Voltaire is seated, his hands leaning upon, almost clinching, the arms of his chair. The Curé d'Ars is on his knees. Voltaire smiles with a cynical air, as if rejoicing in the ruin he has made. "Dors tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire." [Footnote 91]
[Footnote 91: "Rest content, Voltaire, and thy hideous smile."—Alfred De Musset.]
The Curé d'Ars smiles with the ineffably sweet smile of those who see God and dream of the happiness of their equals. In the two marbles, the head is the same; the forehead is the same; the two cheek-bones, so prominent, are the same; the receding chin is the same; the mouth opens by the same smile. In one it has a repulsive and satanic character; in the other it is angelical and attractive. Everything is similar except the expression. The features are brothers—twins, I might say; the souls that animate these features are as divided as the poles. In each face the cornea of the eye is represented by a deeply cut circle, a style of carving peculiar to the best age of statuary. This has given to each an intensity of look; and while that of Voltaire is lowered toward the earth, and only expresses the baser passions, that of the Curé d'Ars is uplifted to the sky, and reflects the joys of his moral superiority.
Thus, we see, the two statues give perfectly the character and life of their respective models. The first seems to rise from regions of hope and love, the second from despair and malevolence. One represents the consoler and saviour, the other the spoiler, the demolisher of souls and consciences.
It would be easy to point out other resemblances and other contrasts.
To complete this analysis it is well to add, that the statue of the Curé d'Ars recalls an element that the author has not taken from our own school. Every one conversant with art will remember the figure of San Diego in Murillo's picture vulgarly called the Kitchen of the Angels. The saint prays to God for the actual necessities of the abbey, and God sends his angels to prepare the repast of the monks. Several gentlemen, visiting the convent, look on with astonishment at the saint raised from the earth, ravished with ecstasy, his hands joined, his eyes uplifted to heaven, while the angels are getting ready the dinner. The natural and supernatural were never more widely separated. Murillo has painted the personages working a miracle as he would any person in any ordinary action of life; yet who that has seen this picture will ever forget it? It is evident that our artist was struck by it, and that the San Diego of Murillo has occurred to him more than once when he represented the Curé d'Ars. He has been inspired by it as a true artist, guarding his own originality. His hero has very much the same simplicity that characterizes the saint of the Spanish painter, the same natural in the supernatural, the same ease of vision and ecstasy. Both see, and in seeing they evidence none of the fear or surprise which could actuate the less assured believer. They see; they are in heaven with God and his angels; they converse with them, and their faces express no other sensation than the tender and deep joy of the man who has discovered his ideal.
Delicate and profound characteristic! shade difficult to seize, and which constitutes the true essence of men living in God, and beginning on earth their immaterial existence. It needs more than an artist to fix this and give it form. Only a simple and pious Christian could crown the heads of our blessed ones with the mystical aureole that the believer alone discovers; only a Christian could give to the figures of which we speak the attitude and life so manifestly stolen from regions of beatitude. The great difficulty of the work consisted in this shade, and that may be said to form the perfect whole. The artist's title to glory is in his having known how to comprehend and realize this, and so give to his statue the freedom of none other.
Let us dwell on this expression of sanctity—the distinctive feature in the personage produced by M. Cabuchet. Sanctity has a strikingly physiological character. It changes the exterior man, and transforms his countenance. The action of Jesus Christ, dwelling constantly in the soul, gives to the features a reflection of a superior order. Sanctity, to speak properly, represents the fusion of divine and human nature. The pervading feature of saints is a calm, a serenity, a natural goodness which attracts and subjugates us. The transfigured soul transfigures its envelope, and we might imagine divinity showing itself through the encasement of the body. If the beautiful is the glory of truth, the saint is the glory of good.