Part 2

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.

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.

“_July._――I shall not say much about my work; the subject is not yet sufficiently sketched in. What I can tell you is that I am going to give myself up to a debauch in pearly tones: half-dry hay and flowering grasses; and this in the sunshine, looking like a pale yellow tissue with silver threads running through it.

“The clumps of trees on the banks of the stream and in the meadow will stand out strongly with a rather Japanese effect….”

“15th _August_.――Your verses are just the picture I should like to paint. They smell of the hay and the heat of the meadow…. If my hay smells as well as yours I shall be content…. My young peasant is sitting with her arms apart, her face hot and red; her fixed eyes seeing nothing; her attitude altogether broken and weary. I think she will give the true idea of a peasant woman. Behind her, flat on his back, her companion is asleep, with his hands closed; and beyond, in the meadow, in the full sun, the haymakers are beginning to work again. I have had hard work to set up my first ideas, being determined to keep simply to the true aspect of a bit of nature. Nothing of the usual willow arrangement, with its branches drooping over the heads of the people to frame the scene. Nothing of that sort. My people stand out against the half-dry hay. There is a little tree in one corner of the picture to show that other trees are near, where the men are gone to rest in the shade. The whole tone of the picture will be a light grey green….”

“_September._――Why didn’t you come, lazy fellow? You would have seen my Hay before it was finished. Lenoir, the sculptor, my neighbour in the Impasse, liked it. The country people say it is alive. I have little more than the background to finish. I am going to harness myself to the Reapers, and to a nude study of a Diogenes the cynic, or rather, the sceptic….”

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.

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.

“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 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.