CHAPTER XXV

THE ROMANCE OF A POTTER: BERNARD PALISSY

Far better it is that one man or a small number of men should make their profit from some art by living honestly, than that a large number of men should struggle, one against the other, so that they cannot gain a livelihood save by profaning the arts, leaving things half done. So said Master Bernard Palissy, born some four hundred years ago--in 1510, to be exact--near Château Biron in Périgord, France.

Where in the whole history of the arts will a more interesting figure be found? His was not the swashbuckling career of a Cellini; nevertheless the serious-minded would not exchange him for the volatile Italian who seemed ever and anon to be swallowing diamond dust or crossing a cardinal for copy. Palissy’s was romance of a different sort, but romance of a fine type.

I have often wondered why we of to-day have almost forgotten about Master Bernard, Master Bernard whom the readers of our grandmothers’ generation immortalized. I suppose the cultivated virtue of novelty which in this restless era demands incessant changing of school-books from term to term failed to bring old Palissy along with it. In earlier days it was part and parcel of one’s polite education to know something of Master Bernard, at least to know that there had once lived such a person. In those less curriculumed yesterdays the story of Palissy the Potter was always a welcome one. Perhaps we ourselves have merely overlooked the matter, and so I make here this venture, believing time has intended no slight to Master Bernard’s memory.

How well I recall a certain lower shelf in a library which regaled a rainy autumn day in my tender years! There were treasures here convenient to the hand of one aged nine, treasures fitting the advancement of learning laboriously attained under the unflinching persistence of an all-too-faithful governess. In this sanctuary I chanced in childhood to come upon a tiny octavo bound in blue, stamped with gilt morning-glories, morning-glories such as I have always associated, for some unexplained reason, with the long-late Prince Albert and the equally long-late Lucy Larcom! Within the covers of this little book was a highly embellished frontispiece, hand-stenciled in colors of saffron, scarlet, and azure, with an overwhelmingly deep dash of bottle-green. I imagine this volume emerged from the press at a time when aniline dyes self-proclaimed their advent to the mediocrity of the day. Beyond that I do not venture a date.

This giddy frontispiece seemed, even in my childish eyes, profanely gay for the subject it presented. Here was depicted the figure of a bearded man in foreign dress, visage forlorn, person unkempt. The artist pictured him in the act of destroying a quantity of furniture of a sort that might have given distinction to an early Victorian parlor.

Just what seemed so terrifying about the situation I do not know, unless it was that, as I distinctly recall, I myself had occasionally been regarded as somewhat destructive in the furniture line--as when, quite unintentionally, I scratched my great-aunt’s mahogany sofa in making a desperate attempt not to slide off its hair-covered plateau at a moment when the peculiarly poignant texture of this revered fabric had caused me unwittingly to squirm about in manœvering for a less irritating bit of the area. From that time on a certain Miss Solander, occupying the important post of governess, could not adjust her perspective to considering me other than a menace to mahogany in the front of the house or black walnut in the rear.

Thus you can well imagine how heroically there loomed forth from that frontispiece the figure of one who was deliberately breaking up chairs, tables, stools, four-posters, and what not--and a grown man at that! But the thrillingness of the situation was further enhanced by the fact that not only was he breaking up the furniture but he was feeding it to the flames! There was no doubt of it: a copious employment of carmine and saffron made that point clear. That any one should have dared to be so deliberately destructive at once awakened my curiosity, and I am not sure it did not awaken my admiration as well. I hope not, for as we grow older we like to think that our Golden Days were paragon in their virtues.

It was not long before I discovered in the background of the picture the figure of a woman in a Breton cap--inexcusable anachronism, though I did not know it then. Who was she? The furniture-breaker’s governess, perhaps; no, that could not be, for he was older than she. From the corner of my eye I took a swift visual dart at Miss Solander. The lady in the picture appeared timid and weeping. No, it would not be a governess.

Just then a voice interrupted: “What are you looking at, child?”

“I do not know,” I replied.

“You do not know!” exclaimed Miss Solander in expected disapproval. “Pray, why do you not know?” She moved near, to be serviceable.

Now, Miss Solander never cared for pictures, at least only for painted ones of forget-me-nots and buttercups in water-color and sheep by Mauve in oil, so I hurried on to spell out the title-page. I gave it up.

“P-a-l-i-s-sy,--Palissy. Master Bernard Palissy the Potter,” coached Miss Solander.

“What is a potter?” I asked. And then it began.

In these after years I have always been glad that Miss Solander’s embroidery chenille gave out at the first question, and that a gentle rain kept us indoors. Undoubtedly, too, this little book had been known to _her_ childhood, for she extended it a more approving greeting than it was her wont to vouchsafe many of my other early literary discoveries. At any rate, I have forgiven her much, for that afternoon she read me the story of Master Bernard from beginning to end.

How it all came back to me yesterday when my friend Cleon, at whose house I was dining, took me into his library and showed me, not a book about the old potter but an actual bit of his craft, a sauce-boat in the enameled faience which Palissy struggled through so many years of vicissitude to produce. Tenderly I took it in my hands and gazed intimately upon its lovely soft blues, grays, browns, wonderful greens, and the soft and well-fused marbled colors on the back of the piece, all of which, together with the sharp modeling of the relief and “neatness” of its workmanship gave unmistakable evidence of its authenticity. It had not the crude greens, the glaring yellows or the bright purples that betray imitations of Palissy’s ware.

I have seen the fine collections of Master Bernard’s handiwork in the Louvre, the Hôtel Cluny, the Sèvres Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the other collections of note, public and private, at home and abroad, but the little _saucière_ which my friend Cleon permitted me to gaze upon--nay, dear reader, to hold in my hands!--there was not a finer bit anywhere. Master Bernard must have given a chuckle of contentment when he drew it from the kiln!

One might, with a princely purse, collect a few examples of Palissy ware in the course of a lifetime keenly devoted to collecting! But so rare is Palissy ware that even in Cleon’s house I had not expected to see such a treasure. Strangely enough, it had been discovered, not just bought; discovered in London, and, unromantically enough, though exultingly, in a shop whose keeper ought to have known what it was, who ought to have known enough not to let it go for the mere pittance of--but that is Cleon’s secret!

My own flair for collecting has often fed my pride, but it is tempered with a happy contentment from an interest in the things I cannot have, may never hope to have! I cannot, perhaps, describe to you the delight I experienced in coming upon that _saucière_ at Cleon’s or the joy I felt in being permitted to take my time in gloating over it unhurried by a museum curator, whose official anxiety must of necessity ever play false to his kindly attempt to conceal it. When I came home I looked over all my photographs of Palissy ware, and took down from its shelf in my library a volume in French of the Works of Master Bernard, a volume of the date of 1636, followed by one of 1777 and one of 1884. Master Bernard was not only a notable potter, but, as both Lamartine and Anatole France observed, he holds a high position among French writers in the field of natural philosophy, agriculture, and religion.

Master Bernard’s early life is wrapped in mystery. We know nothing of his parentage or of his early education. Probably, as Henry Morley observed, “As a child he rolled upon the moss and ripened with the chestnuts.” In later life Palissy himself declared that he had had “no other books than heaven and earth, which were open to all.”

Yet he learned reading, writing, and something of figuring, besides something of design and also of geometry, after the simple methods of his time. It is doubtful if any of the learning of his day was communicated to him in his youth, and it seems more probable that he drew inspiration for his philosophy from the trees and the earth, and that nature herself taught him those many lessons he applied so perfectly to future problems which confronted him. But we know that at an early age he became apprenticed to the art of painting and working at glass. Inasmuch as this art was considered very honorable in those days and practised by members of the lesser nobility, it is possible that Palissy may have sprung from that class who did not lose their dignity of station by following this vocation.

But under Francis I there came a certain disassociation in the crafts. The architect separated from the builder, the sculptor from the stone-worker, and the glass-painter from the glass-worker. It was then the art fell into decay somewhat, and like many another disappointed worker, Palissy turned aside to seek some other field for his abilities, as now he was scarcely able to eke out a living by the old means. For a time he commanded better fortune. In a document by him preserved in the Bibliothéque Nationale we read: “They thought me a better painter than I was, which caused me to be often summoned to draw plans for use in courts of law. Then when I had such commissions I was very well paid.”

However, his superb improvidence--for one may almost call it such--delayed anything like his establishment in life, for we find him at the age of twenty-one years journeying through France as a sort of free-lance; at the very time, indeed, when Paracelsus the philosopher at thirty-seven was wandering, quite as ragged, through Germany. Finally he returned to his own country and settled in Saintes, about 1542, promptly married, and in the course of time became father to a goodly family, which he supported by his work of surveying the salt marshes of Saintonge when his skill as a worker in glass and in designing was not in demand.

I imagine that Master Palissy, Madame and the little Palissys got on very comfortably for a time. Had not the Council of King Francis decided to impose a salt tax on the Saintonge, and had not Master Bernard been commissioned to make the surveys of the salt marshes in the neighborhood of Saintes?

Probably he spent much of his time in “tracing lines of geometry,” of which things he wrote, “It is well known that, thanks be to God, I am not altogether ignorant.” He had also added portrait-painting to his accomplishments. A more provident man than he might have prospered and his name have been forgotten. While the impecunious are not always to be rated wise, it is certain that Palissy’s poverty drove him to the achievement of his fame as a potter in his desperate struggle to be free from its bonds.

One day as Palissy sat disconsolate outside his door, no work in hand, nothing ahead and the larder growing empty through his own extravagances and likewise those of his wife, he remembered to have seen, sometime about the year 1541, during his wanderings at Avignon or at Nîmes, a cup which, as he described it afterward, “was turned and enamelled with so much beauty that from that time I entered into controversy with my own thoughts, recalling to mind several suggestions some people had made to me in fun when I was painting portraits. Then,” continued he, “seeing that these were falling out of request in the country where I dwelt, and that glass painting also was little patronized, I began to think that if I should discover how to make enamels I could make earthen vessels and other things very prettily, because God had gifted me with some knowledge of drawing.”

Now, Luca della Robbia had been dead some twenty-eight years, but not only was his work well known throughout Tuscany and other Italian states but specimens of it and of other Italian faience had been brought into France by Leonardo da Vinci, who died when Palissy was in his eighth year, and later by Benvenuto Cellini, who was but nine years Palissy’s senior. However, Palissy had not visited Paris before this and probably he knew nothing of the Della Robbias, of Leonardo, or of Cellini, and less of the Italian faience. It was enough for him that he had seen a wonderful cup, made he knew not how, but produced by a process which, it is quite possible, he imagined to be a lost one, a process which now his ingenious imagination was seeking to recover. Had fate or fortune taken him to Reims instead of to Avignon, he would never have thought of competing with the work introduced by the Florentines. But in those days of different intercourse he had seen only the one cup, and that he imagined to be unique; consequently, as we have seen, he resolved to set about becoming a potter himself.

How the imagination wreaths around that mysterious cup which inspired Master Bernard! What was it, maiolica of Italy or of Spain, or an enameled cup of southern France? Neither of these, I think. I cannot imagine it could have been anything short of some such treasure as a porcelain cup fetched from China by some Marco Polo!

At any rate, Master Bernard set about the business diligently and persistently. Once he had made up his mind to a thing there was no changing him, so long as the thing he had set his mind to appeared to him better, more wise, or more righteous than that which would take its place. He became as persistent a potter as he had been (and as he was!) persistent a Protestant. Luckily it was for him that the Constable de Montmorency, who was sent by the king to quell an uprising in Saintes, was later to come across Master Bernard and to take up with his ingenious compositions.

Eight long, tedious, heartbreaking years succeeded this resolution, during the course of which his powers of endurance and splendid physical strength were put to a severe test in his attempts to find a suitable enamel for the objects he made out of the earth of the neighborhood, a sort of pipe-clay. Month after month and year after year came sorrowful failures when he was seemingly just on the point of success. Without caring that he knew nothing concerning argillaceous earths, he set himself to search out enamels, like a man who gropes in the darkness.

Whatever else he may have been, we can rest assured that he was thorough and practical in his craft. That so long a time elapsed before the results he hoped to attain were reached seems a proof to confute the theory often advanced that he had learned the secret of his enamel from the Hirschvogels in Nuremberg. If they disclosed any part of their craft to him when he was roving through Germany, they zealously guarded that of making white enamel, since for this he sought so long and arduously--indeed, through fifteen years of patient toil and discouragement. Abaquesne, at Rouen, had anticipated him, it is true, but it is just because it chanced to be his lot to have to seek out these things for himself that his works were endowed with marked originality.

All this time his family suffered in poverty. We can sympathize with his wife, certainly. That Palissy was quite out of his right mind she had no doubt. Was he not sacrificing everything for--what seemed in the face of his failures--nothing? It is hard enough to believe in genius in our own day, when miracles are no longer surprises. What, then, must have been the alienating doubts of Master Bernard’s whole family as they saw him, day after day, absorbed with his clays, his enamels, and his ovens, while they stood by, hungry and neglected! The colossal selfishness of the men who win against all odds is forgotten afterward and forgiven, and one is inclined to think Palissy’s plaint about the lack of encouragement of his friends and family more of a screen to his troubled conscience than anything else. When a man gives up the employment which supports his wife and children for the sake of obstinately attempting to discover the secret of making ornamental dishes like one he has seen years before, is there any wonder he is thought to be mad? Even in these days a family would ask that a commission in lunacy be appointed to look into his sanity.

And listen to his own testimony: “Another misfortune befell me, causing me great annoyance, which was that, running short of wood, I was obliged to burn the palings which maintained the boundaries of my garden, the which after being burned I had to burn the tables and the flooring of my house in order to cause the melting of the second composition. I was in such agony as I cannot express”--not a word about the agony of wife and children!--“for I was utterly exhausted and withered up by my work and the heat of the furnace; during more than a month my shirt had never been dry upon me; even those who ought to have helped me ran crying through the town that I was burning the planks of the floors, so that I was made to lose my credit and was thought to be mad. Others said that I was trying to coin false money, and I went about crouching to the earth, like one ashamed.” I think that what Madame Palissy did not say places her in the hierarchy of our marveling esteem! Howbeit I write of a hero and not of heroines. Here, surely seemed to be a second Columbus tossed on the stormy seas of derision.

But finally, in 1549, the success of the secret formula for which he had been striving was attained as the fires of his experimental oven cooled. It had been his agonized hope--the last straw held out by Providence. How differently they all regarded him now! Wife and children forgave him, friends returned to him, tradesmen were eager to give him credit, for Bernard Palissy had brought renown to their town, and they hailed him as a great man where but the day before they would have driven him to a madhouse. Quickly the fame of his achievements spread far and near, and almost immediately he found a munificent patron in Anne de Montmorency, the great constable, while to the king and the queen mother he became “worker in earth and inventor of figulines” by royal patent.

Is it any wonder he felt justified for all his sacrifices? He could now give his wife a prouder place than any she had ever dreamed of, and his children would be educated beyond all their companions. Surely it was worth these fifteen years of sorrow and suffering, he argued.

Ah, little blue book with the gilt morning-glories, the aniline frontispiece! Courageous, unflinching Master Bernard; brave, suffering madame!

When one remembers all these things every bit of Palissy ware becomes endowed with a double interest. It is distinguished in the earlier examples by its close adherence to natural forms, not, perhaps, to be considered exactly beautiful according to the canons of art in our day, nevertheless admirable in many of its qualities; and its fidelity to nature is so remarkable often that one forgives it its lack of esthetic attributes. One of the extant examples is a large plate executed in enamel faience. It is covered with fishes, reptiles, crustacea, and mollusks in the midst of the modeled representation of water, together with herbs and marine plants. It is remarkable for the minute execution of its details and also for the richness of the enamel giving life to these wonderful studies from nature. Indeed, these rustic pieces, so admirable in their original way, exhibit Palissy’s tendency to imitate nature with exquisite realism and a naturalist’s love for accuracy of detail. He himself was so pleased with his success that he tells us live lizards often came to admire his fabrications, and that a dog which he made (the same is now in the Dresden Museum), caused many real dogs “to growl on coming near it, thinking it to be alive.”

Palissy’s work was eagerly sought by all the great nobles, and the illustrious constable gave into his hands the task of decorating the Château d’Écouen, thereafter one of the marvels of its time. Alas! there remains nothing of this work, nor of the famous grotto in the gardens of the Tuileries, with the decoration of which Catherine de’ Medici had intrusted him. This was about the year 1565, after Palissy had taken his family from La Rochelle (where he had been for several years after leaving Saintes), to Paris to live. It was during the period that Master Bernard discoursed to the learned on topics in natural philosophy and was respectfully listened to at a crown a head, a large lecture entrance fee for those days. Palissy’s sons, Nicolas and Mathurin, were working with him in Paris, as entries in the royal accounts for the year 1570 show. Only a few decades ago workmen excavating in the gardens of the Tuileries unearthed the remains of Palissy’s old workshop, and later discovered some of his ovens.

But Master Bernard was to fall upon evil days. He was a Huguenot, and a former coreligionist denounced him, which led to his arrest in 1588. His property had previously been destroyed. Owing to royal protection he survived the terrible Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve. But the manner in which a man should say his prayers was of more importance to Henry III than the making of “figulines of earth,” so Master Bernard traveled from the Tuileries to the Bastille. His friend the Duc de Mayence obtained respite for him through clever artifice; finally the king agreed to grant him a pardon if he would recant the heresy of his Huguenot faith. Palissy indignantly scorned these ignoble terms.

Shortly after Henry IV succeeded Henry III. Probably kings had ceased to be interested in gray-haired potters and their expenses. At any rate, Master Bernard was condemned to death. Before the fragile clay that God had modeled into the cup of his life had a chance to be dashed to earth by hideous bigotry, his soul was liberated from his worn-out body, and the headsman’s block was cheated of the grace of being Master Bernard’s last pillow on earth. May heaven rest his soul!

I shall never forget, little blue book, how Miss Solander shed a tear over those last pages, how my own eyes were not dry. Somehow I think everything must have its story, and when I am in Cleon’s house or in my own, looking at this thing or at that with the love a collector holds for the things of yesterday, I am not content with the thing alone, but my thoughts seek out the memory of its story. At least it was so with that inimitable _saucière_ of Master Bernard of blessed memory!