“But the subject?” said I.
It was not a large picture, and represented the interior of an artist’s atelier. In the foreground a dissipated-looking young man tilted his chair backward as he held his gloves in one hand, and with the other stroked his mustache, while he contemplated a picture standing on an easel before him. The face was hard, worn, blasé; the features, originally good, and even beautiful, had had all the latent loveliness worn out of them by a wrong, unbeautiful life. He wore a tall hat, very much to one side, as if to accent the fact that the rest of the company, upon whom he had turned his back, certainly did not merit that he should be at the trouble of baring his head to them. And the rest of the company—a girl, a model, seated on a chair upon a raised dais, dressed in a long, flounced white skirt, not of the freshest, some kind of Oriental wrap falling negligently about it—arms, models of shapeliness, folded, and she crouching herself together as if wearied, or contemptuous, or perhaps a little chilly. Upon a divan near her a man—presumably the artist to whom the establishment pertained—stretched at full length, looking up carelessly into her face, a pipe in his mouth, with indifference and—scarcely impertinence—it did not take the trouble to be a fully developed impertinence—in every gesture. This was the picture; faithful to life, significant in its very insignificance, before which von Francius sat, and declared that the drawing, coloring, and grouping were perfect.[B]
“The subject?” he echoed, after a pause. “It is only a scrap of artist-life.”
“Is that artist-life?” said I, shrugging my shoulders. “I do not like it at all; it is common, low, vulgar. There is no romance about it; it only reminds one of stale tobacco and flat champagne.”
“You are too particular,” said von Francius, after a pause, and with a flavor of some feeling which I did not quite understand tincturing his voice.
For my part, I was looking at the picture and thinking of what Courvoisier had said: “Beauty, impudence, assurance, and an admiring public.” That the girl was beautiful—at least, she had the battered remains of a decided beauty; she had impudence certainly, and assurance too, and an admiring public, I supposed, which testified its admiration by lolling on a couch and staring at her, or keeping its hat on and turning its back to her.
“Do you really admire the picture, Herr von Francius?” I inquired.
“Indeed I do. It is so admirably true. That is the kind of life into which I was born, and in which I was for a long time brought up; but I escaped from it.”
I looked at him in astonishment. It seemed so extraordinary that that model of reticence should speak to me, above all, about himself. It struck me for the very first time that no one ever spoke of von Francius as if he had any one belonging to him. Calm, cold, lonely, self-sufficing—and self-sufficing, too, because he must be so, because he had none other to whom to turn—that was his character, and viewing him in that manner I had always judged him. But what might the truth be?