The Unknown Masterpiece

by Honoré de Balzac

  “Two casks,” the old man replied. “One to pay for this morning’s pleasure of seeing your lovely sinner, and the other as a gift of friendship.”

  “Oh, if I weren’t still ailing,” Porbus continued, “and you would allow me a glimpse of your mistress, I think I could do a picture with life-size figures—something high, wide, and with real depth to it, too.”

  “Show you my work!” the old man exclaimed, suddenly upset. “No, no, it must still be brought to perfection. Yesterday, toward evening, I thought I was done. Her eyes seemed moist to me, her flesh was alive, the locks of her hair stirred...She breathed! Though I thought I’d learned how to render nature’s depth and solidity on a flat canvas, this morning, by daylight, I discovered my mistake. Ah! To achieve this glorious result, I’ve studied all the great colorists. Layer by layer I’ve analyzed and dissected the paintings of Titian, and like that master of light, I’ve laid in my figure in high colors with a soft, heavily loaded brush, for shadow is no more than an accident—remember that, my boy. Then I went back over my work and by using halftones and glazes, which I made less and less transparent, I managed to create the strongest shadows and even the deepest blacks—for most painters’ shadows are of a different nature from their lighter tones; they’re wood or bronze, whatever you like, anything except flesh in shadow. You feel that if the figure were to change position, the shadowed parts would never brighten, never become luminous...I’ve avoided this defect where so many of the most illustrious artists have failed: in my pictures the whites are still white within the opacity of even the deepest shadows! Unlike that pack of dabblers who suppose they’re drawing correctly because their work is so painstakingly sleek, I never surround my figures with the sort of dry outlines that emphasize every little anatomical detail—the human body isn’t bounded by lines! In this regard, sculptors come closer to the truth than we painters ever can. Nature consists of a series of shapes that melt into one another. Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as drawing! Don’t laugh, young man! Strange as it sounds, you’ll understand the truth of this some day. Line is the means by which man accounts for the effect of light on objects, but in nature there are no lines—in nature everything is continuous and whole. It’s by modeling that we draw, by which I mean that once we detach things from the medium in which they exist, only the distribution of light gives the body its appearance! Hence I never fix an outline; I spread a cloud of warm blond halftones over the contours—you can never put your finger right where the contours blend into the backgrounds. At close range, such labors look blurred and seem to lack precision, but at two paces everything congeals, solidifies, stands out; the body turns, the forms project, you feel the air circulating around them. Yet I’m still not satisfied—I have doubts. Perhaps it’s wrong to draw a single line: Wouldn’t it be better to deal with a figure from the center, concentrating first on the projecting parts which take the light most readily, then proceeding to the darker portions? Isn’t that the method of the sun, the divine painter of the universe? Oh nature, nature! Who has ever plumbed your secrets? There’s no escaping it; too much knowledge, like too much ignorance, leads to a negation. My work is ...my doubt!”

  The old man paused, then continued: “It’s ten years now, young man, that I’ve been struggling with this problem. But what are ten short years when you’re contending with nature? How long did Lord Pygmalion take to create the only statue that ever walked!”

  The old man sank into a profound reverie, his eyes fixed and his fingers toying mechanically with his knife.

  “Now he’s in conversation with his genius,” Porbus whispered.

  At this word, Nicolas Poussin was seized by an inexplicable curiosity—an artist’s curiosity. This old man with his blank stare, fixed and comatose, had become more than human in the youth’s eyes: a kind of fantastic genie inhabiting an unknown sphere, rousing a thousand vague ideas in his soul. The moral phenomenon of such fascination can no more be defined than we can translate into words the emotion produced by a song reminding an exile of his homeland. The scorn the old man affected for the noble endeavors of art, his wealth, his odd manners, Porbus’s deference toward him, his supreme work of art kept secret for so long—a work of patience, doubtless of genius, judging by the head of the Virgin which young Poussin had so candidly admired and which, still beautiful even beside Mabuse’s Adam, evidenced the imperial mastery of one of the princes of art: everything about this old man transcended the limits of human nature. What Nicolas Poussin’s fervent imagination could apprehend, what now became quite clear to him from his intercourse with this supernatural being, was a consummate image of the artist’s nature, that wild nature to which so many powers are entrusted, and which all too often abuses them, leading cold reason, the bourgeois public, and even some connoisseurs down a myriad barren paths, precisely where this capricious white-winged sprite discovers castles, epics, works of art! A nature sometimes mocking, sometimes kind, at once fertile and desolate! So for the enthusiastic Poussin, this old man had become, by a sudden transfiguration, Art itself, art with all its secrets, its passions, its reveries.

  “Yes, my dear Porbus,” Frenhofer continued, “till now, what I’ve failed to find is a flawless woman, a body whose contours are perfectly beautiful, and whose complexion—But where is she in the flesh?” he interrupted himself. “That matchless Venus of the ancients, so often sought and never found except in scattered elements, some fragmentary beauties here, some there! Oh! I would give all I possess if just once, for a single moment, I could gaze upon that complete, that divine nature; if I could meet that ideal heavenly beauty, I would search for her in limbo itself! Like Orpheus, I would descend into the Hades of art to bring her back to life!”

  “We might as well leave now,” Porbus murmured to Poussin. “He doesn’t hear us anymore, or see us either!”

  “Let’s go up to his studio,” the dazzled youth suggested.

  “Oh, the old monkey has made sure to keep it locked away from the likes of you and me. His treasures are too well protected for us to get at them. I didn’t wait for your suggestion and your imagination to lay siege to that mystery...”

  “Then there is a mystery?”

  “Yes,” Porbus replied. “Old Frenhofer is the only pupil Mabuse would take on. Becoming his friend, his savior, his father, Frenhofer sacrificed the greater part of his treasures to satisfy Mabuse’s passions; in exchange, Mabuse bequeathed him the secret of relief in painting, the power to give his figures an extraordinary life, that natural bloom which is our eternal despair but the technique of which he possessed so securely that one day, having drunk up the money for the brocaded damask he was to wear at the ceremonial reception of Charles V, he accompanied his patron wearing paper garments painted to look like damask. The special luster of the material Mabuse was wearing amazed the Emperor, who, in attempting to compliment the old drunkard’s companion, discovered the deception. Frenhofer’s a man in love with our art, a man who sees higher and farther than other painters. He’s meditated on the nature of color, on the absolute truth of line, but by dint of so much research, he has come to doubt the very object of his investigations. In moments of despair, he claims that drawing doesn’t exist and that lines are only good for rendering geometrical figures, which is far from the truth, since with line and with black, which is not a color, we can create a human figure. There’s your proof that our art is like nature itself, composed of an infinity of elements: drawing accounts for the skeleton, color supplies life, but life without a skeleton is even more deficient than a skeleton without life. Lastly, there’s something even truer than all this, which is that practice and observation are everything to a painter; so that if reasoning and poetry argue with our brushes, we wind up in doubt, like our old man here, who’s as much a lunatic as he is a painter—a sublime painter who had the misfortune to be born into wealth, which has allowed him to wander far and wide. Don’t do that to yourself! Work while you can! A painter should philosophize only with a brush in his
hand.”

  “We’ll get in there somehow!” Poussin exclaimed, no longer listening to Porbus and oblivious of obstacles. Porbus smiled at the unknown youth’s enthusiasm and took his leave, offering an invitation to come and see him.

  Nicolas Poussin slowly made his way toward the rue de la Harpe, so absorbed that he walked right past his modest lodgings. Turning back and climbing the filthy stairs with anxious haste, he reached a high bedroom under a half-timbered gable poorly protected by the flimsy roofing of old Parisian houses. Near the one dark window of his room, he saw a girl who, at the sound of the door, suddenly jumped up with a loving impulse—she had recognized the painter by the way he jiggled the latch.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Wrong!” he exclaimed, gasping with excitement. “For the first time in my life I realized I could be a painter! Until now I doubted myself, but this morning I believed! I can be a great man! You’ll see, Gillette, we’ll be rich, we’ll be happy! There’s gold in these brushes!”

  But suddenly he fell silent. The look of joy faded from his serious, energetic countenance as he compared the immensity of his hopes to the insignificance of his resources. The walls were covered with sheets of paper crisscrossed with crayon sketches. He owned perhaps four clean canvases. Paints were expensive in those days, and the poor young gentleman’s palette was nearly bare. Yet in the depths of such poverty, he possessed and reveled in incredible riches of spirit and a superabundance of consuming genius. Lured to Paris by a nobleman who had befriended him, or perhaps by his own ambitions, he had succeeded in finding a mistress, one of those noble, generous souls who endure their trials at a great man’s side, espousing his poverty and struggling to understand his whims, intrepid in love and poverty as other women are in the show of luxury and heartlessness. The smile playing over Gillette’s lips gilded their garret and rivaled the light of heaven. The sun might not always shine, but she was always there, steadfast in her passion, devoted to his suffering as to his happiness, consoling the genius who exulted in their love before taking possession of his art.

  “Listen, Gillette, I have something to tell you.” Obediently, the happy girl leaped onto the painter’s lap. She was grace itself, lovely as springtime, adorned with all the feminine charms which she illuminated with the flame of a beautiful soul.

  “Oh God!” he exclaimed. “I’ll never dare ask her...”

  “Is it a secret?” she interrupted. “I want to hear it.”

  Poussin remained lost in thought.

  “Tell me what it is!”

  “Gillette, my poor sweetheart!”

  “Oh, you want me to do something?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you want me to pose for you the way I did the other day,” she continued with a little pout, “I’ll never do that again, for when I do, your eyes no longer speak to me. You aren’t thinking of me, even when you’re looking right at me.”

  “Would you like it better if I was drawing another woman?”

  “Maybe,” she said, “if she were really ugly.”

  “Well then,” Poussin continued in a serious tone of voice, “what if, for my future glory—if it would make me a great painter—you were to pose for someone else?”

  “You’re testing me,” she said. “You know perfectly well I wouldn’t do it!”

  Poussin’s head dropped onto his chest like a man yielding to a joy or a sorrow too strong for his soul.

  “Listen,” she said, tugging the sleeve of Poussin’s threadbare doublet, “I’ve told you, Nick, I’d give my life for you, but I never promised you I’d give up my love.”

  “Give it up?” cried Poussin.

  “If I showed myself that way to someone else, you wouldn’t love me anymore. And I myself would feel unworthy of you. I do everything you ask, don’t I? It’s only natural I should. In spite of myself, I’m happy that way. I’m even proud to do your will. But for someone else—oh no!”

  “Forgive me, Gillette!” the painter exclaimed, kneeling before her. “I’d rather have love than all the fame in the world—you’re more to me than wealth and honors. Go throw away my brushes, burn these sketches. I was wrong. My vocation is loving you—I’m not a painter, I’m a lover. Let art and its secrets go to the devil!”

  She marveled at him, happy, enchanted! She ruled now, and felt instinctively that art was forgotten for her sake, cast at her feet like a grain of incense.

  “Even so, he’s just an old man,” mused Poussin. “He’d only be able to see the woman in you. You’re so perfect!”

  “Love conquers all!” she cried, ready to sacrifice her romantic scruples to reward Poussin for all he was giving up on her account. “But it will be the ruin of me. Oh, I’m perfectly willing to ruin myself for your sake! I know it’s a beautiful thing to do, but then you’ll forget me. Oh, what a terrible idea has taken possession of your mind!”

  “It has, and I love you,” he said with a sort of contrition. “Does that make me a villain?”

  “Shall we consult Father Hardouin?” she asked.

  “Oh no, let it be our secret.”

  “All right then, I’ll go, but you must not be there,” she said. “Stay outside the door, keep your sword drawn, and if I scream, come in and kill the painter.”

  No longer envisioning anything but his art, Poussin flung his arms around Gillette.

  “He doesn’t love me anymore!” thought Gillette once she was alone, already regretting her decision. But she soon fell prey to a fear crueler than her regret, though she tried to dismiss the dreadful thought that coiled round her heart: perhaps she already loved the painter less, suspecting him of being less worthy of love than before.

  2. Catherine Lescault

  Three months after Poussin met Porbus, the latter paid a visit to Maître Frenhofer. The old man was suffering at the time from one of those deep and spontaneous depressions caused, according to the mathematicians of medicine, by poor digestion, by wind, by heat, or by some swelling of the abdominal regions; and according to those who prefer a spiritual explanation, by the imperfection of our moral nature. The poor man was quite simply exhausted by the effort to complete his mysterious picture. He appeared to have collapsed on an enormous throne of carved oak upholstered in black leather, and without altering his melancholy posture, he stared at Porbus with the expression of a man not to be argued out of his distress.

  “Well now, maître,” Porbus cajoled him, “was it so bad, that ultramarine you went all the way to Bruges for? Or couldn’t you grind your new white fine enough? Has your oil gone sour? Are the brushes stiff?”

  “Alas!” the old man cried. “For a time I believed my painting was done; but now I’m sure several details are wrong, and I won’t have a moment’s peace till I’ve dispelled my doubts. I’ve made up my mind to travel—I’m off to Greece, Turkey, even Asia to look for a model; I want to compare my picture to various beauties in nature. Perhaps,” he continued with a smile of satisfaction, “perhaps I’ve got nature herself upstairs. Sometimes I’m almost afraid to breathe, lest I waken the woman and she vanishes.” And he suddenly stood up, as if to leave at that moment.

  “Oh, then I’m just in time,” Porbus replied, “to spare you the expense and the fatigue of the journey.”

  “How’s that?” asked Frenhofer in surprise.

  “Young Poussin happens to have a mistress of incomparable beauty—not one defect! But if he consents to lend her to you, you must give us at least a glimpse of that canvas of yours.”

  The old man remained standing just where he had risen to his feet, in a state of utter stupefaction.

  “What!” he exclaimed at last, with a wail of pain. “Expose my creation, my wife? Rend the veil by which I’ve so chastely hidden my happiness? But that would be a terrible prostitution! For ten years now I’ve lived with this woman; she’s mine, mine alone, she loves me. Hasn’t she smiled at me with each brushstroke I’ve given her? She has a soul, I tell you, the soul I’ve endowed her with. She’d blush if
other eyes than mine were fastened on her. Show her! What husband, what lover would be vile enough to put his own wife to such shame? When you paint a picture for the court, you needn’t put your very soul into it; what you’re selling the courtiers is no more than a fancy mannequin! My painting’s not a painting, my figure’s a feeling, a passion! Born in my studio, my beauty must remain inviolate there—she may not leave until she’s fully dressed. Poetry and women show themselves naked only to their lovers! Do we possess Raphael’s model, Ariosto’s Angelica, Dante’s Beatrice? No, we see only their Forms. Well! The work I keep under lock and key upstairs is an exception in our art. It isn’t a canvas, it’s a woman! A woman with whom I weep and laugh and talk and think. Do you suppose I’d suddenly abandon ten years’ felicity the way you take off a cloak? That all at once I’d cease being a father, a lover, and God Himself? This woman’s not a creature, she’s a creation. Let your young man come, I’ll give him my treasures, I’ll give him Correggios, Titians, even Michelangelos! I’ll kiss his footprints in the dust. But make him my rival? Shame on me! Ha, ha! I’m still more of a lover than a painter. Yes, I’m strong enough to burn my Catherine as I draw my dying breath, but to compel her to endure the gaze of a man, a young man, a painter? No, no! If anyone sullied her with a glance, I’d kill him the next day! I’d kill you then and there, my friend, if you didn’t greet her on your knees! And you’d have me subject my idol to the cold gaze and the stupid criticisms of fools? Ah, love’s a mystery: it lives only in the depths of our hearts, and all is lost when a man says, even to his friend, ‘This is the woman I love!’”

  The old man seemed to become young again; his eyes glistened with life, his pale cheeks were tinged with a sudden red, and his hands trembled. Porbus, amazed at the passionate violence with which these words were spoken, was at a loss to reply to a sentiment as novel as it was profound. Was Frenhofer in his right mind, or was he mad? Had he been overtaken by an artist’s illusion, or did such ideas result from that ineffable fanaticism caused by the long gestation of a great work? Could one ever hope to speak reason to this strange passion?