Poor Relations

by Honoré de Balzac

When the progress of affairs required that he should go to the studio at le Gros-Caillou to mould the clay and set up the life-size model, Steinbock found one day that the Prince's clock required his presence in the workshop of Florent and Chanor, where the figures were being finished; or, again, the light was gray and dull; to-day he had business to do, to-morrow they had a family dinner, to say nothing of indispositions of mind and body, and the days when he stayed at home to toy with his adored wife.

Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg was obliged to be angry to get the clay model finished; he declared that he must put the work into other hands. It was only by dint of endless complaints and much strong language that the committee of subscribers succeeded in seeing the plaster-cast. Day after day Steinbock came home, evidently tired, complaining of this "hodman's work" and his own physical weakness. During that first year the household felt no pinch; the Countess Steinbock, desperately in love with her husband cursed the War Minister. She went to see him; she told him that great works of art were not to be manufactured like cannon; and that the State—like Louis XIV., Francis I., and Leo X.—ought to be at the beck and call of genius. Poor Hortense, believing she held a Phidias in her embrace, had the sort of motherly cowardice for her Wenceslas that is in every wife who carries her love to the pitch of idolatry.

"Do not be hurried," said she to her husband, "our whole future life is bound up with that statue. Take your time and produce a masterpiece."

She would go to the studio, and then the enraptured Steinbock wasted five hours out of seven in describing the statue instead of working at it. He thus spent eighteen months in finishing the design, which to him was all-important.

When the plaster was cast and the model complete, poor Hortense, who had looked on at her husband's toil, seeing his health really suffer from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor's frame and arms and hands —Hortense thought the result admirable. Her father, who knew nothing of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.

Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy. Stidmann, the best of good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be the test.

"In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble," wrote Claude Vignon, "a masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful. The plaster is the manuscript, the marble is the book."

So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son. The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.

The clock for the Prince and the price of the statue paid off the young couple's debts. Steinbock had acquired fashionable habits; he went to the play, to the opera; he talked admirably about art; and in the eyes of the world he maintained his reputation as a great artist by his powers of conversation and criticism. There are many clever men in Paris who spend their lives in talking themselves out, and are content with a sort of drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating these emasculated but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew swiftly away at the sight of this effete lover.

Sculpture—like dramatic art—is at once the most difficult and the easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a woman—this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men. Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.