JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN,
PATERNOSTER SQUARE.  MDCCCXCII.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

[Pg 11]

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AND HIS ART.

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE

AS MAN AND ARTIST.

In the month of June, 1856, the chances of a Civil Service noviciate compelled me to live for six weeks at Damvillers, a small town on the Meuse, half-way between Verdun and Montmédy.

Damvillers was formerly fortified, and had the honour of being besieged by Charles V., but there is now nothing left to recall the memory of those warlike days. The whole aspect of the place is peaceful and rural. The people are occupied with agriculture. Orchards now cover the ground where the fortifications once stood, and form a circle of verdure round the scattered houses, in a valley where the Tinte winds through osier beds and meadows. On the right a vine-covered mound like the back of a camel, on the left a succession of wooded slopes, enclose the little town. The grey, blue hills are low. The monotony of the fields and meadows is broken only by rows of poplars. The ill-kept solitary streets bordered by the labourers’ houses with grey or dingy yellow fronts, have the same washed-out look as the landscape.

For a young fellow of twenty-two there was nothing here particularly attractive. I spent my solitary evenings with my elbows on my window-sill watching the twilight descend upon the brown-tiled roofs which enclose the great square as with a horizontal frame. In one corner the large green waggon of a travelling pedler was resting by the side of rows of earthenware, whose polished surface reflected the lights from the window of the neighbouring inn.

My only amusement consisted in listening to the chatter of some girls sitting at the tinner’s door, or the shouts of the children playing at ball by the wall of the corn-market.

I little thought then that among these urchins, with torn pinafores and tangled hair, was to be found a future master of contemporary painting, and that the name of Bastien-Lepage thrown to and fro each evening by the children’s voices, and repeated by the echoes of the solitary square, would come to be known, and received with acclamations throughout the world, by all who are interested in Art and in Artists.

I.

Jules Bastien-Lepage was born at Damvillers, on November 1, 1848, in a house which forms one of the corners of that square of which I have just spoken; a simple, well-to-do farmer’s house, the front coloured yellow, the shutters grey.

On opening the outer door one finds oneself at once in the kitchen, the regular kitchen of the Meuse villages, with its high chimney-piece surmounted by cooking utensils, with its rows of copper saucepans, its maie for the bread, and its dresser furnished with coloured earthenware. The next room serves at once as sitting-room and dining-room, and even, at need, as bed-chamber. Above are some apartments not in general use, and then some vast granaries with sloping rafters.

It was in a room on the ground floor, with windows looking to the south, that the painter of Les Foins (Hay) and of Jeanne d’Arc first saw the light. The family consisted of the father, a sensible, industrious, methodical man; of the mother, a woman of the truest heart and untiring devotion; and of the Grandfather Lepage, formerly a collector of taxes, who now found a home with his children. They lived in common on the modest produce of the fields, which the Bastiens themselves cultivated, and on the grandfather’s small pension.

At five years old Jules began to show an aptitude for drawing, and his father was eager to cultivate this dawning talent. He himself had a taste for the imitative arts, employing his leisure in light work that required a certain manual skill, and to this he brought the scrupulous exactness and conscientious attention which were his ruling qualities.

From this time, in the winter evenings, he required that Jules should draw with pencil on paper the various articles in use upon the table—the lamp, the jug, the inkstand, etc. It was to this first education of the eye and of the hand that Bastien-Lepage owed that love of sincerity, that patient seeking for exactness of detail, which were the ruling motives of his life as an artist.

In thus urging him to draw every day, the father had no idea of making his son a painter. At that time, especially at Damvillers, painting was not looked upon as a serious profession. The dream that he cherished, along with the grandfather, was to put Jules in a position to choose later on one of the administrative careers, such as overseer of forests, or bridges, or high-ways, which are always easiest of access to those who have been well trained in drawing. So, as soon as he should be eleven years old, he was to leave the communal school, and go to the College.

This involved great sacrifice, for the resources of the family were low, and in the interval a second boy was born; but they redoubled their economy, and in 1859 they managed to send Jules to the College of Verdun.

It was at the drawing class that he worked with the greatest zeal. The correctness of his eye and the dexterity of his hand astonished his master.

When the boy went back to Damvillers for the holidays he drew everywhere; upon his books, upon the walls, upon the doors, and long afterwards traces of these rough outlines might be seen on the orchard palings. His mother carefully preserved books full of pencil sketches of the little brother Emile in all sorts of poses.

His habit was to express any thought that possessed him by a drawing. He already attempted to reproduce with his pencil, passages that struck him in reading, and his first composition was Abraham’s Sacrifice. Classical stories made more impression on his mind at this time than the rustic scenes which met him everywhere in his wanderings in the open air.

At this age, the surroundings in which we live, and which custom renders familiar to us, excite neither our surprise nor our imagination, but they enter our eyes and our memory, and, without our knowing it, become deeply engraven there. It is only in later years that, by comparison and reflection, we feel their powerful charm and their original grace.

In his walks across the fields, Bastien-Lepage received impressions of country life, and assimilated them like daily food. Gatherers of faggots carrying their bundles of wood; fishers for frogs wet to the knees, crossing the meadows with their fishing tackle on their shoulders; washerwomen wringing out their linen by the banks of the Tinte; loungers sitting under a willow tree, while the lunch of cheese is carried to the workers; the village gardens in April at the time of the spring digging, when the leafless trees spread their shadows over borders adorned only by the precocious blossoms of the primrose and the crown imperial; potato fields, where fires of dried stems send up their blue smoke into the red October evening—all these details of village life entered the eyes of the child, who instinctively stored them up in his memory.

Literary studies had little interest for him, while on the contrary he had a strong liking for mathematics.

At one time when he was leaving the fourth form he thought of preparing for the examination for St. Cyr. This is not surprising in a department essentially military, whose remarkable men have all been generals or marshals; but this fancy, in which he was led more by imitation of others than by his own true calling, soon passed away, and during his last years at college his thoughts were constantly turned towards drawing, and when his course of philosophy came to an end, he made known to his parents his wish to go to Paris to study painting.

Great was the astonishment in the home at Damvillers. While recognizing his son’s skill as a draughtsman, Father Bastien persisted in declaring that painting was not a career—nothing certain, a long and costly apprenticeship, and then ten chances of failure to one of success. Let us talk rather of an honourable appointment in the administration of the state, where one is sure to get one’s pay every month, with a prospect of a provision for one’s old age!

They held a family council. The grandfather considered the adventure hazardous and shook his head; the mother was frightened above all at the dangers of Paris and the life of privation to be undergone there, but, conquered at last by the persistency of her son, she murmured timidly, “Yet, if Jules wishes it!…”

A way was found for settling everything. A friend of the family, who held a superior employment in the Central Postal Administration, advised Jules to go up for examination for admission into that department, promising him that on his being received, he would have him called to Paris, when it could be arranged for him to study at the École des Beaux Arts in the hours that were free from his postal service. They took this advice; Bastien passed the examination, was named supernumerary, and set out for Paris about the end of 1867.

He divided his time between his postal duties and his studies in the School. This could only be done under great disadvantages. The requirements of his position in the Post Office made consecutive and serious study very difficult.

By the end of six months he was brought to the conclusion that this double work was impossible; that he must choose between the Office and the School. He did not hesitate; he gave up the Post Office, and, furnished with a letter from M. Bouguereau, he entered the Cabanel studio after having been received in the School with the number one.

“All beginnings are painful,” says Goethe. Bastien-Lepage had a harsh experience of this. He had burnt his ships in leaving the Post Office, and he found himself alone in Paris with very limited means of existence.

At Damvillers there was more self-denial. The mother, always valiant, herself went to work in the fields, that she might have something to add to the little sum sent every month to the young painter. The Council General of the Meuse had voted him an allowance of, I believe, six hundred francs; all this together scarcely furnished him with bed and board.

But Jules was endowed with a robust faith, a firm will, a never-failing cheerfulness, and the magical power of these three enabled him to endure bravely the many trials of the years of his apprenticeship.

In 1870 he sent his first picture to the Salon. It passed unnoticed. I have just seen this picture again. It is the portrait of a man, quite young, dressed in a coat of strong green, the whole flooded with a greenish light. It is rather in the manner of Ricard, but the solid construction of the head and the expression of the face already indicate a painter who sees clearly and seeks to enter into the character of his model.

A short time later the war broke out. Jules Bastien enlisted in a company of volunteers, commanded by the painter Castellani, and did his duty bravely at the outposts.

One day in the trenches a shell burst near him and sent a clod of hardened earth straight at his chest. He was taken to the ambulance, where he remained during the last month of the siege, while another shell fell upon his studio, and there destroyed his first composition, a nymph, nude, her arms clasped over her blonde head, and bathing her feet in the waters of a spring.

On the re-opening of communications he hastened back to his village, where he arrived, like the pigeon in the fable, disabled,

“Trainant l’aile et tirant le pied.”

There he spent the remainder of the year 1871, recovering his shattered health in his native air, making long excursions as far as to the Moselle, and painting various portraits of relations and friends. He did not return to Paris until sometime in the year 1872.

Then the struggling life of the débutant began again. In order to make both ends meet he tried to get some of his drawings into the illustrated journals; but his manner of illustrating was not what was wanted by the editors, who sought above all things to please the ordinary public.

Weary of the struggle he began to paint fans.

One day a manufacturer of antéphelic milk (lait antéphelique) asked him to make a sort of allegorical picture intended for an advertisement for his Elixir of Youth. The artist, making a virtue of necessity, painted a bright gay picture, after the manner of Watteau’s landscapes, with groups of young women dressed in modern style approaching a fountain, where Cupids were gambolling.

The painting finished, Bastien explained to the manufacturer his intention to exhibit it first of all in the Salon.

The perfumer wished for nothing better, but insisted on one condition; above the fountain was to be placed on a scroll of all the colours of the rainbow, the name of the cosmetic, and the address of the place where it was sold.

Naturally Bastien refused, and the tradesman, disappointed of his advertisement, left him the picture for his trouble.

This painting was exhibited in the Salon of 1873, under the title of Au Printemps (In Spring); being placed very high it attracted no attention.

Jules was not discouraged, but he was a prey to that restless and feverish indecision which commonly besets beginners. The teaching in the school troubled him, and being a great admirer of Puvis de Chavannes, he was tempted to try decorative and allegorical painting.

His second picture, La Chanson du Printemps (The Song of Spring), exhibited in 1874, is conceived and executed under this influence. It represents a young peasant girl seated at the edge of a wood, bordered by a meadow which slopes down to a Meusian village, whose red-tiled roofs are seen in the distance. The girl is sitting, with wide-open eyes, her arm passed through the bowed handle of a rustic basket strewn with violets, while from behind her nude little children with butterflies’ wings and blowing upon pipes, whisper to her the song of the growing grass, and tell her of coming womanhood.

This light and spring-like picture, half realistic, half symbolical, would, perhaps, in spite of its simple charm, have left the public indifferent if it had not been accompanied by another, which suddenly brought the artist into the light, and was the success of the Salon of 1874.

During his last holiday at Damvillers, Bastien-Lepage had conceived the idea of painting the portrait of his grandfather, in the open air, in the little garden which the old man loved to cultivate.

Grandfather Lepage.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

The grandfather was represented seated in a garden chair, holding on his knees his horn snuff-box and his handkerchief of blue cotton. His striking face stood out well detached from the background of trees; the black velvet cap sloping jauntily towards his ear gave effect to the shrewd Socratic face; his blue eyes twinkled with humour; the nose was broad and retroussé; the white forked beard spread itself over an ancient vest of the colour of dead leaves; the hands, painted like life, were crossed upon the grey trousers.

Before this picture, so true, so frank, of such marvellous intensity of familiar life, the public stood delighted, and the name of Bastien-Lepage, unknown before, figured the next day in the first place in the articles on the Salon.

II.

It was in front of this picture that I first met Jules. Having looked in my catalogue for the name of the painter, I was delighted to find that he was from the Meuse, and born at that same Damvillers where I had once lived.

The heavy soil of our department is not fruitful in artists. When it has produced one it takes a rest for a few centuries.

Since Ligier Richier, the celebrated sculptor, born at the end of the fifteenth century, the Meuse could only claim credit for the painter Yard a clever decorator of churches and houses in the time of Duke Stanislas; so I was quite proud to find that Bastien-Lepage was a fellow countryman of mine. A few moments later a mutual friend introduced us to each other.

I saw before me a young man, plainly dressed, small, fair, and muscular; his pale face, with its square determined brow, short nose, and spiritual lips, scarcely covered with a blond moustache, was lighted up by two clear blue eyes whose straight and piercing look told of loyalty and indomitable energy. There was roguishness as well as manliness in that mobile face with its flattened features, and a certain cool audacity alternated with signs of sensitiveness and sparkling fun and gaiety.

Remembrances of our native province, our common love of the country and of life in the open air, soon established kindly relations between us, and after two or three meetings we had entered upon a close friendship.

The portrait of the grandfather had won for him a third medal, and had ensured him a place in the sunshine.

It was not yet a money success, but it was a certain degree of fame; he might go back to his village with his heart at rest, his head high. The State had just bought his picture, La Chanson du Printemps (The Song of Spring), and orders were beginning to come in.

In 1875 Bastien-Lepage reappeared in the Salon with La Communiante (The Communicant) and the portrait of M. Simon Hayem, two excellent works which gave, each in its way, a new mark of his originality.

The portrait of M. Hayem was best liked by men of the world; artists were most struck by La Communiante.

The Communicant.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

This young girl’s simple awkward bearing, as she stands out from a creamy background, with all the stiffness of her starched white veil, naïvely opening her pure hazel eyes, and crossing her fingers, ill at ease in the white gloves, is a marvel of truthful painting. It reminds one of the manner of Memling and of Clouet, though with quite a modern feeling. It is interesting, as being the first of those small, lifelike, characteristic portraits, in a style at once broad and conscientious, which may be reckoned among the most perfect of this painter’s works.

At the time of these successes in the Salon, Bastien joined in the competition for the Prix de Rome. The subject chosen for 1875 was taken from the New Testament—L’Annonciation aux Bergers (The Annunciation to the Shepherds).

I remember as if it were yesterday that July morning when the gates of the Palais des Beaux Arts were opened, and the crowd of eager inquirers rushed into the hall of the competition.

After a few minutes Bastien’s picture was surrounded, and a buzz of approval arose from the groups of young people gathered round that work, so real, so strongly conceived and executed that the other nine canvases disappeared as in a mist.

The artist had understood and treated the subject in a manner utterly different from the usual style of the Academy. It was familiar and touching, like a page of the Bible. The visit of the angel had surprised the shepherds sleeping by their fire in the open air; the oldest of them was kneeling before the apparition, and prostrated himself in adoration; the youngest was gazing with half-closed eyes, and his open lips and hands, with fingers apart, expressed astonishment and admiration. The angel, a graceful figure, with childlike almost feminine head, was showing with outstretched arm to the shepherds, Bethlehem in the distance surrounded by a miraculous halo.

This picture, which has both the charm of poetic legend and a manly grip of real life, was executed with uncommon grace and vigour; its very faults contributed to the realization of the effect aimed at.

Most of those who saw this work of Lepage declared that he would carry off the Prix de Rome with a high hand; yet the jury decided otherwise. It was an older and more correct competitor who was sent to the Villa Medicis at the cost of the State.

For a moment Bastien-Lepage was troubled and discouraged by this decision. Not that he felt himself strongly attracted towards Rome and Italian art, but he knew that many people judge of an artist by his success. Among the people down in his province and in his own family the Prix de Rome would have been considered as an official recognition of his talent, and he regretted, above all, not being able to give this satisfaction to his relations, who had undergone so many privations in order to maintain him at Paris. That he did not soon forget this unmerited check, we may gather from this fragment of a letter to a friend:

“I learned my business in Paris, I shall not forget that; but my art I did not learn there. I should be sorry to undervalue the high qualities and the devotion of the masters who direct the school. But is it my fault if I have found in their studio the only doubts that have tormented me? When I came to Paris I knew nothing at all, but I had never dreamed of that heap of formulas they pervert one with. In the school I have drawn gods and goddesses, Greeks and Romans, that I knew nothing about, that I did not understand, and even laughed at. I used to say to myself that this might be high art; I wonder sometimes now if anything has resulted from this education….”

However, he did not consider himself beaten. The following year, at the same time that he was exhibiting his portrait of M. Wallon, he went in again for the Prix de Rome competition. This time it was less for his own sake than to give a satisfaction to his family and friends. He did not enter with any real feeling into this competition, the subject for which was: Priam suppliant Achille de lui rendre le corps de son fils Hector (Priam begging Achilles to restore to him the body of his son Hector). This picture, though a vigorous composition, tells almost nothing of the deep and poignant emotion of this episode of the Iliad.

Once more he failed to gain the prize, but this time he did not take it much to heart. He was occupied with more absorbing prospects: his last visit to Damvillers had bent his mind toward another ideal. Whatever he might say, his studies in the school had not been without their use to him. They had developed in him the critical faculty. His repugnance to factitious and conventional art had driven him with more force to the exact and attentive observation of nature.

At Paris he had learned to compare, and to see better. The Meuse country, so little heroic, with its low hills, its limited horizons, its level plains, had appeared to him suddenly more attractive and more worthy of interest than the heroes of Greece and Rome. Our labourers driving the plough across the field; our peasant women with their large liquid eyes, prominent jaws, and widely opening mouths; our vine-dressers, their backs curved with the labour of the hoe, had revealed themselves to him as models much more attractive than those of the atelier. It was a work for a great artist to bring out the poetry pervading the village folk and their belongings and to give it a real existence, as it were, by means of line and colour. To represent the intoxicating odour of the mown grass, the heat of the August sun on the ripe corn, the life of the village street; to bring into relief the men and women who have their joys and sorrows there; to show the slow movement of thought, the anxieties about daily bread on faces with irregular and even vulgar features;—this is human art, and consequently high art. This is what the Dutch painters did, and they created masterpieces. Bastien, while lounging among the orchards of Damvillers and the woods of Réville, resolved that he would do as they had done, that he would paint the peasants of the Meuse.

The list of studies begun or completed at this time shows us the progress of this dominant idea: La Paysanne au Repos (The Peasant Woman Reposing), La Prairie de Damvillers (The Meadow at Damvillers), the two sketches for the picture Les Foins (The Hay), Les Jardins au Printemps (Gardens in Spring), Les Foins Mûrs (Ripe Grasses), L’Aurore (Dawn)—all these canvases bear the date of 1876.

It was in the autumn of the same year that we carried out a long-talked-of plan for making an excursion together on foot into the Argonne. I went to join him in September at Damvillers.

Thanks to him, I saw with a very different feeling the town that formerly I thought so dull. Cordially and hospitably received in the house at the corner of the great square, I made the acquaintance of the father, with his calm, thoughtful face; of the grandfather, so cheerful in spite of his eighty years; of the mother, so full of life, so devoted, the best mother that one could wish for an artist. I saw what a strong and tender union existed between the members of this family whose idol and whose pride was Jules.

We set out along with one of my old friends and the painter’s young brother. For a week we walked with our bags on our backs through the forest country of the Argonne, going through woods from Varennes to La Chalade, and from Islettes to Beaulieu. The weather was rainy and unpleasant enough, but we were none the less gay for that, never winking when the rain came down, visiting the glass-works, admiring the deep gorges in the forests, the solitary pools in the midst of the woods, the miles of green and misty avenues at the foot of the hills.

Jules Bastien was always the leader. When we arrived at our resting place in an evening, after a day of walking in the rain, he almost deafened us with scraps of café-concert songs, with which his memory was stored.

I seem still to hear in the dripping night that voice, clear and vibrating, now silent for ever….

As we went along he told me of his plans for the future.

He wanted to tell the whole story of country life in a series of large pictures: hay-making, harvest, seed-time, the lovers, the burial of a young girl…. He also wanted to paint a peasant woman as Jeanne d’Arc, at the moment when the idea of her divine mission is taking possession of her brain; then, a Christ in the Tomb.

Together we made a plan for publishing a series of twelve compositions: Les Mois Rustiques (The Months in the Country), for which he was to furnish the drawings and I the text.

From time to time we stopped at the opening of a wood or at the entrance of a village, and Jules would make a hasty sketch, little thinking that the wild and simple peasants of the Argonne would take us for Germans surreptitiously making notes of their roads and passes. At Saint Rouin, while we were looking on at a Pilgrimage, we had nearly been taken as spies. I have told this story elsewhere.[1] The remembrance of it amused us for a long time.

After eight days of this vagabond life we separated at Saint Mihiel, where Bastien wished to see the group of statues of the sepulchre, the chef d’œuvre of Ligier Richier, before beginning his Christ in the Tomb.

Shortly afterwards he gave an account of this visit in a letter to his friend Baude, the engraver:

“Our too short walk through the Argonne has been very interesting, and ended with a visit to the grand chef d’œuvre of Ligier Richier at Saint Mihiel. You must see that some day. I have seen nothing in sculpture so touching. France ought to know better and to be prouder of that great Lorraine artist. You will see a photograph of this masterpiece when you come to me….”

He had scarcely been six weeks at Damvillers again when he lost his father, who was suddenly carried off by pulmonary congestion. Death entered the house for the first time, and it was a rude shock for a family where each loved the other so well.

“We were too young to lose such a good friend,” he wrote to me; “in spite of all the courage one can muster, the void, the frightful void is so great, that one is sometimes in despair….”

“… Happily remembrance remains (letter to M. Victor Klotz), and what a remembrance it is! … the purest that is possible;—he was goodness and self-abnegation personified; he loved us so!… What is to be done? We must try to fill the void with love for those who remain, and who are attached to us, always keeping in mind him who is gone, and working much to drive away the fixed idea.”

And indeed he did work furiously: at Damvillers, at a Job that remains unfinished, and at Paris at the full-length portrait of a lady, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1877.

He had left the Rue Cherche Midi and had settled in the Impasse du Maine, where his studio and his apartment occupied one floor of a building, at the end of a narrow neglected garden, whose only ornaments were an apricot tree and some lilac bushes.

His brother Emile, who just then came to an end of his study of architecture in the school, lived with him.

His studio was very large, and was simply furnished with an old divan, a few stools, and a table covered with books and sketches. It was decorated only with the painter’s own studies and a few hangings of Japanese material.

I used to go there every morning at this time to sit for my portrait.

I used to arrive about eight o’clock, to find Jules already up, but with his eyes only half awake, swallowing two raw eggs, to give himself tone, as he said.

He already complained of stomach trouble, and lived by rule. We used to smoke a cigarette, and then he began to work. He painted with a feverish rapidity, and with a certainty of hand quite astonishing. Sometimes he would stop, get up and roll a cigarette, would closely examine the face of his model, and then, after five minutes of silent contemplation, he would sit down again with the vivacity of a monkey and begin to paint furiously.

The portrait, sketched in during the snows of January, was almost finished when the apricot tree began to put on its covering of white flowers in April.

The Hayfield.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Immediately after the opening of the Salon, Bastien packed up his baggage and fled to Damvillers to prepare for his great picture Les Foins (The Hayfield), which occupied him all the summer of 1877, and of which he gave me news from time to time.

Les Foins was sent to the Salon in 1878. It had a great success, though it was warmly discussed.

In the hall where it was placed, among the pictures which surrounded it, this picture gave an extraordinary sensation of light and of the open air. It had the effect of a large open window.

The meadow, half mown, went back bathed with sunshine, under a summer sky, flecked with light clouds. The young haymaker sitting drooping in the heat, intoxicated with the smell of the hay, her eyes fixed, her limbs relaxed, her mouth open, was wonderfully real. There was nothing of the conventional peasant whose hands look as if they had never touched a tool, but a veritable countrywoman accustomed from childhood to outdoor work. One felt that she was weary with fatigue, and glad to breathe a moment at her ease, after a morning of hard work in the sun.

This picture of life in the fields, so carefully studied, so powerfully rendered, had a considerable influence on the painting of the day. From the time of this exhibition many young painters, many foreign artists especially, threw themselves with enthusiasm into the new way opened out by Bastien-Lepage, and, without intention on his part, the painter of the Meusian peasants became the head of a school.

[1] See La Chanson du jardinier in Sous Bois.

III.

Bastien did not allow himself to be spoiled by success, but continued his life of assiduous labour and conscientious research. He divided his time between Paris and Damvillers, giving the larger part to his village.

We have a long list of his works done in 1878 and 1879. Portraits of M. and Mme. Victor Klotz and of their children, of MM. de Gosselin, of M. A. Lenoir, of M. de Tinan, of the publisher George Charpentier, of Emile Bastien, of Sarah Bernhardt, and lastly that Saison d’Octobre, or, Recolte des Pommes de terre (October, or The Potato Harvest) which is the companion picture to Les Foins (Hay). This was in a graver key, with warm yet sober colours, and an exquisite savour of the country in the late summer; it was powerfully executed and full of health and serenity.

The portrait of Sarah Bernhardt and The Potato Harvest, less discussed than The Hay, made a deep impression on the mass of the public.

Sarah Bernhardt.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

Dating from this time, Bastien’s success, both artistic and monetary, was secure.

His first care was to let his friends at Damvillers join in his good fortune.

They had been with him in his difficulties, they should now share his pleasure, and he brought them to Paris in the summer of 1879. He was happy to return to them, in all sorts of kind attentions, a little of what he owed them for so much affectionate devotion. He was grateful to them for having believed in him in his time of difficulty as a beginner, and he experienced a tender pride in being able to show them that they had not been mistaken.

When he received his first important gains he took his mother to a large shop and had silks for dresses spread out before her. “Show some more,” cried he. “I want Mama to choose the best.” And the poor little mother, frightened at the sight of black satin that could stand upright of itself, in vain protested that “she would never wear that.” She was obliged to give way.

He took his grandfather through the avenues of the Bois and the principal boulevards, expecting that he would be delighted; but in this direction his zealous efforts failed utterly. The old man remained indifferent to the splendours of Parisian luxury and to the scenery in the theatres. At the opera he yawned openly, declaring that all this commotion was deafening, and he went back to Damvillers determined that they should never take him away again.

After having seen his people into the train for their return, he set out for England, where he painted the Prince of Wales.

Decorated in the following July, he hastened to Damvillers to show his red ribbon to his friends, and also to go on with the work he loved best.

He had managed to arrange a studio in the spacious and lofty granaries of the paternal house, and there he worked hard.

He hoped at last to realize his dream, so long deferred, of painting a Jeanne d’Arc. He had meditated much on this subject, and we have often spoken of it.

His idea was to paint Jeanne in the little orchard at Domrémy at the moment when she hears, for the first time, the mysterious voices sounding in her ears the call to deliver her country.

To give more precision to the scene, Bastien wished to show, through the branches of the trees, the “blessed saints,” whose voices encouraged the heroic shepherdess.

In this I differed from him. I maintained that he ought to suppress these fantastic apparitions, and that the expression of Jeanne’s face alone should explain to the spectator the emotion caused by the hallucination to which she was a prey. I reminded him of the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth: the doctor and the chamber-woman, I said, do not see the terrible things that dilate the pupils of Lady Macbeth, but from her face and gestures they know that there is something terrible; the effect is only the greater, because, after having perceived this, the imagination of the spectator increases it. Suppress your phantoms and your picture will gain in sincerity and dramatic intensity.

But Jules held to the personification of the voices, and our discussions ended without either the one or the other being convinced. Nevertheless, my objection had impressed him, and he wanted to show his work to his friends before it was quite finished.

Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

“Come,” he wrote to me, about the 15th of September, “F. is quite disposed to come; he really wants to come to Damvillers. Everything will go beautifully. You will see my picture of Jeanne d’Arc well advanced, and somebody coming from Paris will do me no harm….”

“If you knew how I work (letter to Ch. Baude) you would be less surprised. My picture is getting on, and getting on well; all, except the voices, is sketched, and some parts are begun. I think I have found a head for my Jeanne d’Arc, and everybody thinks she expresses well the resolution to set out, while keeping the charming simplicity of the peasant. Also, I think the attitude is very chaste and very sweet, as it ought to be in the figure that I want to represent; … but if I am to see you soon, I prefer to leave you the pleasure of surprise and of the first impression of the picture; you will judge of it better, and you will be able to say better what you think of it….”

Jeanne d’Arc appeared in the Salon of 1880, with the portrait of M. Andrieux. It did not produce all the effect that Jules expected. The picture had its enthusiastic admirers, but also passionate detractors. The critics attacked first the want of air and of perspective; then, as I had foreseen, the voices, represented by three symbolical personages, too slightly indicated to be understood, and yet too precise for apparitions. But the public did not do justice to the admirable figure of Jeanne, standing, motionless, quivering, her eyes dilated by the vision, her left hand extended, and mechanically fingering the leaves of a shrub growing near.

Never had Bastien-Lepage created a figure more poetically true than this Lorraine shepherdess, so pure, so human, so profoundly absorbed in her heroic ecstasy.

The rapid and brilliant success of the young master had ruffled the amour propre of many; they made him pay for these precocious smiles of glory by undervaluing his new work. He had hoped that the medal of honour would be given to his Jeanne d’Arc; this distinction was given to an artist of talent, but whose work had neither the originality, nor the qualities of execution, nor the importance of Bastien’s picture. He felt this injustice strongly and went to London; there the reception and appreciation of English artists and amateurs consoled him a little for this new mortification.

The two years that followed were fruitful in vigorous work of different kinds: Les Blés Mûrs (Ripe Corn), the London Docks, The Thames, Le Paysan allant voir son champ le dimanche (The Peasant Going to Look at his Field on Sunday), La Petite Fille allant à l’école (The little Girl Going to School); the portraits of M. and of Mme. Goudchaux, of Mdlle. Damain, of Albert Wolff, and of Mme. W., La Marchande de Fleurs (The Flower Girl); last of all, the two great pictures Le Mendiant (The Beggar), and Père Jacques, exhibited in the Salon in 1881 and 1882.

His stay in London and the reading of Shakspeare had inspired him with the idea of painting one of the heroines of the great poet, and in 1881 he went back to Damvillers full of a project for painting the Death of Ophelia.

“I have been painting hard” (letter to Ch. Baude, August, 1881), “for I want to go away and travel for two or three weeks. At the end of September you will come and see us. That is settled, is it not? Shooting, amusements, friendship. Since my return I have painted a haymaker and worked at a little picture of an interior: The Cuvier à Lessive (The Washing Kitchen); all the detail requires much time. Besides I have begun and already advanced a large picture of Ophelia. I think it will be well to do something as a contrast to my Mendiant (Beggar). It is to be a really touching Ophelia, as heartrending as if one actually saw her.”

“The poor distracted girl no longer knows what she is doing, but her face shows traces of sorrow and of madness. She is close to the edge of the water leaning against a willow; upon her lips, the smile left by her last song; in her eyes, tears! Supported only by a branch, she is slipping unawares; the stream is quite close to her. In a moment she will be in it. She is dressed in a little greenish blue bodice, and a white skirt with large folds; her pockets are full of flowers, and behind her is a river-side landscape. One bank under trees, with tall flowering grasses, and thousands of hemlock flowers, like stars in the sky; and in the higher part of the picture, a wooded slope; and the evening sun shining through birches and hazel bushes; that is the scene….”

This picture was never finished. The landscape and flowers were rendered as the artist wished, but the face and the costume of Ophelia recalled his Jeanne d’Arc too much.

Bastien-Lepage no doubt saw this, and for this reason put the picture on one side to return to his peasants.

The Beggar.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

The more he become master of his brush, the more the rustic work haunted him. He was still a thorough countryman. Although he had now at intervals the refinements of elegance and little bursts of worldliness; although he had exchanged the modest atelier in the Impasse du Maine for a house in the Quartier Monceau, the world soon wearied him, and he was glad to go back to his village.

This six weeks’ absence, of which he speaks in his letter to his friend Baude, was spent in an excursion to Venice, and in Switzerland. He came back only half delighted, and brought back only a few unimportant sketches.

Italy and the splendours of Venetian art had left him cold. In this world of history and mythology he was not at home. He sickened for his meadows and his Meusian forests.

During his rapid visits to Paris in 1881 and 1882, the painting of various portraits, notably that of Madame Juliette Drouet, and the compulsory tax of visits and soirées occupied him almost entirely. We saw but little of him. But these successes, and the adulation lavished upon him in Parisian drawing-rooms, did not change him.

He was still the loyal, joyous comrade, faithful to old ties; very good, very simple; happy as a child when he found himself in a circle of intimate friends.

We were both members and even founders of an Alsace-Lorraine dinner, the Dîner de l’Est, which was always given in summer in the country. One of the last meetings at which he was present, took place at the end of May, 1881.

A boat had been engaged, which was to take the diners to the bridge at Suresnes, and to bring them back at night. When we arrived at the landing-stage, a blind man was standing by the footbridge, attended by a young girl, who held out her sebilla to the passers-by.

“Come, gentlemen! all of you, put your hands in your pockets!” gaily commanded Bastien, and he passed over first, preaching by example. And the eighty, or a hundred guests of the Dîner de l’Est, passed one after another over the footbridge, each one leaving in the child’s sebilla a coin, large or small.

When we were on the deck, Bastien turned round to look at the blind man and his girl, who were amazed at this unexpected windfall, and were slowly counting their money.

“What a lovely group?” he said to me. “How I should like to paint that child!”

While waiting for dinner we walked in the Bois de Boulogne. The acacias and hawthorns were in flower. The lawns, newly shorn, gave out a perfume of mown grass. Jules, joyfully drawing in this air impregnated with country odours, laughed like a happy child.

At that moment all was going well with him. His Mendiant had had a great success at the Salon; his last visit to England had been very prosperous; his head was full of fine projects for pictures. “It is good to be alive!” he exclaimed, as he played with a flower he had plucked from the bushes…. On the way back he gave himself up to all sorts of roguish fun. Mounted on the prow of the boat he sang, with his full voice, the Chant du Départ.

The vibrating tones resounded powerfully between the two sleeping river banks; the sky was splendid, twinkling with innumerable stars. From time to time Bastien lighted a rocket and sent it up overhead, shouting a loud hurrah!

The fusée mounted slowly into the night, showering down many-coloured sparks, then fell suddenly and sank in the dark water. Alas! it was the image of the short and brilliant years that remained for him to live.

IV.

On the death of Gambetta, January 1, 1883, Bastien was commissioned to make a design for the funeral car in which the great orator was to be conveyed to Père Lachaise; he spent a week in the little room at Ville d’Avray, painting the picture representing the statesman on his deathbed. The cold was extreme at this time, and, his work scarcely finished, he went away, feeling ill, to Damvillers, where he hoped to finish the great picture he had began of L’Amour au Village.

His native air, the simple life, and his mother’s loving care restored him, and he began to work again with his usual eagerness.

Muffled in a warm jacket and a travelling cloak that covered him down to the feet, he made his models pose for him in the piercing days of February, in the little garden where he had already painted the portrait of his grandfather. In March the work was well advanced, and he invited me to go and see it at Damvillers before it was sent to the Salon. I left Verdun on a freezing afternoon, accompanied by the old friend who had walked with us through the Argonne, and we were set down at Damvillers at night-fall. Our hosts were awaiting us on the doorstep; the grandfather, always the same, with his Greek cap and white beard, and his Socratic face; the painter and the little mother, with smiles and outstretched hands.

Around them Basse the spaniel, and Golo and Barbeau were bounding and barking joyfully to give us a welcome.

The next morning, early, we went up to the studio to see L’Amour au Village, which was to go to Paris that day.

The subject of this picture is well known; it is one of the most real and the most original that the artist has painted: the daylight is waning; at the gate of a village garden, a lad of twenty, who has been binding sheaves, and still wears his leggings of leather, is talking, leaning against a fence, with a young girl, who turns her back to the spectator; what he is saying to her may be guessed from his awkward manner of twisting his stiff fingers, and also from the attentive but embarrassed air of the young girl. One feels that they are not saying much, but that love exhales from every word, so difficult to speak. Around them summer spreads the robust verdure of the country. The fruit trees stand lightly silhouetted against a background of kitchen herbs, gently sloping up to the houses of the village, whose brown roofs and pointed spire come against the soft and misty twilight sky. All this, bathed in a subdued light, is marvellously painted. The young girl, her short plaits falling over her shoulders, her neck bent, the form of her back, so young, so delicate, is an exquisite figure; the face of the young harvester, so energetic, so ingenuously in love, is charming in expression; the treatment of the hands, the bust, the dress, is masterly. There is in this picture a true and manly poetry, which is strengthening and refreshing, like the odour of ripe corn.

Bastien was glad to have completed this difficult work, and his satisfaction enabled him to bear with cheerfulness the pains in his loins, and the digestive troubles which were becoming more and more frequent.

It was long since I had seen him so gay and unreserved. This happy holiday-week spent at Damvillers was the pendant to the walk through the Argonne. The sullen sky, continually blotted out by chilling showers, allowed us few walks in the open air; but every morning we went up to the studio. Jules dismissed the little sweep, who was sitting for a picture that he had on hand, and, taking a sheet of copper, he made us pose for an etching. I have this plate before me now; it did not bite well. It represents the whole family, including the grandfather, making a circle round our friend F., who, standing up and very grave, is reciting one of La Fontaine’s fables. While I look at it, I seem to hear again the merry laughter which filled the studio, alternating with the rattling of the hail against the windows.

In the evening, after supper, we placed ourselves at the round table, and played at Diable or Nain rouge. Jules, throwing away his best cards, always managed to let the grandfather win; and when the octogenarian, quite proud of his success, took up the stakes, he would pat him on the shoulder, and cry out, with a merry twinkle of the eye, “Ha! what a lucky man! he will ruin us all!” and the laughter began again.

We did not go to bed till well on into the night, after having roused the little domestic, Felix, who had dozed off in the kitchen while copying a portrait of Victor Hugo.

Father Jacques, the Woodman.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

In the intervals of sunshine, Bastien-Lepage took us to visit “his fields.” He had a peasant’s love for the land, and he employed his gains in adding to the paternal domains. He had just bought an orchard situated in the old moat of the town, which had belonged to an unfrocked priest. He intended to build a châlet there, where his friends, painters or poets, might come and live in their holidays and dream at their ease. He explained to us with the delight of a child, his plans for the future. When, with his portraits, he should have gained an independent fortune, he would execute at his ease and in freedom, the grand rustic pictures that he dreamed of, and among others, that burial of a young village girl, for which he had already made many notes and sketched the principal details. We only took one long walk, and it was in those woods of Réville which form the background of his landscape, Ripe Corn. The weather had remained cold, and there were still patches of snow on the backs of the grey hills, though the sun shone sometimes. Except a few downy buds on the willows, the woods were without verdure; but the ploughed fields had a beautiful brown colour; the larks sang; the tops of the beeches began to have that reddish hue, which indicates the rising of the sap, the swelling buds. “Look,” said Bastien to me, when we were in the forest, “my Wood-cutter in the last Salon was reproached with want of air…. Well, here we are in a wood, and the trees are still without leaves, yet look how little the figure stands out from the undergrowth of trees and bushes. There is a great deal of routine and prejudice in that criticism of the perspective of my pictures done in the open air. It is the criticism of people who have never looked at a landscape, except crouching down or sitting. When you sit down to paint, you naturally see things quite differently from the way you see them standing. Sitting, you see more sky and you have more objects—trees, houses, or living beings standing out sharply in silhouette against the sky, which gives the illusion of a greater distance and a wider atmosphere. But it is not in this way that we generally see a landscape. We look at it standing, and then the objects, animate or inanimate, that are nearest to us, instead of being seen in profile against the sky, are silhouetted upon the trees, or upon the fields, grey or green. They stand out with less clearness, and sometimes mix with the background, which then, instead of going away, seems to come forward. We need to renew the education of our eye, by looking with sincerity upon things as they are in nature, instead of holding as absolute truths the theories and conventions of the school and the studio.”

All the afternoon passed thus happily away in friendly talking and slow smoking along the wooded paths. The blackbirds were whistling; from time to time we discovered a flower in the open spaces, which showed that spring was surely coming; a wood anemone, with its milk-white petals, or a branch of mezereon, with its pink flowers opening before the leaves, and its Japanese appearance.

Jules stopped and gathered a stem of black helebore. “Ah, how beautiful!” he said. “How one would like to make a careful study of these leaves—so decorative, so finely cut—of dark green, almost brown, out of which comes this pale green stem, with its clusters of greenish flowers edged with pale rose-colour. What lovely forms, and what a variety of tender shades! This is what they ought to give as a copy to the children in the schools of design, instead of the eternal and wearisome Diana de Gabies!”

Sketch for Father Jacques

We did not return till evening, when there was a magnificent sunset, which crimsoned the smoky roofs of Réville, and made the light clouds scattered over the sky look like a strew of rose-leaves.

The next day was the last of my visit. We took leave after long embraces, making fine plans for returning to Damvillers for the September holiday, while the grandfather, shaking his hoary head, murmured sadly, “Who knows if you will find me here?” And Barbeau, and Golo, and Basse bounded and barked round the omnibus that took us away with tremendous noise.

I did not see Jules again till a month later, at the opening of the Salon, in front of L’Amour au Village, which had a full success. He was ill, and complained of pains in the loins more acute than formerly; then he suddenly disappeared mysteriously. The door of the atelier in Rue Legendre was closed, and visitors were told that the painter was gone into the country. We did not know till later that he had hidden himself, to undergo a sharp and painful treatment, and that, scarcely convalescent, he had gone to breathe the sea air in Brittany, at Concarneau. He spent his days there, in a boat, painting the sea, and forgetting his pains by the help of work.

When he came to see us again in October, he appeared to be recovered; but digestion was still a difficulty, and his habitual gaiety was, as it were, clouded over. His character was changed. There were no more of those trenchant affirmations of which his comrades sometimes complained; he was indulgent, and even affectionate, much more than was usual with him. He did not stay long in Paris, but hastened back to Damvillers, to get seriously to work again. He arrived in time to be present during his grandfather’s last moments. The old man departed loaded with years; but, though surely expected, his death was a painful blow to the survivors. “The house,” he wrote, “is empty more than one could believe. Only a few days ago, at any moment, a door would open and the grandfather appeared, without motive, without object, without speaking or being spoken to; but the sight of his kindly face was enough. One kissed him, and he went away, as before, without object, sitting down, going into the garden, coming back, and always with the same kind face. I remember now that he has been growing paler for some days…. No, you can have no idea how empty the house is. I cannot get accustomed to it. We often talk of him with my mother—with what pleasure! It is not that we weep for him with tears; we reason about it, and we appear resigned and courageous; but behind all that there is a sad feeling of want, of absolute loss. It is the touch one wants…. I have been ill with it, and am so still. I have not been able to work; to-day, for the first time, I went out to shoot larks; the weather was fine, the sun was shining, and the country beautiful. This did me good.”

Indeed, the health of the artist, far from improving, was becoming daily more uncertain. “It is the digestive tube,” said he, “that is out of order.” Nevertheless, he worked with his usual courage, overlooking his Concarneau studies, planning a new picture, and only stopping to go out shooting or to saunter through the woods.

“Our evening walks are the best part of the day”—(letter to Ch. Baude, Nov. 27, 1883)—“that is, from the setting of the sun till it is dark. Every night the spectacle is new. The programme changes with the weather. Sometimes the subject of the piece is dramatic; the next day it is soft and charming; and, with the constant rain, our inundated meadows reflect the brilliant scenery. Can you imagine all our pleasure, in your dingy Paris? The next morning is too slow in coming; one wants so much to put down last night’s impression; so that I am making a heap of sketches, and find much pleasure in it. Then—here is a surprise!—I have a new picture on the way…. Guess!… The subject is a wounded deer taken by the dogs. The scene is, naturally, the wood, and the wood at this time of year: only a few leaves of brilliant yellow against the marvellous rosy-grey of the branches of the trees; then the violet tone of the dead leaves flattened on the soil, and a few green briars round a pool under a willow. The place was not chosen by me. The deer chose it himself to die there; for I killed him the other day, and he went there to be taken, a hundred yards from where he was shot—just opposite the spot where Minet killed a hare. It was then that this picture struck me. Afterwards I sketched in and reconstructed the scene; and, as I wanted a model, I killed a second deer….”

Here is a characteristic symptom: he who formerly only wrote the shortest of notes, scribbled in haste at the corner of a table, now sent long, expansive letters to his friends, showing signs of redoubled love of life, of art, of the beauties of nature:—

“My dear friends” (Jan. 3, 1884), “if you could see your poor Bastien, with this heap of letters to write, you would certainly say: ‘How he is changed!’… If my wishes had the extraordinary virtue of fulfilling themselves, I should like that you, whom I love, should profit by it, and that 1884 should bring health and happiness and success to all. My mother’s wishes are the same as mine, and she rejoices that we are to see you soon. Ah, my dear friend, what pleasure you would have in living upon the woods, as I feed upon them now almost every day, along with Golo and Barbeau! What marvellously delicate tones! and the fading out of daylight, and when the evening comes on! The woods are exquisitely fine, with their tall, dry, ivory-coloured grasses; they are so tall in some of the open spaces that they caress your face as you pass, and the cool touch upon your face and hands, hot with walking, is a delicious sensation. I rarely leave the woods before night, for I must send up a few salutes to the wild ducks with my gun before going in. One hears them coming from a great distance, but it is difficult to judge if they are far away or near, from the peculiarity of their cry; so they have often passed, and are already a good way off, before one finds out that one has missed them.

“This is to let you know that I am not a stay-at-home, as you might think. I find it important to walk a good deal, for in this way I regain a little health. My stomach was beginning to get wrong, but it is better!…”

A few days after this I met a mutual friend of ours. “Well,” he said to me, “our poor Bastien is very ill…. They think it is hopeless.”

V.

Indeed he was very ill. The treatment he had undergone in the summer of 1883 had not been successful. The pains in the loins and bowels had returned with greater violence at the end of January.

By the advice of his friend Dr. Watelet he again went to Paris in March to consult Dr. Potain. Without any illusions as to the fatal nature of the disease, the doctors thought that a change of air and of climate might, morally and physically, produce good results. They advised that he should go to Algiers for two months.

Bastien himself, seized with that longing desire for movement which often torments invalids who are seriously ill, had experienced a wish to go to the south. It was decided that he should start as soon as possible for Algiers, accompanied by his servant Felix, and by his mother.

On the morning of the day fixed for starting I went to the Rue Legendre to say good-bye to him. He had gone to complete some arrangements with his picture-agent. I found only Mme. Bastien, who was occupied in filling the trunks which were scattered about the studio. The brave little mother, who had never left her home at Damvillers for more than a few days together, was preparing for this long journey to an unknown country quite simply, with an apparent tranquillity, as if she were going as far as Saint Cloud.

The hope that the change might be good for Jules was enough to give her courage to face this upsetting of all her old ways of living. Sometimes only, when she was carefully arranging the linen in the trunk, the tears would rise to her eyes and a quiver of pain pass over her lips.

Upon the chairs and against the walls were placed the recent studies brought from Damvillers, and one felt one’s heart tighten at the sight of these last works, where nature had been observed and rendered with incomparable skill, penetration, and charm. They were The Frog-fisher, The Little Sweep, The Washerwoman, The Pond at Damvillers, The Edge of the Wood, The Church at Concarneau, and that study of A Midnight Sky so original, with the clouds scattered over an azure that was almost black.

At this moment Bastien-Lepage came in, and on seeing him walk with difficulty into the studio, I was distressed at the change that had come over him. His thin face had become quite bloodless; the skin of his neck was peeling off; his hair seemed to have no life in it. His questioning blue eyes expressed an anguish and weariness that was heartrending. “Well,” said he, after having embraced me, “are you looking at my studies? When people see them at George Petit’s, they will say that the little Bastien could paint the landscape too, when he gave himself the trouble!…” When I said to him that his long absence that morning had made his mother anxious, he added quite low, and taking me into one corner of the studio: “When one is going to take a journey so far, one must prepare for it…. I wanted to put my affairs in order. Poor little mother!” he went on; “she has been very brave! Down at home she used to spend whole nights in rubbing me for my rheumatism, and I let her think that it did me good…. Now, perhaps the Algiers sun will cure me.” Hope alternated with discouragement. During breakfast he recovered a little. I was to go to Spain at the end of March; he urged me to change my plans, and to join him in Algiers. We ended with a half-promise. We tried hard to appear gay; we clinked our glasses as we drank to the hope of soon meeting again, but each one felt his throat tighten, and turned away to hide from the other his moist eyes. I left the house in the Rue Legendre with my heart full of the saddest forebodings.

Jules left the same night for Marseilles. They had a good crossing, and his first letter, dated March 17th, was reassuring:—

“My dear friends, there is no getting out of it; you must come, for a thousand reasons. Here it is just like May in Paris. Everything is in flower; and such flowers!—heaps of them, everywhere. The verdure is delicate and grey, and, like patches, always well placed; the outlines picturesque and new, the trees very dark green. And in the midst of all this, upon the roads, the Arabs, of astonishing calmness and splendid carriage, under their earth-coloured and ash-coloured draperies—ragamuffins as proud as kings, and better dressed than Talma. They all wear a shirt and burnous; not one is like another. It seems as if each one, at every moment, gave expression to his thought by his manner of draping his garment. It is once more the triumph of blank truth over arrangement and conventionalism. The sorrowful man, whether he wishes it or not, in spite of himself is not draped like the gay. Beauty, I am convinced, is exact truth: neither to the right nor to the left, but in the middle.

“All this without telling you we have hired a house at Mustapha Superior. It is half Arab, half French, quite white, with an interior court opening into a garden twice as big as that at Damvillers. The garden is full of orange-trees, and lemon, almond, fig, and a quantity of other trees, the names of which I do not know and probably never shall. All this, not trim like a park, but left a little à la diable, like our garden at home. Then we have the right of walking in a magnificent garden which joins ours. We have at least eight rooms; in counting them I thought of you. In all directions round this house there are delightful walks within reach for invalid limbs; in short, it is a Mahomet’s Paradise, … ‘moins les femmes.’ I have said nothing about Kasbah, the old Arab town—my legs have only let me see it from a distance as yet; but, my good friend, imagine that against a morning sky you have, sometimes in the palest rose, sometimes in silvery grey, sometimes in faint blue, and so on—everywhere against the pearly sky—more or less elongated rectangles, placed irregularly, but always horizontally, in the manner of a line of low hills, and you will have the delicate colouring of the old town. One would not suppose it was a town with habitations, so delicate is the tone of it, but for some little holes of rare windows placed here and there. One could not have a sensation more unexpected, and never a sweeter and finer joy. So you must come! My mother is counting upon it, and what, then, am I? What new things you could say about all this! The sea was very fine at the beginning and end of our crossing. Midway some of the passengers suffered: my mother and Felix among them, but they got some sleep. We were twenty hours in crossing, and we were not tired on arriving. Come, set off; start!… A good embrace from my mother and from me.”

His first letter, as may be seen, was full of ardour. The climate of Algeria did him good at first, and his sufferings seemed to be relieved.

“I am preparing myself bravely for the ordeal by fire” (April letter to Ch. Baude); “may my rheumatism take flight and depart with the coming attack of the sun! When it is hot here, it is still quite bearable. Apart from these calculations about the heat and these health experiences, I am happy, even excited, by all that I have seen; and yet I have only seen what any bagman might see who is busy about the selling of his goods; but it has been enough to give me great delight. What remains of the old Arab town is marvellous; one holds one’s breath when, at a sudden turn, the vision reappears. For those unhappy eyes that only see the colours on the palette, it is white; but picture to yourself a long hill, rather high, with a depression in the middle, and sloping as if to the sea, and this hill all covered with elongated or elevated cubes of which one cannot distinguish the thickness; all this remaining unnoticed by the eye that is ravished by the delicate tone, rosy, greenish, pale blue, making altogether white tinted with salmon.

“If one did not know it beforehand, one would never dream that amongst these cubes of plaster thousands of men are walking, talking, sleeping—men of noble manner, proud and calm, and with something very like indifference or contempt for us. And they are right. They are beautiful, we are ugly. What matter is it to me that they are knaves! They are beautiful!…

“Yesterday I went to take a bath. I had to go three or four hundred steps through streets full of merchants. In a passage a Jew was selling silks, pearls and corals; in front of his shop, not two yards wide, were three Arabs—an old man, another of middle age, the third about seventeen. There they were, seated, attentive, calm, wishing to buy, consulting together, making scarcely a gesture with their hands, always kept at full length, but sitting quietly, never hurrying, reflecting enormously, and keeping all the while under their burnouses the softest, gentlest attitudes. The youngest was superb—so handsome that mama was struck with it. ‘They are like beautiful statues,’ said she. I could not understand the scene and the relations that united these three Arabs. It was clear they were come to buy; they had come down from the higher part of the town. They were poor, for the youngest was in rags, and the burnouses of the others, though not in rags, were very much worn; but they took such pains in counting the little pieces of false coral that it was clear the Jew was selling dear to these big children a thing of no value. The one of middle age was counting on the table, with his flat hand by groups of five, the little pieces of coral which he chose as he counted them; thus adding each time five pieces to the heap that he drew towards him.

“What strikes one is this simple colouring, these magnificent folds, and then this serious childishness.

“I was not able to wait till the end of the scene. It was cold and draughty in this passage, which brought me back to the fact of my poor crazy legs. I long for the time when I shall be a man again; what lovely things I shall see, and perhaps I shall do!”

April 23rd (to the same): “Now I take myself by the ear and drag myself to the letter-paper, and all the needful things. Nothing is wanting, neither the thousand things I have to say, nor above all the tender affection that I keep in store for you.

“Emile says that you are coming, and soon: don’t be alarmed, you will not melt in the hot sun. There are cool places in the garden, where one can stretch oneself, with a magnificent landscape at one’s feet. We have only had the heat since yesterday; you will see how good you will find it, your muscles will relax, and you will go back quite young. We will make some excursions together if I am up to it. Any way there are plenty all round us to tempt you to make some.

“You have heard from Emile that I went to Blidah. I bore the little journey very well at first, but I was tired afterwards. I am going to begin to rest, and go slowly, in order that I may go farther. I have scarcely done anything till now, for I don’t feel myself up to remaining long in the same position, as a painter must, who thinks only of his work.”

The health that he hoped for, and so anxiously waited for, did not come. On the contrary, as the heat increased, Jules felt more unwell and more fatigued. The last letter that he wrote to me reached me at Granada, in that hotel, the “Siete Suelos,” where Fortuny and Henri Regnault had lived. There was all through it a sentiment of touching melancholy and discouragement.

“My good friends, this is delightful. It is too good to get your photographs at the same time as your kind and affectionate letter. I am glad you are going to Spain. Lucky fellows! Go along! while I, who should so like to see a bull fight!… You had not time to come, and indeed it was selfish to ask you. You could not have stayed more than a few days. But that is to be done some day when I am no longer a cripple, and when we can have two months before us. We are comfortably settled here. At this moment I am writing to you under the tent set up in the terraced court of our villa, with a wonderful view before me. Placed a little to the left of a semicircle, formed by the hills of Mustapha, 170 yards above the sea which flows at their base, we have at every hour of the day, a different landscape; for the sides of the hills are full of ravines, and the sun, according to the time of day, throws their slopes into light, or makes a network of shade, in a way quite peculiar to this corner of Africa. Little villas gleaming in the sunshine or grey in the shade give effect to the groups of verdure, the whole looking from the distance like a rich embroidery, with bosses of green harmoniously arranged. All this runs down toward the Gulf of Algiers, and trending away from here forms Cape Matifou. Above are the crests of the Little Atlas, far away, and lost in heaven’s blue; near by, sloping gardens spread out their golden or silvery verdure, according as one looks upon olive or eucalyptus. Add to this the perfume of the orange and lemon trees, the pleasure of telling you that I embrace you all three, Tristan included, that I am a little better, and you will have the state of my heart.

“Enjoy yourselves,—and you, my dear forester, with your Toledo eyes, what are you going to give to the world after all this delight of sunshine and kindly fellowship and the loving union of the charming trio that you make? It seems to me I have the heart and voice to make a fourth—what say you? Ah! that shall be after the rheumatism! Kindest regards from mama and from me. A last embrace to all three of you.”

The improvement he had experienced on arriving in Algiers ceased about the end of April. His strength and appetite gradually failed; and at the end of May it was decided to take the invalid back to France. He settled again in the Rue Legendre with the poor little mother, who never left him afterwards. When I saw him again I was shocked at the progress the disease had made. His thinness was such that my unhappy friend was nowhere in the garments that were made for his journey. His legs refused their service; he could no longer work; and yet he kept a little hope. He had just begun a new treatment, and talked of going into Brittany “as soon as he was strong enough.” He drove every day in the Bois when the weather was fine, and spent the rest of his day on cushions in the corner of the studio, occupied in contemplating, with a heartrending look, his studies hanging on the walls. This inaction was most distressing to him.

“Ah!” cried he, “if I was told: They are going to cut off your two legs, but after that you will be able to paint again, I would willingly make the sacrifice….”

He could only sleep now with the help of injected morphine, and he waited with impatience for the hour when a new supply should give him some relief, and a factitious drowsiness should make him forget his suffering.

In proportion as digestion became more difficult his appetite became more capricious. He wanted to have dishes made which reminded him of the cooking of his village; then, when they were brought to him, he turned away disgusted, without tasting them. “No,” said he, pushing aside the plate, “that’s not it; to have it good it must be made down there, prepared by the Damvillers people, with home-grown vegetables.” And while he was speaking one saw by his moist eyes a sudden and painful calling up of the impressions of former days; he saw all at once the old home, the gardens and orchards of Damvillers at the fall of evening, the peaceful village interiors at the time when the fires were lighted for the evening meal.

As the season advanced his strength decreased. In September his brother was obliged to take him on his back to carry him to the carriage, and he drove about slowly for an hour in the avenues of the Bois. He could not read, and was easily wearied by conversation. His nerves were become very irritable, and the slightest odours were disagreeable to his sense of smell. His courage seemed to forsake him; at the same time he was always wanting to know what others thought of his illness. His blue eyes with their penetrating look anxiously searched the eyes of his friends, and of his mother, who never left his side. The heroic little woman did her best to dissimulate, and was always smiling and affecting a cheerfulness and a confidence which were painful to see; then, when she could escape for a moment, she hastened into the neighbouring room and melted into tears.

For months this cruel agony was thus prolonged. Bastien was only a shadow of himself. On the 9th of December, during great part of the night, he talked of Damvillers with his mother and his brother. Then at about four in the morning he said to them, with a kiss, “Come, it is time for children to sleep.” All three slept. Two hours later Mme. B. was awakened by Jules, who asked for something to drink; she rose, and brought him a cup of tea, and was alarmed on finding that the invalid groped for the cup to guide it to his lips; he could no longer see; but he still spoke and even joked about the difficulty he had in moving his limbs.

Shortly afterwards he dozed, and sliding gently from sleep into death, he expired at six in the evening, December 10, 1884.

I saw him next day lying on his mortuary bed, in the midst of a thick covering of flowers. His poor emaciated face, with its sightless and deeply sunk orbits, made him look like one of those Spanish figures of Christ, fiercely cut in wood by Montanez.

On the 12th of December a long train of friends and admirers accompanied his remains to the Eastern Railway Station, whence it was conveyed to the Meuse. The next day, Sunday, the whole population of Damvillers waited at the entrance of the town for the funeral carriage, which brought back Bastien-Lepage to his native place.

The sad procession advanced slowly on that road from Verdun where the painter had loved to walk at twilight, talking with his friends. A pale mist blotted out those hills and woods whose familiar outlines he had so often reproduced. The cortège stopped before the little church where he had intended painting his Burial of a Young Girl. The morning was showery; the wreaths and festoons of flowers, placed the night before on his coffin, were revived and refreshed by the moisture; when they were heaped up upon the grave they seemed to come to life again, and to send out with their renewed perfume a last adieu from Paris to the painter of the peasants of the Meuse.

VI.

On the 17th of the following March, at the Hôtel de Chimay, now connected with the École des Beaux Arts, the exhibition of the works of him whom we have surnamed the “Primitif” was opened. All the works of Bastien, with the exception of the Jeanne d’Arc, were collected there.

On visiting this exhibition the most prejudiced minds were struck with the suppleness, the fecundity, and power of the talent of this painter, carried off at the age of thirty-six. For the first time his varied and original work could be judged as a whole.

One could study in detail these productions of a thoroughly conscientious artist, and follow the growth of each composition as one follows the development of a beautiful plant—first in the drawings, so pure, so sober, and expressive; then in the sketches so truthful and sincere; and, lastly, in the finished pictures, so harmonious and luminous. By the side of the great pictures, Les Foins (The Hay), La Saison d’Octobre (October), Le Mendiant (The Beggar), Père Jacques (Father Jacques), and L’Amour au Village (Love in the Village), like windows opening upon life itself, one admired that collection of small portraits in which the most penetrating physiological observation was united with an execution most masterly, precise, and delicate. One passed delighted from those interiors worthy of the Dutch painters, such as La Forge and La Lessive, to the landscapes breathing the odours of the fields and of the woods, such as Le Vieux Gueux (The Old Beggar), Les Vendanges (The Vintage), La Prairie (The Meadow), La Mare (The Pool), Les Blés Mûrs (Ripe Corn), or to those full of air and motion, like London Bridge and the Thames; then one stopped before La Petite fille allant à la École (The Little Girl going to School), or that poetic Idyl, Le Soir au Village (Evening in the Village).

The Inn.
By Jules Bastien-Lepage.

In this exhibition containing more than two hundred canvases and a hundred drawings, there was nothing trifling, nothing indifferent. The smallest sketches were interesting because they revealed passionate worship of what is simple and natural, hatred of the almost and the conventional, and the incessant striving of the artist after his ideal, which is Truth.

A healthy and robust poetry exhaled from this collection. One left the Hôtel de Chimay with a sensation of strengthening and reviving pleasure, such as one gets from certain aspects of nature—deep woods, limpid waters, and the bright sky of a summer morning.

Unhappily this joy was mixed with the sad thought of the sudden death of the young man who had produced all this masterly work.

On first entering these rooms reserved for his pictures I was, for a long time, impressed with a feeling that I had already experienced at the exhibition of the works of the talented young artist, Mdlle. Bashkirtseff, mown down like Bastien, in full youth, and at the same time as he. This cruel death seemed only a bad dream.

On seeing again these unfinished sketches, these perfect portraits, these canvases that I had seen him paint one after another, I felt as if I was conversing with the painter and the friend who had created all this. I felt that he was still living and in possession of all his force. I expected every moment to see him appear among us, smiling, happy, fortified by the now unanimous admiration of the crowd gathered before his work.

Alas! instead of himself my eyes only met his portrait, placed in the first room, and the mournful eloquence of the wreaths and flowers attached to the frame recalled me harshly to the heartrending reality.

The poor “Primitif” will paint no more. The atelier at Damvillers where we have spent such happy hours is closed for ever. The peasants of the village will no more meet their countryman on the roads where he used to work in the open air. The rustic flowers that he used to paint in the foreground of his pictures, the blue chicory and the groundsel, will flower again this summer by the edges of the fields, but he will not be there to study and admire them.

Among the sketches exhibited by the side of the great pictures there was one that I had already remarked at Damvillers, and that I now saw again with deep emotion. It represents an old peasant woman going in the early morning into her garden to visit her apple tree in blossom. The nights of April are perfidious, and the spring frosts give mortal wounds; the old woman draws to her a flowering branch and inspects with anxious eye the disasters caused by the hurtful rays of the red moon. Bastien-Lepage was like this tree, full of sap and of promising blossom. For years the heavens had been clement to him, and the flowers had given many and rich fruits; then in a single night a murderous frost destroyed all—the open flowers by thousands, and the tree itself. All that remains is the splendid fruit of past seasons, but the exquisite flavour of that the world will long enjoy.

Things truly beautiful have wonderful vitality and last on through the centuries, hovering above the earth where the generations of men go turn by turn to sleep,—and this survival of the works of the spirit of man is perhaps the surest immortality upon which he can count.

JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE AS ARTIST.

Transcriber’s Note:

This book was written in a period when many words had not become standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Obsolete words, alternative spellings, and misspelled words were not corrected.

One footnote was moved to the end of the chapter. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added.