When an artist like myself suffers from a hypertrophy of the intelligence, when he feels himself intoxicated by criticism, paralysed by theories, this symbol of the cursed and wandering nymph who expiates in distress the crime of wishing to know, becomes, too, too real, too true. It agitates too powerfully cords which are too deep. I always felt myself attracted by this subject, without doubt on account of that, and I have never been able to make a success of the scenes of canvasses on which I have begun to treat the subject. Camille Favier is far away and the “Psyché pardonnée” is still unfinished. I would like to introduce into the picture, too, many tints. But then the slightest pretext has always been and will always be enough to distract me. The clear impression which I retained of Camille was of all these pretexts the most delightful, and the one which least disturbed my craft as a painter, thanks to the strange compromise of conscience which I devised, about which I will tell you.
“As I cannot help thinking of her all day long,” I said to myself at last, “suppose I try to paint her portrait from memory? Goethe pretended that to deliver himself from a sorrow, it was sufficient for him to compose a poem. Why should not a painted poem have the same virtue as a written one?” Was not this paradoxical and foolish enterprise, the portrait without a model of a woman seen but twice, the work of a poet? It was paradoxical but not foolish. I had to fix upon canvas this pale silhouette which haunted my dreams, my first impression of which was so clear that by shutting my eyes I could see her before me just as she appeared—upon the stage, fine and fairylike in her youth and genius beneath her make-up, with the blue costume of her part; then in her dressing-room, by turns tender and satirical, with the picturesque disorder around her which betrayed the thousand small miseries of her calling; then along the wall of the Invalides under the stars of that December night, leaning on my arm, pale and magnified as if she were transfigured by the sadness of her confidences; and last of all at home, tragic and trembling at the deceit practised upon her? All these Camilles were blended in my mind into an image hardly less clear than her presence itself. I dismissed Malvina. I relegated “Psyché” to a corner of the studio, and I made a large red crayon drawing of my phantom. The likeness in this portrait outlined in the fever of a passionate pity was striking. Camille smiled at me from the bluish paper. It was only a sketch, but so lifelike that I was astonished at it myself.
As usual I doubted my own talent, and to verify the fact that this portrait from memory was really successful to this extent, I went to a shop in the Rue de Rivoli where photographs of famous people were for sale. I asked for one of the fashionable actress. They had a collection of six. I bought them with a blush on my face, a ridiculous timidity considering my age, my profession, and the innocence of the purchase. I waited before examining, them in detail till I was alone beneath the bare chestnuts in the Tuileries on this overcast autumn afternoon, which accorded well with the nostalgia with which I was seized before these portraits. The most charming of them represented Camille in walking dress. It must have been at least two years old, at a period certainly before she became Jacques’ mistress. There was in the eyes and at the lips of this girlish picture a maidenly and somewhat shy expression, the shamefaced nervous reserve of a soul which has not yet given itself—the soul of a child which foresees its destiny and fears it, but desires the mysterious unknown. Two others of these photographs represented the debutante in the two parts she had played at the Odéon. She was the same innocent child, but the determination to succeed had formed a wrinkle between her brows, and there was the light of battle in her eyes; the firm, almost strained fold of the mouth revealed the anxiety of an ambition which doubts itself. The three latter photographs showed in the costume of the Blue Duchess the woman at last born from the child. The revelation of love was displayed by the nostrils which breathed life, and by the eyes in which the flame of pleasure, light and burning, floated; and the mouth had something like a trace, upon its fuller lips, of kisses given and received.
Would another day come when other pictures would tell no more of the romance of the artist and lover, but of the venal slave of gallantry, kept by a Tournade, by several Tournades, and forever branded by shameless and profligate luxury. But I always went back to the earliest of these photographs, the one I would have desired, had I been able to meet the living model in that same garden of the Tuileries, on her way to the Conservatoire. Now I could think of her only as she had been before her first stain, such as she would never be again!
“Poesy is deliverance”; yes, perhaps, for a Goethe, or for a Leonard, for one of those sovereign creatures who throw all their inner being into, and incarnate it in, a written or painted work. There is another race of artists to whom their work is only an exaltation of a certain inner state. They do not rid themselves of suffering by expressing it, they develop it, they inflame it, perhaps because they do not know how to express it and to entirely rid themselves of it. This was so in my own case. Before these photographs my project for a portrait became praise. I only retained the first one. It was the eighteen-year-old Camille I wished to evoke and paint. It was a phantom, the phantom of her whom I might have known in her purity, as a virgin, might have loved and perhaps married. It was a portrait of a phantom, of a dead woman.
From this task was diffused upon me during the week’s seclusion and uninterrupted labour that vague and satisfying delight which floats around a woman’s form which has gone for ever. In analysing under the microscope the tiny details of this face upon this bad and almost faded photograph, I enjoyed for hours a voluptuous and unutterably attractive soul’s pleasure. There was not a trait in this ingenuous face in which I did not discover a proof, quite obvious and physiological to me, of an exquisite delicacy of nature in the person, of whom that had been a momentary likeness. The tiny ear with its pretty lobe told of her breeding. Her pale silky hair displayed tints in its ringlets which seemed faded and washed out. The construction of the lower part of the face could be seen to be fine and robust beneath her slender cheeks. There was a shade of sensuality in her lower lip which was slightly flattened and split by the wrinkle which betokens great goodness. There was intelligence and gaiety in her straight nose, which was cut a trifle short in comparison with her chin. But what of her eyes? Her great, clear, profound eyes, innocent and tender, curious and dreamy! As I looked at them, to my overwrought imagination they seemed to be animate. Her little head turned upon a neck, which fine attachment displayed the slenderness of the rest of the body.
I never understood so well as in that period of contemplative exaltation that oriental jealousy which protects their women from the caress of the glance, which is as passionate, as enveloping, and almost as deflowering as the other caresses. To contemplate is to possess. How I felt that during those long sittings spent in putting on to canvas such a real and deceptive mirage as the smile and eyes of Camille, her smile of the past, and her eyes of to-day lit by ether flames! How I felt, too, that my talent was not in the depths of my soul, since the intoxication of this spiritual possession was not achieved by a definite creature! I have only sketched these days in which I lived and experienced the sensations produced by the achievement of a masterpiece. At least I respected in myself this attack of the sacred fever, and I never again touched, to complete it, the portrait I had drawn in that week. Why was not the period prolonged?
Why? The fault is not alone in my own weakness. A simple incident occurred which did not depend upon my will. It sufficed to dismiss me from the drama of coquetry and real love which I wished to shun, to avoid being the confidant of former tragedies boasted of by Jacques—a confidant himself wounded and bleeding. Because of my troubles during the day following my introduction to the Bonnivets, and during my week’s solitary work, I had neglected to call upon them and leave my card. For that reason I felt I was not likely to see Queen Anne again. But that was the quarter from which reached me the pretext to break this period of solitude and work in the ordinary shape of a perfumed note emblazoned and scrawled in the most coquettish and impersonal English handwriting, by Madam de Bonnivet herself. It was an invitation to dine with her and a small party of mutual friends.
The fact that this invitation reached me after my breach of etiquette proved clearly enough that her quarrel with Jacques had not lasted. The brief notice the dinner was for the following day, showed on the other hand that it was an unexpected invitation. A third fact added an enigmatic character to this note, which was as commonplace as the writing in it! Why had it not reached me through Jacques or with a few lines from him? My first idea was to refuse it. A dinner in town had appeared to me for years an insupportable and useless task. The too numerous family feasts I am constrained to attend, why?—the monthly love feasts of fellow artists which I am weak enough to frequent—why again?—two or three friends who dine with me from time to time—because I like them—the dining-room at the club where I go when I am very bored—these gatherings to a great extent suffice for the social sense which has withered in me with age. I shall end, I think, by only dining out about once in three years.
The dinner to which the beautiful and dangerous Queen Anne had invited me was one the more to be avoided, as it plunged me once more into the current of emotions I had stemmed so resolutely and painfully. I sat down to write a note of refusal, which I put into an envelope and stamped. Then instead of sending the letter to the post, I put it in my pocket to post myself. I called a passing cab, and instead of telling the driver to stop at the nearest post office I gave him Molan’s address, Place Delaborde—the house I had sworn not to enter again. Would there not still be time to send my refusal after finding out from Jacques the reason of Madam de Bonnivet’s amiability, about which I could say with Ségur of the promotion of officers, after the battle of Moskwa: “These favours threatened?”