“What’s the matter?” I asked with a heavy heart. “How about father?”
The old woman looked at me fixedly.
“Why, don’t you know? … Haven’t you received anything? … Ah, my poor Monsieur Jean! My poor Monsieur Jean!”
And with eyes filled with tears, she stretched out her arms in the direction of the cemetery.
“Yes! Yes! There is where he is now, with Madame,” she said in a dull voice.
III
Toc, toc, toc.
And at the same time a small drawn otter skin bonnet appeared in the slight opening of the door, followed by two smiling eyes under a veil, then a long fur cape which outlined the slender body of a young woman.
“I am not disturbing you? … May I come in?”
Lirat, the painter, raised his head.
“Ah! it’s you, Madame!” he said in a curt tone, almost irritated, while shaking his hands soiled with pastel. “Why, yes, certainly. … Come right in!”
He left his easel and offered a seat.
“How is Charles?” he asked.
“He is all right, thank you.”
She sat down, smiling, and her smile was really charming as well as sad. Although covered with a veil, her clear eyes of pinkish blue, her very large eyes which illuminated her whole figure, seemed to be radiating infinite kindness. … She was dressed very elegantly, without striving to be pretentious. A little over-perfumed, however. … There was a moment of silence.
The studio of the painter Lirat, situated in a peaceful section of the Faubourg Saint Honoré, on Rodrigues Square, was a vast, bare place with grey walls, with rough carpentry work and without furniture. Lirat called it familiarly “his hangar.” A hangar it was, indeed, where the north winds blew and the rain entered the room through the small crevices in the roof. Two long tables of plain wood supported boxes of paint, scrap books, blocks, handles of fans, Japanese albums, casts, a mess of odd and useless things. Near a bookcase filled with old magazines in a corner there was a pile of pasteboard, canvas, torn sketches with the stretchers sticking through. A shattered sofa creaking with a sound like that of a piano out of tune, whenever one tried to sit on it, two rickety armchairs, a looking glass without a frame—constituted the only luxury of the studio illumined by trembling sunlight. In the winter, on days when Lirat had a model posing for him in the studio, he used to light his little cast-iron stove whose chimney, crooked into several large bends, supported by iron wire and covered with rust, rose in a serpentine fashion in the middle of the room, before losing itself in the roof through an opening, all too large. On other days, even during the coldest nights, he substituted for the heat of the stove an old coat of astrakhan fur, worn out, bald and scabby, which he put on with real pleasure.
Lirat took a childish pride in this dilapidated studio, and he boasted of its bareness as other painters do of their embroidered plush and tapestries, invariably historical in origin. Nay, he even wanted it to be still less attractive, he wanted its floor to be the bare ground. “It is in my studio that I learn who my best friends are,” he would often say, “they always come again, the others stay away. That’s very convenient.” Very few came more than once.
The young woman was attractively seated in her chair, her bust slightly bent forward, her hands buried in her muff; from time to time she would take out an embroidered handkerchief and bring it slowly to her mouth which I could not see because of the thick border of the veil which hid it, but which I surmised was very beautiful, very red and exquisitely shaped. In her whole figure, elegant and refined, about which, in spite of the smile which rendered it so alluring, there was an air of modesty and even haughtiness, I could distinguish only these beautiful eyes which rested on objects like the rays of some heavenly star, and I followed her gaze which passed from the floor to the frame work, so vibrant with luminosity and caresses. The embarrassing silence continued. I thought I alone was the cause of this embarrassment and I was getting ready to leave, when Lirat exclaimed:
“Ah! Pardon! … I have forgotten. … Dear Madame, allow me to introduce to you my friend Jean Mintié.”
She greeted me with a gracious and at the same time coaxing nod of her head and in a very sweet voice, which thrilled me deliciously, she said:
“I am delighted to meet you, Monsieur, but I know you well.”
While very much flushed, I was stammering out a few confused and silly words, Lirat broke in mockingly:
“I hope you are not going to make him believe that you have read his book?”
“I beg your pardon, Monsieur Lirat. … I have read it. … It is very good.”
“Yes, like my studio and my painting, isn’t that right?”
“Oh, no! what a comparison!”
She said it frankly, with a laugh, which rolled through the room like the chirping of a bird.
I did not like this laughter. Although it had a hard, sonorous quality, it nevertheless rang false. It seemed to me out of harmony with the expression of her face, so delicately sad, and then, in my admiration for Lirat’s genius it hurt me almost like an insult. I do not know why, but it would have been more pleasing to me if she had expressed her admiration for this great unrecognized artist, if she had shown at this moment a loftier judgment, if she had evinced a sentiment superior to those of other women. On the other hand the contemptuous manner of Lirat, his tone of bitter hostility, shocked me deeply! I had a grudge against him for this affected rudeness, for this attitude of boyish insolence which lowered him in my esteem, I thought. I was displeased and very much embarrassed. I tried to speak of indifferent things, but not a single object
