Cosmopolis — Complete

by Paul Bourget

Vous metes, en dormant, un peu triste apparu.

Florent did not love Lincoln because he admired him; he admired him because he loved him. He was not wrong in considering the painter as one of the most gifted who had appeared for thirty years. But Lincoln would have had neither the bold elegance of his drawing, nor the vivid strength of coloring, nor the ingenious finesse of imagination if the other had lent himself with less ardor to the service of the work and to the glory of the artist. When Lincoln wanted to travel he found his brother-in-law the most diligent of couriers. When he had need of a model he had only to say a word for Florent to set about finding one. Did Lincoln exhibit at Paris or London, Florent took charge of the entire proceeding—seeing the journalists and picture dealers, composing letters of thanks for the articles, in a handwriting so like that of the painter that the latter had only to sign it. Lincoln desired to return to Rome. Florent had discovered the house on the Rue Leopardi, and he settled it even before Maitland, then in Egypt, had finished a large study begun at the moment of the departure of the other.

Florent had, by virtue of the affection felt for his brother-in-law, come to comprehend the paintings as well as the painter himself. These words will be clear to those who have been around artists and who know what a distance separates them from the most enlightened amateur. The amateur can judge and feel. The artist only, who has wielded the implements, knows, before a painting, how it is done, what stroke of the brush has been given, and why; in short, the trituration of the matter by the workman. Florent had watched Maitland work so much, he had rendered him so many effective little services in the studio, that each of his brother-in-law’s canvases became animated to him, even to the slightest details. When he saw them on the wall of the gallery they told him of an intimacy which was at once his greatest joy and his greatest pride. In short, the absorption of his personality in that of his former comrade was so complete that it had led to this anomaly, that Dorsenne himself, notwithstanding his indulgence for psychological singularities, had not been able to prevent himself from finding almost monstrous: Florent was Lincoln’s brother-in-law, and he seemed to find it perfectly natural that the latter should have adventures outside, if the emotion of those adventures could be useful to his talent!

Perhaps this long and yet incomplete analysis will permit us the better to comprehend what emotions agitated the young man as he reascended the staircase of his house—of their house, Lincoln’s and his—after his unexpected dispute with Boleslas Gorka. It will attenuate, at least with respect to him, the severity of simple minds. All passion, when developed in the heart, has the effect of etiolating around it the vigor of other instincts. Chapron was too fanatical a friend to be a very equitable brother. It seemed to him very simple and very legitimate that his sister should be at the service of the genius of Lincoln, as he himself was. Moreover, if, since the marriage with her brother’s friend, his sister had been stirred by the tempest of a moral tragedy, Florent did not suspect it. When had he studied Lydia, the silent, reserved Lydia, of whom he had once for all formed an opinion, as is the almost invariable custom of relative with relative? Those who have seen us when young are like those who see us daily. The images which they trace of us always reproduce what we were at a certain moment—scarcely ever what we are. Florent considered his sister very good, because he had formerly found her so; very gentle, because she had never resisted him; not intelligent, because she did not seem sufficiently interested in the painter’s work; as for the suffering and secret rebellion of the oppressed creature, crushed between his blind partiality and the selfishness of a scornful husband, he did not even suspect them, much less the terrible resolution of which that apparent resignation was capable.

If he had trembled when Madame Steno began to interest herself in Lincoln, it was solely for the work of the latter, so much the more as for a year he had perceived not a decline but a disturbance in the painting of that artist, too voluntary not to be unequal. Then Florent had seen, on the other hand, the nerve of Maitland reawakened in the warmth of that little intrigue.

The portrait of Alba promised to be a magnificent study, worthy of being placed beside the famous ‘Femme en violet et en jaune,’ which those envious of Lincoln always remembered. Moreover, the painter had finished with unparalleled ardor two large compositions partly abandoned. In the face of that proof of a fever of production more and more active, how would not Florent have blessed Madame Steno, instead of cursing her, so much the more that it sufficed him to close his eyes and to know that his conscience was in repose when opposite his sister? He knew all, however. The proof of it was in his shudder when Dorsenne announced to him the clandestine arrival in Rome of Madame Steno’s other lover, and one proof still more certain, the impulse which had precipitated him upon Boleslas, who was parleying with the servant, and now it was he who had accepted the duel which an exasperated rival had certainly come to propose to his dear Lincoln, and he thought only of the latter.

“He must know nothing until afterward. He would take the affair upon himself, and I have a chance to kill him, that Gorka—to wound him, at least. In any case, I will arrange it so that a second duel will be rendered difficult to that lunatic.... But, first of all, let us make sure that we have not spoken too loudly and that they have not heard upstairs the ill-bred fellow’s loud voice.”

It was in such terms that he qualified his adversary of the morrow. For very little more he would have judged Gorka unpardonable not to thank Lincoln, who had done him the honor to supplant him in the Countess’s favor!

In the meantime, let us cast a glance at the atelier! When the friend, devoted to complicity, but also to heroism, entered the vast room, he could see at the first glance that he had been mistaken and that no sound of voices had reached that peaceful retreat.

The atelier of the American painter was furnished with a harmonious sumptuousness which real artists know how to gather around them. The large strip of sky seen through the windows looked down upon a corner veritably Roman—of the Rome of to-day, which attests an uninterrupted effort toward forming a new city by the side of the old one. One could see an angle of the old garden and the fragment of an antique building, with a church steeple beyond. It was on a background of azure, of verdure and of ruins, in a horizon larger and more distant, but composed of the same elements, that was to arise the face of the young girl, designed after the manner, so sharp and so modelled, of the ‘Pier della Francesca’, with whom Maitland had been preoccupied for six months.