Chapter 11
As she said this in the tone of disdainful acerbity in which she always addressed the Irishman, Felicia was at work on the bust of the Nabob which she had just begun, adjusting her model, taking up and putting down the modelling tool, wiping her hands with a quick movement on the little sponge, while the light and peace of a lovely Sunday afternoon flooded the circular glass-walled studio. Felicia "received" every Sunday, if receiving consisted in leaving her door open and allowing people to come and go and sit down a moment, without stirring from her work for them, or even breaking off a discussion she might have begun, to welcome new arrivals. There were artists with shapely heads and bright red beards, and here and there the white poll of an old man, sentimental friends of the elder Ruys; then there were connoisseurs, men of the world, bankers, brokers, and some young swells who came rather to see the fair sculptress than her sculpture, so that they would have the right to say that evening at the club: "I was at Felicia's to-day." Among them Paul de Géry, silent, engrossed by an admiration which sank a little deeper in his heart day by day, strove to comprehend the beautiful sphinx, arrayed in purple cashmere and unbleached lace, who worked bravely away in the midst of her clay, a burnisher's apron--reaching nearly to the neck--leaving naught visible save the proud little face with those transparent tones, those gleams as of veiled rays with which intellect and inspiration give animation to the features. Paul never forgot what had been said of her in his presence, he tried to form an opinion for himself, was beset by doubt and perplexity, yet fascinated; vowed every time that he would never come again, yet never missed a Sunday. There was another fixture, always in the same spot, a little woman with gray, powdered hair and a lace handkerchief around her pink face; a pastel somewhat worn by years, who smiled sweetly in the discreet light of a window recess, her hands lying idly upon her lap, in fakir-like immobility. Jenkins, always in good humor, with his beaming face, his black eyes, and his apostolic air, went about from one to another, known and loved by all. He too never missed one of Felicia's days; and in very truth he displayed great patience, for all the sharp words of the artist and of the pretty woman as well were reserved for him alone. Without seeming to notice it, with the same smiling indulgent serenity, he continued to court the society of the daughter of his old friend Ruys, of whom he had been so fond and whom he had attended until his last breath.
On this occasion, however, the question that Felicia propounded to him on the subject of his son seemed to him extremely disagreeable; and there was a frown upon his face, a genuine expression of ill-humor, as he replied:
"Faith, I know no more than you as to what has become of him. He has turned his back upon us altogether. He was bored with us. He cares for nothing but his Bohemia--"
Felicia gave a bound which made them all start, and with flashing eye and quivering nostril retorted:
"That is too much. Look you, Jenkins, what do you call Bohemia? A charming word, by the way, which should evoke visions of long wandering jaunts in the sunlight, halting in shady nooks, the first taste of luscious fruits and sparkling fountains, taken at random on the highroads. But since you have made of the word with all the charm attaching to it a stigma and an insult, to whom do you apply it? To certain poor long-haired devils, in love with freedom in rags and tatters, who starve to death on fifth floors, looking at the sky at too close quarters, or seeking rhymes under tiles through which the rain drips; to those idiots, fewer and fewer in number, who in their horror of the conventional, the traditional, of the dense stupidity of life, have taken a standing jump over the edge. But that's the way it used to be, I tell you. That's the Bohemia of Murger, with the hospital at the end, the terror of children, the comfort of kindred, Little Red Riding Hood eaten by the wolf. That state of things came to an end a long while ago. To-day you know perfectly well that artists are the most well-behaved people on earth, that they earn money, pay their debts and do their best to resemble the ordinary man. There is no lack of genuine Bohemians, however; our society is made up of them, but they are found more particularly in your circle. _Parbleu!_ they are not labelled on the outside, and no one distrusts them; but so far as the uncertainty of existence and lack of order are concerned, they have no reason to envy those whom they so disdainfully call 'irregulars.' Ah! if one knew all the baseness, all the unheard-of, monstrous experiences that may be masked by a black coat, the most correct of your horrible modern garments! Jenkins, at your house the other evening, I amused myself counting all those adventurers of high--"
The little old lady, pink-cheeked and powdered, said to her softly from her seat:
"Felicia--take care--"
But she went on without listening to her:
"Who is this Monpavon, Doctor? And Bois-l'Héry? And Mora himself? And--"
She was on the point of saying, "And the Nabob?" but checked herself.
"And how many others! Oh! really, I advise you to speak contemptuously of Bohemia. Why, your clientage as a fashionable physician, O sublime Jenkins, is made up of nothing else. Bohemia of manufacturing, of finance, of politics; fallen stars, the tainted of all castes, and the higher you go the more of them there are, because high rank gives impunity and wealth closes many mouths."
She spoke with great animation, harshly, her lip curling in fierce disdain. The other laughed a false laugh and assumed an airy, condescending tone. "Ah! madcap! madcap!" And his glance, anxious and imploring, rested upon the Nabob, as if to beseech his forgiveness for that flood of impertinent paradoxes.
But Jansoulet, far from appearing to be vexed,--he who was so proud to pose for that lovely artist, so puffed up by the honor conferred upon him--nodded his head approvingly.
"She is right, Jenkins," he said, "she is right. We are the real Bohemia. Look at me, for instance, and Hemerlingue, two of the greatest handlers of money in Paris. When I think where we started from, all the trades that we tried our hands at! Hemerlingue, an old regimental sutler; and myself, who carried bags of grain on the wharves at Marseille for a living. And then the strokes of luck by which our fortunes were made, as indeed all fortunes are made nowadays. Bless my soul! Just look under the peristyle at the Bourse from three to five. But I beg your pardon, mademoiselle, with my mania for gesticulating when I talk, I've spoiled my pose--let's see, will this do?"
"It's of no use," said Felicia, throwing down her modelling-tool with the gesture of a spoiled child. "I can do nothing more to-day."
She was a strange girl, this Felicia. A true child of an artist, a genial and dissipated artist, according to the romantic tradition, such as Sébastien Ruys was. She had never known her mother, being the fruit of one of those ephemeral passions which suddenly enter a sculptor's bachelor life, as swallows enter a house of which the door is always open, and go out again at once, because they cannot build nests there.
On that occasion the lady, on taking flight, had left with the great artist, then in the neighborhood of forty, a beautiful child whom he had acknowledged and reared, and who became the joy and passion of his life. Felicia had remained with her father until she was thirteen, importing a childish, refining element into that studio crowded with idlers, models, and huge greyhounds lying at full length on divans. There was a corner set aside for her, for her attempts at sculpture, a complete equipment on a microscopic scale, a tripod and wax; and old Ruys would say to all who came in:
"Don't go over there. Don't disturb anything. That's the little one's corner."
The result was that at ten years of age she hardly knew how to read and handled the modelling-tool with marvellous skill. Ruys would have liked to keep the child, who never annoyed him in any way, with him permanently, a tiny member of the great brotherhood. But it was a pitiful thing to see the little maid exposed to the free and easy manners of the habitués of the house, the incessant going and coming of models, the discussions concerning an art that is purely physical, so to speak; and at the uproarious Sunday dinner-table, too, sitting in the midst of five or six women, with all of whom her father was on the most intimate terms, actresses, dancers, singers, who, when dinner was at an end, smoked with the rest, their elbows on the table, revelling in the salacious anecdotes so relished by the master of the house. Luckily, childhood is protected by the resistant power of innocence, a polished surface over which all forms of pollution glide harmlessly. Felicia was noisy, uproarious, badly brought up, but was untainted by all that passed over her little mind because it was so near the ground.
Every summer she went to pass a few days with her godmother, Constance Crenmitz, the elder Crenmitz, who was for so long a time called by all Europe the "illustrious dancer," and who was living quietly in seclusion at Fontainebleau.
The arrival of the "little devil" introduced into the old lady's life, for a time, an element of excitement from which she had the whole year to recover. The frights that the child caused her with her audacious exploits in leaping and riding, the passionate outbreaks of that untamed nature, made the visit both a delight and a terrible trial to her,--a delight, because she worshipped Felicia, the only domestic tie left the poor old salamander, retired after thirty years of _battus_ in the glare of the footlights; a trial, because the demon pitilessly pillaged the ex-dancer's apartments, which were as dainty and neat and sweet-smelling as her dressing-room at the Opéra, and embellished with a museum of souvenirs dated from all the theatres in the world.
Constance Crenmitz was the sole feminine element in Felicia's childhood. Frivolous, shallow, having all her life kept her mind enveloped in pink swaddling-clothes, she had at all events a dainty knack at housekeeping, and agile fingers clever at sewing, embroidering, arranging furniture, and leaving the trace of their deft, painstaking touch in every corner of a room. She alone undertook to train that wild young plant, and to awaken with care the womanly instincts in that strange creature, on whose figure cloaks and furs, all the elegant inventions of fashion, fell in folds too stiff, or performed other strange antics.
It was the dancer again--surely the little Ruys must not be abandoned--who, triumphing over the paternal selfishness, compelled the sculptor to assent to a necessary separation, when Felicia was twelve or thirteen years old; furthermore, she assumed the responsibility of finding a suitable boarding school, and purposely selected a very rich but very bourgeois establishment, pleasantly situated in a sparsely-settled faubourg, in a huge old-fashioned mansion, surrounded by high walls and tall trees,--a sort of convent, minus the restraint and contempt for serious studies.
Indeed, a great deal of hard work was done at Madame Belin's establishment, with no opportunities to go out except on great festivals, and no communication with the outside world except a visit from one's relatives on Thursday, in a little garden of flowering shrubs, or in the vast parlor with the carved and gilded panels above the doors. Felicia's first appearance in that almost monastic institution caused considerable commotion; her costume, selected by the Austrian ballet-dancer, her curly hair falling to the waist, her ungainly, boyish bearing, gave rise to some ill-natured remarks; but she was a Parisian and readily adapted herself to all situations, to all localities. In a few days she wore more gracefully than any of the others the little black apron, to which the most coquettish attached their watches, the straight skirt--a stern and cruel requirement at that period, when the prevailing fashion enlarged the circumference of woman with an infinite number of ruffles and flounces--and the prescribed arrangement of the hair, in two braids fastened together well down on the neck, after the fashion of Roman peasants.
Strangely enough, the assiduous work of the classes, their tranquil regularity, suited Felicia's nature, all intelligence and animation, in which a taste for study was enlivened by an overflow of childish spirits in the hours of recreation. Every one loved her. Among those children of great manufacturers, Parisian notaries and gentleman-farmers, a substantial little world by themselves, somewhat inclined to stiffness and formality, the well-known name of old Ruys, and the respect which is universally manifested in Paris for a high reputation as an artist, gave to Felicia a position apart from the rest and greatly envied; a position made even more brilliant by her success in her studies, by a genuine talent for drawing, and by her beauty, that element of superiority which produces its effect even upon very young girls.
In the purer atmosphere of the boarding-school, she felt the keenest pleasure in making herself womanly, in resuming her true sex, in learning order, regularity, in a different sense from that inculcated by the amiable dancer, whose kisses always retained a taste of rouge, and whose embraces always left an impression of unnaturally round arms. Père Ruys was enchanted, every time that he went to see his daughter, to find her more of a young lady, able to enter and walk about and leave a room with the pretty courtesy that made all of Madame Belin's boarders long for the _frou-frou_ of a long train.
At first he came often, then, as he lacked time for all the commissions accepted and undertaken, the advances upon which helped to pay for the disorder and heedlessness of his life, he was seen less frequently in the parlor. At last disease took a hand. Brought to earth by hopeless anæmia, for weeks he did not leave the house, nor work. He insisted upon seeing his daughter; and from the peaceful, health-giving shadow of the boarding-school Felicia returned to her father's studio, still haunted by the same cronies, the parasites that cling to every celebrity, among whom sickness had introduced a new figure in the person of Dr. Jenkins.
That handsome, open face, the air of frankness and serenity diffused over the whole person of that already well known physician, who talked of his art so freely, yet performed miraculous cures, and his assiduous attentions to her father, made a deep impression on the girl. Jenkins soon became the friend, the confidant, a vigilant and gentle guardian. Sometimes in the studio, when some one--the father himself most frequently--made a too equivocal remark or a ribald jest, the Irishman would frown and make a little noise with his lips, or else would divert Felicia's attention. He often took her to pass the day with Madame Jenkins, exerting himself to prevent her from becoming once more the wild creature of the ante-boarding school days, or indeed the something worse than that which she threatened to become, in the moral abandonment, the saddest of all forms of abandonment, in which she was left.
But the girl had a more powerful protector than the irreproachable but worldly example of the fair Madame Jenkins: the art which she adored, the enthusiasm it aroused in her essentially open nature, the sentiment of beauty, of truth, which passed from her thoughtful brain, teeming with ideas, into her fingers with a little quiver of the nerves, a longing to see the thing done, the image realized. All day she worked at her sculpture, gave shape to her reveries, with the happy tact of instinct-guided youth, which imparts so much charm to first works; that prevented her from regretting too keenly the austere régime of the Belin institution, which was as perfect a safeguard and as light as the veil of a novice who has not taken her vows; and it also shielded her from perilous conversations to which in her one absorbing preoccupation she paid no heed.
Ruys was proud of the talent springing up by his side. As he grew weaker from day to day, having already reached the stage at which the artist regrets his vanishing powers, he followed Felicia's progress as a consolation for the close of his own career. The modelling-tool, which trembled in his hand, was seized at his side with virile firmness and self-assurance, tempered by all of the innate refinement of her being that a woman can apply to the realization of her ideal of an art. A curious sensation is that twofold paternity, that survival of genius, which abandons the one who is going away to pass into the one who is coming, like the lovely domestic birds which, on the eve of a death, desert the threatened roof for a more cheerful dwelling.
In the last days of her father's life, Felicia--a great artist, and still a child--did half of her father's work for him, and nothing could be more touching than that collaboration of the father and daughter, in the same studio, sculptors of the same group. Things did not always run smoothly. Although she was her father's pupil, Felicia's individuality was already inclined to rebel against any arbitrary guidance. She had the audacity of beginners, the presentiment of a great future felt only by youthful geniuses, and, in opposition to the romantic traditions of Sébastien Ruys, a tendency toward modern realism, a feeling that she must plant that glorious old flag upon some new monument.
Then there would be terrible scenes, disputes from which the father would come forth vanquished, annihilated by his daughter's logic, amazed at the rapid progress children make on the highroads, while their elders, who have opened the gates for them, remain stationary at the point of departure. When she was working for him Felicia yielded more readily; but concerning her own work she was intractable. For instance, the _Joueur de Boules_, her first exhibited work, which made such a tremendous hit at the Salon of 1862, was the occasion of violent disputes between the two artists, of such fierce controversy that Jenkins had to intervene and to superintend the removal of the figure, which Ruys had threatened to break.
Aside from these little dramas, which had no effect upon the love of their hearts, those two worshipped each other, with the presentiment and, as the days passed, the cruel certainty of an impending separation; when suddenly there came a horrible episode in Felicia's life. One day Jenkins took her home to dinner with him, as he often did. Madame Jenkins and her son were away for two days; but the doctor's years, his semi-paternal intimacy, justified him in inviting to his house, even in his wife's absence, a girl whose fifteen years, the fifteen years of an Eastern Jewess resplendent with premature beauty, left her still almost a child.
The dinner was very lively, Jenkins cordial and agreeable as always. Then they went into the doctor's office; and suddenly, as they sat on the divan, talking in the most intimate and friendly way concerning her father, his health and their joint work, Felicia had a feeling as of the cold blast from an abyss between herself and that man, followed by the brutal embrace of a satyr's claw. She saw a Jenkins totally unknown to her, wild-eyed, stammering, with brutish laugh and insulting hands. In the surprise, the unexpectedness of that outbreak of the animal instinct, any other than Felicia, any child of her years, but genuinely innocent, would have been lost. The thing that saved her, poor child, was her knowledge. She had heard so many stories at her father's table! And then her art, her life at the studio. She was no _ingénue_. She at once understood what that embrace meant, she squirmed and struggled, then, finding that she was not strong enough, screamed. He was frightened, released her, and suddenly she found herself on her feet, free, with the man at her knees, weeping and imploring forgiveness. He had yielded to an attack of frenzy. She was so lovely, he loved her so dearly. He had struggled for months. But now it was all over--never again, oh! never again. He would not even touch the hem of her dress. She did not reply, but tremblingly rearranged her hair and her clothes with frenzied fingers. Go, she must go at once, alone. He sent a servant with her, and whispered, as she entered the carriage: "Above all things, not a word of this at home. It would kill your father." He knew her so well, he was so sure of closing her mouth by that thought, the villain, that he came the next day as if nothing had happened, effusive as always and with the same ingenuous face. She never did mention the incident to her father or to anybody else. But from that day a change took place in her, as if the springs of her pride were relaxed. She became capricious, had fits of lassitude, a curl of disgust in her smile, and sometimes she yielded to sudden outbursts of wrath against her father, and cast scornful glances upon him, rebuking him for his failure to watch over her.
"What is the matter with her?" Père Ruys would ask; and Jenkins, with the authority of a physician, would attribute it to her age and a physical trouble. He himself avoided speaking to the girl, relying upon time to efface the sinister impression, and not despairing of obtaining what he desired, for he desired more eagerly than ever, being in the grasp of the insane passion of a man of forty-seven, the incurable passion of maturity; and that was the hypocrite's punishment. His daughter's strange state caused the sculptor genuine distress; but it was of brief duration. Ruys suddenly expired, fell to pieces all at once, like all those whom Jenkins attended. His last words were:
"Jenkins, I place my daughter in your care."
The words were so ironical in all their mournfulness that Jenkins, who was present at the last, could not avoid turning pale.
Felicia was even more stupefied than sorrowful. To the feeling of amazement at death, which she had never seen before, and which appeared in a guise so dear to her, was added the feeling of a terrible loneliness surrounded by darkness and perils.
Several friends of the sculptor assembled in a family council to deliberate concerning the future of the unfortunate, penniless orphan. They had found fifty francs in the catch-all in which Sébastien kept his money on a little commode in the studio, well known to his needy friends, who had recourse to it without scruple. No other patrimony, in cash at all events; only a most superb collection of artistic objects and curios, a few valuable pictures and some scattered outstanding claims hardly sufficient to cover his innumerable debts. They talked of a sale at auction. Felicia, on being consulted, replied that it was a matter of indifference to her whether they sold all or none, but that she begged them, for God's sake, to leave her in peace.
The sale did not take place, however, thanks to the godmother, the excellent Crenmitz, who suddenly made her appearance, as tranquil and gentle as always:
"Don't listen to them, my child, sell nothing. Your old Constance has fifteen thousand francs a year which were intended for you. You shall have the benefit of them now, that's all. We will live together here. I will not be in the way, you will see. You can work at your sculpture, while I keep the house. Does that suit you?"