public taste. He also brought accusations against the bourgeois of our town, whose plots and treacheries he enumerated at length. I observed that the designation bourgeois was by itself alone a disgrace, and I trembled at the thought that I was one, and my father also. Only grandfather, stout against being classified, might perhaps be spared. I afterward learned that Gallus was by profession an examiner of weights and measures. In its turn society in general came in for severe condemnation; but that it deserved this I had already learned in the course of my walks with grandfather. And thus I came to know that my new friends of the café, whom I had imagined to be even more fortunate than the peasants with their white cheeses and their fresh cream, were in reality persecuted martyrs.
How could I have the slightest doubt of this in face of the injustice which had befallen the second artist, Merinos? Whether this was his name or a nickname I never knew. If a nickname, it miraculously fitted his mutton face, at once long and full, rosy as the cheeks of a nursing baby, and crowned with curly hair. He vaguely resembled Mariette, our cook, though without her martial aspect. But these somewhat prepossessing features were liable to misconstruction. Merinos was a ravaged soul,> and I caught allusions to the extraordinary passions which he had experienced. Up to this time I had supposed that passion showed itself by a lugubrious face and tearful eyes, but he was shining and jovial, with not a trace of tears in his protruding orbits, though they were plain to see in those of Casenave, Gallus and nearly all the others. Thus my childish imagination found itself nonplussed.
Both Merinos and Gallus had lived long in Paris, in the mysterious Montmartre quarter, of which both spoke as of the promised land. Merinos was a portrait painter, but he had given up painting, a fact for which he gave convincing reasons.
“You understand: now-a-days people make such ridiculous demands. They insist upon a likeness. As if the likeness ever mattered to an artist!”
“That’s sure enough,” the chorus assented.
My mind at once reverted to the collection of ancestors that covered the walls of the drawing room and that were bad paintings. Assuredly they must be likenesses.
Thus defrauded of glory by the stupidity of the bourgeois, Merinos none the less continued to give evidence of genius. He always carried about with him a piece of coloured paper and a stick of charcoal. While talking and smoking he would carelessly rub his charcoal on the paper, and draw a few lines below the spots thus obtained. It was curious, but when one studied these masterpieces patiently and with good will, one could get a notion of distorted faces, barely indicated, but which the admiring group recognised as faces in torment, ill disposed folk, disturbers of society. Certain art-lovers in the town—there were some all the same, it seemed—would buy these at a high price, declaring them to be wonderful; and there was an enthusiastic and slender witted lady, who, as every one knew, used regularly to visit Merinos’s studio, which, it appeared, was a perfect dog-hole, humbly to gather up his slightest sketches, even going down upon her knees on the floor to hunt them under the furniture. I too admired him, on trust.
One day when grandfather at our house was praising this underrated genius, he brought upon himself this remark from my father: