The clusion he must be haranguing in Russia; the mother is with them for the Servians. It is the him when he dies. first indication of the wider, more impersonal feelings which in afteryears urge her to frequent visits to Versailles; which provoke indignant tears on the death, of the Prince Imperial; which overwhelm her with grief at the untimely removal of Gambetta; which nearly produce a fainting fit when the artist Julian, to see if she is capable of emotion, tells her that the Czar has been assassinated. So Marie was again at Nice with her "two mothers," grandfather, cousin, and doctor; enjoying the garden and the sea, playing with her. dogs, haranguing her fishwomen and market-women. old restlessness had taken possession of her; she plunged with redoubled vigour into reading of every description. Gradually her artistic nature asserted itself more and more strongly at the expense of the social side. "I must cling But Marie was not happy in to painting," she had said already Russia. "This life makes my flesh creep (m'horripile)," she says. "The days pass; I am losing precious time in the best years of my life. Evenings passed en famille, charming pleasantries, a gaiety of which I myself am the moving spirit. But what ennui! Not a word of sense, not a phrase that shows a cultivated man. I am a pedant, unhappily, and love to hear talk of the ancients Heartily glad, therefore, was in Rome; and now: "I grow every day more enthusiastic for following words : "I have decided to remain at Paris, where I shall study, and whence I shall go to enjoy myself at the waters in the sunimer. Fancies are exhausted; Russia has failed; I am corrected for good. I feel that the moment has at last come to stop. . . . This is no passing resolution like so many others, but definitive." It proved the determining moment in Marie's life. Of the traditional marriage idea we hear after this but little. She had refused offer after offer which fell short of her ideal; it was becoming more and more apparent that the glory she desired must be selfearned, that the surging energy within her could not be dominated except by strenuous independent work-work which should gather There was, however, a reason for this imperious necessity of serious work very different from the oft-expressed desire of glorya reason unformulated, probably unsuspected, by Marie herself. The loosening of conventional religious beliefs was awakening in her, as it does in all veracious natures, a deepened feeling of the value of human nature as human nature, and, working in union with her impetuousity, was already beginning to produce an almost frenzied desire to reach the living bottom of the world around her. The religion imbibed from her family had never been much more than fetishism, her God a being whose duty it was to make her happy in return for pilgrimage and almsgiving - an essentially artificial religion, not likely to persist in an analytical mind subject to the strain and stress of nineteenth-century life in the great centres of civilisation. "My God!" she says, quite at the beginning of her diary, "if you let me live as I should like, I promise you, if you take pity on me, to go from Kharkhoff to Kieff on foot. If you satisfy my ambition and make me quite happy, I promise to go to Jerusalem, and do the tenth part of the road on foot." is very original to converse with the good God, but that does not make Him any the kinder to me.” We find her telling her beads, and hitting her head on the pavement at each bead; or again, quietly reasoning away the existence of the soul. Now she is lifted up to the seventh heaven in an ecstasy of belief; again, she shyly remarks that she felt the first pain in her right lung while her father and mother were so fervently praying for her recovery in that specially favoured church at Kharkhoff. We may surely believe that this fluctuation of religious belief, this want of the spiritual excitement which acts as a safety-valve to most women, had much to do with the frenzied zeal with which she sought realisin in heart. An indolent. inactive religion was not akin to her nature, yet that was the religion which she had been accustomed from childhood to see before her. if God wills-by the help of God. "Mamma always speaks of God: One calls on God so often ouly to escape from all kinds of little duties. That is neither faith nor devotion: a weakness, the cowardice of the idle, indolent, incapable. If it is written that such a thing will happen, it will happen,' she says, to avoid the trouble of exerting herself. 'If everything were written beforehand, God would only be a constitutional president, and our wishes, vices, virtues, miere sine cures.' Deprived, then, both by her analytical mind and by the loftiness of her ideals of religion, and of the ability to make a good match, Marie, in the autumn of 1878, settled in Paris to begin the artistic career which was to prove her consolation until her death. Painting was the only form of art left open to her. Her voice was irrevocably gone in consequence of a chronic laryngitis. From the beginning it seems to have been fluctuating; it went and came, and she received it back after each attack of hoarseness with tears of joy, the value of which singers will be well able to appreciate. "It is as though a mother should find living, in her arms, a child whom she believed to be dead, and dead through her own fault," says Marie in one such transport. But at Rome the terrible cough began; chest and larynx were both affected: "You know, doctor, I spit blood, and must be looked to." "Oh, mademoiselle, if you persist in writing till three o'clock in the morning you will have every malady under the sun." But to preach calm to Marie was to impose moderation on some devouring conflagration; and her answer to the warning was-her Paris life. October 1878 saw her first entry into Julian's art academy, and an immediate grip of her work, which greatly astonished Julian, and Robert Fleury, the teacher in her section. It was certainly an extraordinary thing that a vivacious girl of seventeen, whose position enabled her to go into society as much as she wished, should work for eight and nine hours a day in a small, close, ugly studio, with a fervour not to be surpassed by those whose art was their bread. "All that in an hour!" cried M. Robert Fleury, correcting one of her sketches, "but she must be furious (enragée)." Her powers were at once apparent; so plainly so, in fact, that it took some time to convince both Julian and Robert Fleury that she had never worked seriously at art before. "You did all that alone?" is the constant and somewhat incredulous demand during the first few days of her studio-life, to be followed by encouragements to work which spoke volumes in the mouths of such masters of the art. "Reassure yourself," said Julian three days after her entry, "you will not be long on the road." "And when," Marie goes on mamma came to fetch me at five o'clock, he said something like the following: 'I thought it was the caprice of a spoilt child, but I must confess that she really works, has plenty of will, and is well gifted. If this Salon in three months."", continues, her works will be fit for the Such words of praise were to Marie the sine quá non of successful work; they were a mental champagne, needful to counteract the desponding tendency so curiously blended with her ambition. They never elated her unduly ; they simply made her see clearly. "Do not think I do wonders because M. Julian is astonished," she says. "I am wanting in experience, but what I do is correct and like the original. As to the execution, it is what one might expect after a week's work. All my companions draw better than I do. . . . What makes me think I shall do better than they is that, though I feel their merit, I should not be content to do as they do; whereas most beginners say, 'If I could only draw like So-and-so, or So-and-so !'" Yet, if M. Julian did not praise, but blamed her, or if even his words of praise were not glowing enough, her fears got the better of her, she ceased calculating the number of months which she would and began to think that, after all, need to make herself renowned, she had mistaken her vocation; neither could she judge herself fairly again until she had provoked a renewal of the praise which was her medicine. • She brooded on blame, and passed lightly over praise. "What a much greater impression disagreeable things make than pleas ant ones!" she says epigrammatically in this connection. For the last month I heard nothing but encouragements, except once, a fortnight_ago; this morning I am scolded, and I only remember this morning; but it is so in everything and always. A thousand persons applaud, one only hisses, and one hears that one more than the thousand." Most characteristically Marie proceeds to grow jealous of the successes of the most gifted and advanced artist in the studio. "Breslau has been working in the studio for two years, and she is twenty, while I am seventeen; but Breslau had drawn a great deal before coming here. And I, wretch! I have only been drawing for a fortnight. How well Breslau draws !" Her artistic life resolves itself henceforth in great measure into a race with Breslau. "In two or three months I shall draw as she does that is to say, very well." She compares all her work with Breslau's; she is continually pulling herself up to ask herself how Breslau drew at the corresponding stage of her studies. When her painting seems at a standstill (she was encouraged to begin to paint very soon after entering the studio) she consoles herself with the thought that Breslau too, was said at first to be no colourist; "yet now," she adds, with the artistic appreciation of a generous rival "now, 'her tones sing.' She is glad to have found a rival worthy of her. "With the others," she says, "I should have gone to sleep." "This girl," she writes later on in one of her moments of despairing depression-"this girl is a power; she is not the only one, of course, but we come from the same cage, not to say from the same nest, and I divined and foresaw it, and told you so in the very first days, I, ignorant being as I was then. I despise myself, I renounce myself, I do not understand how Julian and Tony [Robert Fleury] can say what they do. I am nothing, I have nothing dans le ventre (0 Zola !). Beside Breslau I feel like a thin, fragile card-board box near a massive, richly sculptured oaken chest." She envies Bresiau her milieu, where persons and things are artistic. "The milieu is half the talent while one is a pupil," she says later, comparing Breslau's advantages in this respect with the constant friction and nervous tension to which she herself is subjected through her efforts to control her impatience at the philistinism of her family, through her struggles to feel and show gratitude for the numberless marks of devotion which the fundamental want of sympathy between herself and her "mothers" rendered intensely galling to her spirit of independence. But she puts her finger on the real difference between herself and Breslau, and reveals the cause of the fever of her work in the words in which she comments on a success attained by Breslau while she herself was too ill to work. "In the studio everything disappears," she remarks in toues of rejoicing: "one has neither name nor faniily; one is no longer one's mother's daughter. one is one's self. one is an individual, with before one -Art, and nothing else. One feels so happy, so free, so proud!" She modifies her dress to harmonise with her new condition ("I wear no heels at the studio," she remarks, half laughing); makes merry expeditions into the Quartier Latin in search of engravings, draperies, casts, and other artistic properties; is discovered by her horrified family driving with her fellow-students in an open cab in the Bois ("elles étaient si gentilles, si convenables," she says); is delighted when, "thanks to my modest costume, people take me for some Breslau or other, and look at me in a certain benevolent, encouraging manner, quite different from formerly." realistic tendencies gradually developed and strengthened in this congenial atmosphere. They show ed themselves from the first by an admirable power of seizing the salient features in her models, a marked preference for drawing from the nude ("like all those who are worth anything," says Julian), and a quite extraordinary boldness and aplomb of execution. "It's boy's work," is the judgment of the men students on her competition sketch, and they adjudge the medal to the sheer force it displays. Her envelope," she says, in the elation As the technical difficulties of execution were overcome, as the novelty of work from the nude wore off, these realistic tendencies, developed by growing age and experience, manifested themselves in an intense love of the streets and public gardens. "Have you ever considered it?" sider it well at five or Her last exhibited picture, the spirited "Meeting" of six vivacious schoolboys, was painted in the street; one of her last productions was the result of work in a cab; everything had been prepared for the commencement of another study of the kind, when death cut short her career. Yet her realisin, as the above extract abundantly shows, was not the sham which ordinarily goes by that name. which occupies itself simply with cynically copying the ugly or the nasty, calling it "nature"; hers was rather the realism of the true "Of the woinan I have only the poet, who feels and seeks to ex “M. Julian and the others." she says, "have said in the men's studio that I had neither the hand. the manner, nor the tendencies of a wonian, and they want to know if there is any one in my family from whom I derive so much talent and force, even brutality, in drawing, and courage in work." |