Bohemian Paris of To-day / Second Edition

by W. C. Morrow; Edward Cucuel

This double work, with increasing pressure from my modelling, required longer hours at night and shorter hours in the morning. But I was satisfied, for this was to be Bishop's masterpiece, and I knew from the marvellous labor and spirit that he put into the work that something good would result.

The name of his great effort was "The Suicide." It was like him to choose so grisly a subject, for he had a lawless nature and rebelled against the commonplace. Ghastly subjects had always fascinated him. From the very beginning of our domestic partnership he had shown a taste for grim and forbidding things. Often, upon returning home, I had found him making sketches of armless beggars, twisted cripples, and hunchbacks, and, worse than all, disease-marked vagabonds. A skull-faced mortal in the last stages of consumption was a joy to him. It was useless for me to protest that he was failing to find the best in him by developing his unwholesome tastes. "Wait," he would answer patiently; "the thing that has suffering and character, that is out of the ordinary, it is the thing that will strike and live."

The suicide was a young woman gowned in black; she was poised in the act of plunging into the Seine; a babe was tightly clutched to her breast; and behind the unspeakable anguish in her eyes was a hungry hope, a veiled assurance of the peace to come. It fascinated and haunted me beyond all expression. It was infinitely sad, tragic, and terrible, for it reached with a sure touch to the very lowest depth of human agony. The scene was the dead of night, and only the dark towers of Notre-Dame broke the even blackness of the sky, save for a faint glow that touched the lower stretches from the distant lamps of the city. In the darkness only the face of the suicide was illuminated, and that but dimly, though sufficiently to disclose the wonderfully complex emotions that crowded upon her soul. This illumination came from three ghastly green lights on the water below. The whole tone of the picture was a black, sombre green.

That was all after the painting had been finished. The making of it is a story by itself. From the first week in January to the first week in March the studio was a junk-shop of the most uncanny sort. In order to pose his model in the act of plunging into the river, Bishop had rigged up a tackle, which, depending from the ceiling, caught the model at the waist, after the manner of a fire-escape belt, and thus half suspended her. He secured his green tone and night effect by covering nearly all the skylight and the window with green tissue-paper, besides covering the floor and walls with green rugs and draperies.

The model behaved very well in her unusual pose, but the babe—that was the rub. The model did not happen to possess one, and Bishop had not yet learned the difficulties attending the procuring and posing of infants. In the first place, he found scores of babes, but not a mother, however poor, willing to permit her babe to be used as a model, and a model for so gruesome a situation. But after he had almost begun to despair, and had well advanced with his woman model, an Italian woman came one day and informed him that she could get an infant from a friend of her sister's, if he would pay her one franc a day for the use of it. Bishop eagerly made the bargain. Then a new series of troubles began.

The babe objected most emphatically to the arrangement. It refused to nestle in the arms of a strange woman about to plunge into eternity, and the strange woman had no knack at all in soothing the infant's outraged feelings. Besides, the model was unable to meet the youngster's frequent demands for what it was accustomed to have, and the mother, who was engaged elsewhere, had to be drummed up at exasperatingly frequent intervals. All this told upon both Bishop and Francinette, the model, and they took turns in swearing at the unruly brat, Bishop in English and Francinette in French. Neither knew how to swear in Italian, or things might have been different. I happened in upon these scenes once in a while, and my enjoyment so exasperated Bishop that he threw paint- tubes, bottles, and everything else at me that he could reach, and once or twice locked me out of the studio, compelling me to kick my shins in the cold street for hours at a time. On such occasions I would stand in the court looking up at our window, expecting momentarily that the babe would come flying down from that direction.

When Bishop was not sketching and painting he was working up his inspiration; and that was worst of all. His great effort was to get himself into a suicidal mood. He would sit for hours on the floor, his face between his knees, imagining all sorts of wrongs and slights that the heartless world had put upon him. His husband had beaten him and gone off with another woman; he had tried with all his woman-heart to bear the cross; hunger came to pinch and torture him; he sought work, failed to find it; sought charity, failed to find that; his babe clutched at his empty breasts and cried piteously for food; his heart broken, all hope gone, even God forgetting him, he thought of the dark, silent river, the great cold river, that has brought everlasting peace to countless thousands of suffering young mothers like him; he went to the river; he looked back upon the faint glow of the city's lights in the distance; he cast his glance up to the grim towers of Notre-Dame, standing cold and pitiless against the blacker sky; he looked down upon the black Seine, the great writhing python, so willing to swallow him up; he clutched his babe to his breast, gasped a prayer....

At other times he would haunt the Morgue and study the faces of those who had died by felo-de-se; he would visit the hospitals and study the dying; he would watch the actions and read the disordered thoughts of lunatics; he would steal along the banks; of the river on dark nights and study the silent mystery and tragedy of it, and the lights that gave shape to its terrors. In the end I grew afraid of him.