The existence he had been living would have inevitably ruined him, when a new turn arrived with the panic of ’93. In a fortnight, as a result of the treachery of an executor, he found himself bankrupt. The news made a sensation here and abroad. The army of friends melted away. Creditors descended on him and drove him from his palace, and the woman he had adored departed overnight in the company of a Swedish count. When the news was brought to him, he began by flying into a paroxysm of despair and ended by bursting into laughter. The next day, with the best of good humor, he packed up his effects and moved over into a studio in the Rue d’Assas off the Luxembourg Gardens. His mother gave him an allowance of one hundred dollars a month, which, in his new surroundings, was a fortune. In a month he had found his happiness in a life of work among these democrats of the soul.
If he did not at once forget the woman, the memory of his existence of luxury never returned to embitter him. For years he lived with his comrades of the atelier, adopting their flowing dress and easy customs, a leader in their revelries, but a madman for work, as completely divorced from his past existence as though he had died and been born again. The two experiences as a boy and as a man had left him distrustful of women or, at least, recoiling before the intense outpouring of emotion which love meant to him. During this long student period, no woman touched his heart beyond a womanly sympathy. In fact, his attitude was the occasion of numerous jests among the more catholicly inclined, while those of more romantic persuasion did him the honor to ascribe it to the tragedy of a “grande passion.” His studio, which was magnificent for the quarter, became the refuge of the whole tribe of models and others whose living was even more precarious. At any hour of the day and night, they arrived for a bit of food, a night’s shelter, or to give him their tragic confidence, and these flitting children of the sidewalks, cynical, hardened, and sly in their dealings with other men, would melt into tears or burst into angry tirades against the injustice of established order, sitting alone with him into the long night. They taught him much of their dreadful vision of mankind and suffering in such hours of confession, which he would never have known had he approached them differently. At the bottom, pity was too deep in his soul to have permitted any other sentiment. All adored him and one, Pepita, a little Spanish model, loved him with the love of a dog for its master. For his part, he took no credit for this open charity. As a matter of fact, it was a privileged glance into a hidden life, that interested him intensely, that roused in him long periods of meditation and revolt, that was as much a part of the architectural structure of his artistic conscience, as his boyhood, his life on the prairies, his wildness at college, or his rapid plunge through the dissipations of the brilliant world. He became known not only as an artist of bold and daring originality, but as a man who thought and reasoned.
In his third year, an event came which occasioned a new outburst of public curiosity. An aunt died and left him a legacy of fifty thousand dollars. He reappeared in society in a brilliant renaissance, took up his old habits, just as though nothing had happened; reassembled the former acquaintances, gave dinners and balls, and won enormous sums at baccarat. This lasted for almost two months, at the end of which a streak of luck set in against him and he found himself again bankrupt. Seven weeks after his departure from the studio of the Rue d’Assas, he returned penniless but happy, and announced:
“Now, if no more aunts die, I shall become an artist.”
His return was made a gala night; the quarter packed in to hear his adventures, and, in the end, the renegade was received back into the sacred enclosure, while his dress clothes and the offending hat were burned with imposing ceremonies.
When the death of his mother brought him a fortune, he remained true to his oath and the left bank of the Seine. By this time he had won his medals in the Salon and had achieved the honor of a private exhibition of water-colors which he had brought back from Algeria and the East. There were some critics who complained of the theatric quality of his art, but all conceded the individuality and the boldness of his new conceptions. His sudden spring into fame was as instantaneous as all the other phases of his existence. Everything seemed to open ahead of him for a long and brilliant career of highest achievement, when fate, which had played him a dozen queer turns, returned to intrude once more into his existence.
He was motoring along the Riviera, on a trip he had long planned to Venice and the galleries of Florence, when, as his car swerved out and around a jutting corner of rock, a sudden gust of wind caught his hat and whirled it into the lap of a young woman who was passing in a phaeton. This gust of wind decided his whole life. He fell in love with her at the first sight of her wistful Madonnalike face and trusting eyes, that strangely enough reminded him of the idealized vision of his boyhood. She was a divorcée, scarcely twenty-one, from the South, who had resumed her maiden name, Louise Fortier. He knew absolutely nothing about her except the story she told of childish innocence and the whims of a selfish libertine. Two weeks later, they returned to Paris, engaged. He had thrown himself into this new experience without the slightest distrust, with the rapturous idolatry of the boy he was. He would not have permitted her to be discussed even by his most intimate friends, though, in fact, several made hints which he was too blind to perceive. They were married a month later. One painful incident occurred. Pepita, the little Spanish model who had been devoted to him for years, attempted to take her life by swallowing poison, and though her act was detected in time to save her, the occurrence cast a shadow over the wedding.
During the first months, he found himself incomprehensibly, riotously happy. He was charmed and bewildered by his wife. They made a romantic trip through Italy and into the East, during which she assumed subtly a great influence over his moods and ambitions. When they returned to Paris, he was more in love than ever; only, there was one thing which had gone completely out of his day, of which he never thought—his work. Their coming to New York was her suggestion. The return home was a triumph for him. For the first time, he tasted the completeness of personal success. His friends of the quarter who had returned before him hailed him as a leader. He became a personality; his eccentricities of speech and thought, the dramatic wildness, even, of his past life were now registered in his favor. He took a studio and began to work, and success continued his. Yet, at the bottom, he became conscious of a growing restlessness, of an inability to enjoy what he had won.