Great French Short Stories

by Paul Negri

  It was the Adam that Mabuse painted to get out of the prison where his creditors kept him so long. Indeed, that figure gave such a strong impression of being real that, from that moment on, Nicolas Poussin began to understand the true meaning of the confused words the old man had uttered. The old man looked at the picture with seeming satisfaction, but without enthusiasm, and appeared to be saying: “I’ve done better!”

  “There’s life in it,” he said. “My poor master outdid himself in it; but there was still a little truth missing in the background of the picture. The man is really alive; he’s getting up and is going to approach us. But the air, sky, and wind that we breathe, see, and feel aren’t there. Besides, he’s still just a man! Now, the only man who ever came directly from the hands of God ought to have something divine about him, which is missing. Mabuse used to say so himself, with vexation, when he wasn’t drunk.”

  Poussin was looking back and forth between the old man and Pourbus with restless curiosity. He came up to Pourbus as if to ask him their host’s name; but the painter put a finger to his lips with an air of mystery, and the young man, though keenly interested, kept silent, hoping that sooner or later some remark would allow him to learn the name of his host, whose wealth and talents were sufficiently attested to by the respect Pourbus showed him and by the wonders assembled in that room.

  Seeing a magnificent portrait of a woman on the somber oak paneling, Poussin exclaimed: “What a beautiful Giorgione!”

  “No,” replied the old man, “you’re looking at one of my first smears.”

  “Damn! Then I’m in the home of the god of painting,” Poussin said naïvely.

  The old man smiled like a man long accustomed to such praise.

  “Master Frenhofer,” said Pourbus, “could you possibly send for a little of your good Rhenish wine for me?”

  “Two casks,” replied the old man. “One to repay you for the pleasure I had this morning looking at your pretty sinner, and the other as a present to a friend.”

  “Oh, if I weren’t always under the weather,” continued Pourbus, “and if you were willing to let me see your Quarrelsome Beauty, I could paint some tall, wide, deep picture in which the figures were life-size.”

  “Show my painting!” cried the old man, quite upset. “No, no, I still have to perfect it. Yesterday, toward evening,” he said, “I thought I had finished it. Her eyes seemed moist to me, her flesh was stirring. The locks of her hair were waving. She was breathing! Even though I’ve found the way to achieve nature’s relief and three-dimensionality on a flat canvas, this morning, when it got light, I realized my mistake. Oh, to achieve this glorious result, I’ve studied thoroughly the great masters of color, I’ve analyzed and penetrated layer by layer the paintings of Titian, that king of light; like that sovereign painter, I sketched in my figure in a light tint with a supple, heavily loaded brush—for shadow is merely an incidental phenomenon, remember that, youngster. Then I went back over my work and, by means of gradations and glazes that I made successively less transparent, I rendered the heaviest shadows and even the deepest blacks; for the shadows of ordinary painters are of a different nature from their bright tints; they’re wood, bronze, or whatever you want, except flesh in shadow. You feel that, if their figure shifted position, the areas in shadow would never be cleared up and wouldn’t become bright. I avoided that error, into which many of the most illustrious have fallen, and in my picture the whiteness can be discerned beneath the opacity of even the most dense shadow! Unlike that pack of ignoramuses who imagine they’re drawing correctly because they produce a line carefully shorn of all rough edges, I haven’t indicated the outer borders of my figure in a dry manner, bringing out even the slightest detail of the anatomy, because the human body isn’t bounded by lines. In that area, sculptors can come nearer the truth than we can. Nature is comprised of a series of solid shapes that dovetail into one another. Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as drawing ! Don’t laugh, young man! As peculiar as that remark may sound to you, you’ll understand the reasons behind it some day. Line is the means by which man renders the effect of light on objects; but there are no lines in nature, where everything is continuous: it’s by modeling that we draw; that is, we separate things from the medium in which they exist; only the distribution of the light gives the body its appearance ! Thus, I haven’t fixed any outlines, I’ve spread over the contours a cloud of blonde, warm intermediate tints in such a way that no one can put his finger on the exact place where the contours meet the background. From close up, this work looks fleecy and seems lacking in precision, but, at two paces, everything firms up, becomes fixed, and stands out; the body turns, the forms project, and you feel the air circulating all around them. And yet I’m still not satisfied, I have some doubts. Perhaps it’s wrong to draw a single line, perhaps it would be better to attack a figure from the center, first concentrating on the projecting areas that catch most of the light, and only then moving on to the darker sections. Isn’t that how the sun operates, that divine painter of the universe? O nature, nature, who has ever captured you in your inmost recesses? You see, just like ignorance, an excess of knowledge leads to a negation. I have doubts about my painting!”

  The old man paused, then resumed: “It’s ten years now, young man, that I’ve been working on it; but what are ten short years when it’s a question of struggling with nature? We don’t know how long it took Sir Pygmalion to make the only statue that ever walked!”

  The old man dropped into deep musing, and sat there with fixed eyes, mechanically playing with his knife.

  “Now he’s in converse with his ‘spirit,’ ” said Pourbus quietly.

  At that word, Nicholas Poussin felt himself under the power of an unexplainable artistic curiosity. That old man with white eyes, attentive and in a stupor, had become more than a man to him; he seemed like a whimsical genius living in an unknown sphere. He awakened a thousand confused ideas in his soul. The moral phenomenon of that type of fascination can no more be defined than one can render in words the emotion caused by a song that reminds an exiled man’s heart of his homeland. The scorn this old man affected to express for beautiful artistic endeavors, his wealth, his ways, Pourbus’s deference toward him, that painting kept a secret for so long—a labor of patience, a labor of genius, no doubt, if one were to judge by the head of the Virgin that young Poussin had so candidly admired, and which, still beautiful even alongside Mabuse’s Adam, bespoke the imperial talents of one of the princes of art—everything about that old man exceeded the boundaries of human nature. The clear, perceivable image that Nicholas Poussin’s rich imagination derived from his observation of that preternatural being was a total image of the artistic nature, that irrational nature to which such great powers have been entrusted, and which all too often abuses those powers, leading cool reason, the bourgeois, and even some connoisseurs over a thousand rocky roads where there is nothing for them, while that white-winged lass, a madcap of fantasies, discovers there epics, castles, works of art. Nature—mocking and kind, fertile and poor! And so, for the enthusiastic Poussin, that old man, through a sudden transformation, had become art itself, art with its secrets, its passions, and its daydreams.

  “Yes, my dear Pourbus,” Frenhofer resumed, “up to now I’ve been unable to find a flawless woman, a body whose contours are perfectly beautiful, and whose complexion . . . But,” he said, interrupting himself, “where is she in the living flesh, that undiscoverable Venus of the ancients, so often sought for, and of whose beauty we scarcely come across even a few scattered elements here and there? Oh, if I could see for a moment, just once, that divine, complete nature—in short, that ideal—I’d give my entire fortune; but I’d go after you in the underworld, heavenly beauty! Like Orpheus, I’d descend to the Hades of art to bring back life from there.”

  “We can leave,” said Pourbus to Poussin; “he can’t hear us anymore or see us anymore!”

  “Let’s go to his studio,” replied the amazed young man.


  “Oh, the sly old customer has taken care to block all entry to it. His treasures are too well guarded for us to reach them. I didn’t wait for your suggestion or your fancies to attempt an attack on the mystery.”

  “So there is a mystery?”

  “Yes,” Pourbus replied. “Old Frenhofer is the only pupil Mabuse was ever willing to train. Having become his friend, his rescuer, his father, Frenhofer sacrificed the largest part of his treasures in satisfying Mabuse’s passions; in exchange, Mabuse transmitted to him the secret of three-dimensionality, the power to give figures that extraordinary life, that natural bloom, which is our eternal despair, but the technique of which he possessed so firmly that, one day, having sold for drink the flowered damask with which he was supposed to make garments to wear at Emperor Charles V’s visit to the city, he accompanied his patron wearing paper clothing painted like damask. The particular brilliance of the material worn by Mabuse surprised the emperor, who, wanting to compliment the old drunkard’s protector on it, discovered the deception. Frenhofer is a man who’s impassioned over our art, who sees higher and further than other painters. He has meditated profoundly on color, on the absolute truth of line; but, by dint of so much investigation, he has come to have his doubts about the very thing he was investigating. In his moments of despair, he claims that there is no such thing as drawing and that only geometric figures can be rendered in line; that is going beyond the truth, because with line and with black, which isn’t a color, we can create a figure; which proves that our art, like nature, is made up of infinite elements: drawing supplies a skeleton, color supplies life; but life without the skeleton is even more incomplete than the skeleton without life. Lastly, there’s something truer than all this: practice and observation are everything to a painter, and if reasoning and poetry pick a fight with our brushes, we wind up doubting like this fellow here, who is as much a lunatic as he is a painter. Although a sublime painter, he had the misfortune of being born into wealth, and that allowed his mind to wander. Don’t imitate him! Work! Painters shouldn’t meditate unless they have their brushes in their hand.”

  “We’ll make our way in!” cried Poussin, no longer listening to Pourbus and no longer troubled by doubts.

  Pourbus smiled at the young stranger’s enthusiasm, and left him, inviting him to come and see him.

  Nicolas Poussin went back slowly toward the Rue de la Harpe, walking past the modest hostelery in which he lodged, without noticing it. Climbing his wretched staircase with restless speed, he reached an upstairs room located beneath a half-timbered roof, that naïve, lightweight covering of old Parisian houses. Near the dark window, the only one in his room, he saw a girl, who, at the sound of the door, suddenly stood up straight, prompted by her love; she had recognized the painter by the way he had jiggled the latch.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “The matter, the matter,” he cried, choking with pleasure, “is that I really felt I was a painter! I had doubted myself up to now, but this morning I began to believe in myself! I can be a great man! Come, Gillette, we’ll be rich and happy! There’s gold in these brushes.”

  But he suddenly fell silent. His serious, energetic face lost its expression of joy when he compared the immensity of his hopes to the insignificance of his resources. The walls were covered with plain pieces of paper full of crayon sketches. He didn’t own four clean canvases. Paints were expensive at the time, and the poor gentleman’s palette was nearly bare. Living in such destitution, he possessed and was aware of incredible riches of the heart and the superabundance of a devouring genius. Brought to Paris by a nobleman who had befriended him, or perhaps by his own talent, he had suddenly found a sweetheart there, one of those noble, generous souls who accept suffering at the side of a great man, adopting his poverty and trying to understand his whims; brave in poverty and love just as other women are fearless in supporting luxury and making a public show of their lack of feelings. The smile that played on Gillette’s lips gilded that garret, competing with the brightness of the sky. The sun didn’t always shine, whereas she was always there, communing with his passion, devoted to his happiness and his suffering, consoling the genius that overflowed with love before seizing art.

  “Listen, Gillette, come.”

  The joyful, obedient girl leaped onto the painter’s knees. She was all grace, all beauty, lovely as springtime, adorned with all feminine riches and illumining them with the flame of a beautiful soul.

  “Oh, God!” he cried, “I’ll never have the courage to tell her.”

  “A secret?” she asked. “I want to hear it.”

  Poussin remained quiet, lost in thought.

  “Well, talk.”

  “Gillette, my poor sweetheart!”

  “Oh, you want something from me?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you want me to pose for you again the way I did the other day,” she continued in a rather sulky way, “I’ll never agree to it again, because, at times like that, your eyes no longer tell me anything. You no longer think about me, even though you’re looking at me.”

  “Would you prefer to see me drawing another woman?”

  “Maybe,” she said, “if she were good and ugly.”

  “So, then,” Poussin went on in a serious tone, “what if, for my future glory, in order to make me a great painter, it were necessary to pose for someone else?”

  “You want to test me,” she said. ‘You know very well I wouldn’t go.”

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

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

  “Give it up?” cried Poussin.

  “If I showed myself that way to somebody else, you wouldn’t love me anymore. And I myself would feel unworthy of you. Isn’t catering to your whims a natural, simple thing? In spite of myself, I’m happy, and even proud to do everything you ask me to. But for somebody else—oh, no.”

  “Forgive me, Gillette,” said the painter, falling on his knees. “I’d rather be loved than famous. For me you’re more beautiful than wealth and honors. Go, throw away my brushes, burn those sketches. I was wrong. My calling is to love you. I’m not a painter, I’m a lover. Art and all its secrets can go hang!”

  She admired him, she was happy, delighted! She ruled supreme, she felt instinctively that the arts were forgotten for her sake and cast at her feet like a grain of incense.

  “And yet he’s only an old man,” Poussin continued. “He’ll only be able to see the woman in you. You’re so perfect!”

  “I’ve got to love you!” she cried, prepared to sacrifice her romantic scruples to reward her lover for all the sacrifices he made for her. “But,” she went on, “it would mean ruining me. Ah, to ruin myself for you! Yes, it’s a beautiful thing, but you’ll forget me. Oh, what a terrible idea you’ve come up with!”

  “I’ve come up with it, and I love you,” he said with a kind of contrition, “but it makes me a scoundrel.”

  “Shall we consult Father Hardouin?” she asked.

  “Oh, no. Let it be a secret between the two of us.”

  “All right, I’ll go; but you mustn’t be there,” she said. “Remain outside the door, armed with your dagger; if I scream, come in and kill the painter.”

  No longer seeing anything but his art, Poussin crushed Gillette in his arms.

  “He doesn’t love me anymore!” Gillette thought when she was alone.

  She already regretted her decision. But she soon fell prey to a fear that was even crueler than her regret; she did her best to drive away an awful thought that was taking shape in her heart. She was thinking that she already loved the painter less, suspecting him of being less estimable than before.

  2. Catherine Lescault

  Three months after Poussin and Pourbus first met,
Pourbus paid a visit to Master Frenhofer. The old man was at the time a prey to one of those spontaneous fits of deep discouragement, the cause of which, if one is to believe the firm opinions of traditional doctors, is indigestion, the wind, heat, or some bloating of the hypochondriac regions; but, according to psychologists, is really the imperfection of our moral nature. The man was suffering from fatigue, pure and simple, after trying to finish his mysterious painting. He was seated languidly in an enormous chair of carved oak trimmed with black leather; and, without abandoning his melancholy attitude, he darted at Pourbus the glance of a man who had settled firmly into his distress.

  “Well, master,” Pourbus said, “was the ultramarine you went to Bruges for bad? Weren’t you able to grind your new white? Is your oil defective, or your brushes stiff?”

  “Alas!” exclaimed the old man, “for a moment I thought my picture was finished; but now I’m sure I was wrong about a few details, and I won’t be calm until I’ve dispelled my doubts. I’ve decided to take a trip to Turkey, Greece, and Asia to look for a model and compare my picture to different types of natural beauties. Maybe,” he went on, with a smile of satisfaction, “I’ve got nature herself upstairs. Sometimes I’m almost afraid that a breath of air might wake up that woman and she might disappear.”

  Then he suddenly rose, as if to depart.

  “Oh, oh,” Pourbus replied, “I’ve come just in time to save you the expense and fatigue of the journey.”

  “How so?” asked Frenhofer in surprise.

  “Young Poussin has a sweetheart whose incomparable beauty is totally flawless. But, dear master, if he agrees to lend her to you, at the very least you’ll have to show us your canvas.”

  The old man just stood there, motionless, in a state of complete stupefaction.

  “What!” he finally cried in sorrow. “Show my creation, my wife? Rend the veil with which I’ve chastely covered my happiness? But that would be a terrible prostitution! For ten years now I’ve been living with this woman; she’s mine, only mine, she loves me. Hasn’t she smiled at me at each brushstroke I’ve given her? She has a soul, the soul that I endowed her with. She would blush if anyone’s eyes but mine were fixed on her. Show her! But where is the husband or lover so vile as to lead his wife to dishonor? When you paint a picture for the royal court, you don’t put your whole soul into it; all you’re selling to the courtiers is colored dummies. My kind of painting isn’t painting, it’s emotion, passion! She was born in my studio, she must remain there as a virgin, she can only leave when fully dressed. Poetry and women only surrender themselves naked to their lovers! Do we possess Raphael’s model, Ariosto’s Angelica, Dante’s Beatrice? No, we only see their forms! Well, the picture I have under lock and key upstairs is something exceptional in our art. It isn’t a canvas, it’s a woman!—a woman with whom I weep, laugh, converse, and think. Do you want me suddenly to throw away ten years’ happiness the way one throws off a coat? Do you want me suddenly to leave off being a father, a lover, God? That woman isn’t a single creature, she’s all of creation. Let your young man come; I’ll give him my treasures, I’ll give him pictures by Correggio, Michelangelo, Titian; I’ll kiss the print of his feet in the dust; but make him my rival? Shame upon me! Ha, ha, I’m even more of a lover than I am a painter. Yes, I’ll have the strength to burn my Quarrelsome Beauty with my dying breath; but to expose her to the eyes 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 on the spot, you, my friend, if you didn’t salute her on your knees! Now do you want me to submit my idol to the cold eyes and stupid criticisms of imbeciles? Oh, love is a mystery, it lives only in the depths of our heart, and everything is ruined when a man says, even to his friend, ‘This is the woman I love!’ ”