He had hardly told me of this visit, so disturbing to me, in his joking way, when the servant said that two ladies were waiting for me in the studio. God! how my heart beat when I was about to enter the presence of the woman I had sworn to avoid! How my heart beats even now at my vivid and precise recollection of this meeting long ago! I believe that I can see the two of them, mother and daughter, in the crude light of that bright January day which filled, by means of the large glass bay, the studio with a cold pale light. Madam Favier, more placid and smiling than ever, walked from canvas to canvas, looking at them with her great laughing eyes. She would suddenly ask me what was the net cost of a picture, and what did it fetch, with as much simplicity as if it were a question of a dress or a curio. Camille sat down opposite a copy of “L’Allégorie du Printemps,” which I had made in Florence so lovingly. In the long and supple dancers of the divine Sandro, who lent with tender grace their blonde and dreamy though bitter faces, the little Blue Duchess could recognize her sisters. She did not see them, absorbed as she was in a memory, the nature of which I could easily guess, seeing that she had not acted the previous evening, and had found a way to spend that free evening with Jacques, thanks to a complaisant cousin. It hurt me to detect around her tender, almost blood-shot eyes a pearly halo of lassitude, and on her mouth tremors which told of happiness. But what made me feel worse still was that Jacques, directly he came in, copied the photographs I had used to make my dream-picture of her—that chimerical picture of my week of folly, which happily I had put aside and well concealed; and at the moment Camille was greeting me with a slightly embarrassed smile, he displayed those instructive pictures and said maliciously—
“You can see, mademoiselle, that if Vincent has not been to see you again as he promised, he has not forgotten you.”
“It was to better prepare the studies for my future picture,” I stammered. “The great painter Lenbach does so.”
“Who contradicted you?” Molan went on even more maliciously.
“Oh! you have not picked out the best ones,” the mother interrupted as she showed her daughter the photograph I loved best. “You see,” she said, “that in spite of your prohibition, this picture which is such a bad likeness of you is still being sold. Come, now, is it anything like her? I ask you to decide the point, M. La Croix.”
“I was three years younger,” Camille said, “and he did not know me then.” Taking the photograph she looked at it in her turn. Then putting it by the side of her face so that I could see the model and the portrait at the same time, she asked me: “Have I changed very much?”
Poor little Blue Duchess, the sincere lover of the least loving of my friends, romantic child stranded by an ironical caprice of fate in the profession most fatal to mystery, silence and solitude, when the pretty, delicate flowers of your woman’s soul needed a warm atmosphere of protective intimacy, say, did you suspect my emotion when I looked at your face, paled by the pleasures of the previous evening, smiling at me thus by the side of another face, the face of the innocent child you were once, when I might have loved you as my betrothed wife? No, certainly you did not. For you were good; and if you had guessed what I suffered, you would not have imposed upon me this useless ordeal. You would not on that visit have arranged with me the details of that series of sittings which began the following day and were for me a strange and sorrowful Calvary! Yes, however, perhaps you did guess, for there was sadness and pity in your smile—sorrow for yourself and pity for me. You saw so clearly from that moment that I bore an affection for you which was too quickly awakened to be the reasonable and simple friendship of a comrade! You saw it without wishing to admit it, for love is an egoist. Yours had need of being related, to be encouraged in its hopes, comforted in its doubts, and pitied in its grief. Who would have rendered you the service of lending himself as a complaisant echo of your passion like I did? If it cost me my rest for weeks and weeks; if on your departure from my studio after each sitting, just as after your first visit, I remained for hours struggling against the bitterness of which I have not yet emptied my heart, you did not wish to know, and I had not the strength to condemn you to do so. After all, you made me feel, as Jacques used to say, and there will come a time perhaps when, passing my memories in review, I shall bless you for the tears I shed, sometimes as if I were no more than eighteen, on your account, who did not see them. Had you seen them, you would have refused to believe in them, to preserve the right to initiate me into the inner tragedy in which you then lived, and which by a counter stroke, alas! was not spared me.
If I allowed these impressions to go on, I should fill the pages with groans like this, and never reach the tragedy itself, or rather the tragic comedy, in which I played the part of the ancient Chorus, the ineffectual witness of catastrophies, who deplored them without preventing them. Let us employ the only remedy for this useless elegy. Let us note the little facts clearly. I have mentioned that this visit of mother and daughter had as its object the arrangement of a series of sittings. I have also mentioned that the first of these sittings was placed for the following day.
On the following day Camille arrived, not accompanied by her mother, but alone. It was so almost always during the four weeks which this painting lasted, but during the whole of this time the work did not succeed in interesting the artist in me, for my attention was too much absorbed by the adorable child’s confidences, confidences which were ceaselessly interrupted, repeated and prolonged by the interruptions till the details were multiplied and complicated to infinity. Yes, many little facts come into my mind in trying to recall these private sittings which were always somewhat bitter to me. This liberty proved to me how many favourable opportunities her intrigue with Jacques had obtained. Too many little scenes recur to me, and too many multiple and over-lapping impressions which my memory is apt to confuse. It is like a tangled skein of thread I am trying in vain to unravel. Let us see if I can reduce them to some kind of order in classifying them.
These recollections, which are so numerous and so similar that they become mixed, are distributed, when I reflect, into three distinct groups; and these groups mark the stages of this purely moral drama, in which Camille, Jacques and Madam de Bonnivet were engaged, in its progress to a real and terrible drama. When I reflect again, it was the difference between these three groups of emotions which justified me in not making a success of this portrait. Had I been an artist who was an imperturbable master of execution, in place of being what I am, half an amateur, always uncertain, and a sort of “Adolphe” of the brush, all intention and touches, all scratching out and alteration, I should not have been able to execute a unique canvas under such conditions. It was not a woman I had before me during these too long and too short sittings, it was three women.