One day on the street Tiburce catches sight of a woman who bears—a striking resemblance to the Magdalen! Her—Gretchen—he eventually meets, and to her he reluctantly gives his love. Yet, though Gretchen comes to love Tiburce, she cannot evoke in him quite the same feelings he knows in the presence of Rubens’ beautiful woman—the Magdalen is still his ideal. Even when he christens the girl with the name of the Penitent, the transformation is not complete. At length Gretchen, hidden behind a pillar, overhears Tiburce sighing out his worship toward the woman of the painting: “How I would love thee to-morrow if thou wert living!”—and realizes that she is loved only vicariously.
By and by they go to Paris, where the artist feels his love for the absent Magdalen grow instead of wane, and Gretchen can bear her jealous unhappiness no longer. She breaks out into a tender eloquence of reproach: “You are ambitious to love; you are deceived concerning yourself, you will never love. You must have perfection, the ideal and poesy—all those things which do not exist. Instead of loving in a woman the love that she has for you, of being grateful to her for her devotion and for the gift of her heart, you look to see if she resembles that plaster Venus in your study.... You are not a lover, poor Tiburce, you are simply a painter.”
And so she goes on, uncovering to him his foolish delusion, ending in a passion of abandonment, of “sublime immodesty,” by appearing before him like Aphrodite rising from the sea.
Swept by all this nobility of her discerning spirit, and all the ravishing charm of her beauty, Tiburce seizes his brushes and does master work—and then begs his new-found love to name the day for the crying of their banns.
Perhaps it needs no word here to emphasize one phase of Gautier’s nature—he knew himself to be a beauty-lover, and he knew all the limitations of character that this cult rendered inevitable.
A second force in Gautier’s life was his orientalism. In this he was not only conscious of the strain of eastern blood that pulsed through both body and temperament, but he was, by reason of long application, constant travel, and the varied opportunities of a critic’s life, a savant on matters oriental, particularly Pompeian and Egyptian.
Here, again, “The Romance of a Mummy,” a long tale, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” a short tale, and “The Mummy’s Foot,” which follows in translation, display the savant in his work. The movement of life in ancient Egypt in the time of the Hebrew bondage, and all that highly colored, picturesque civilization, afford him the always coveted background which he valued as much for itself as for its use as a setting.
In another of his shorter stories, “Arria Marcella,” the savant is also evident. The familiar but terrible theme of the vampire woman is set in an idealized reconstruction of Pompeian life; just as that one perfect short-story from the pen of Gautier, “The Dead Leman” (La Morte Amoureuse), marvellously made to live again the mediæval spirit in the poignantly pitiful mistress whose end is the heart-break of selfish passion; and “The Thousand-and-Second Night” evokes anew the indistinct, subtle, alluring odors of the Arabian Nights.