Five o’clock in the afternoon. Rain since
morning and a gray sky low enough to be reached with
an umbrella; the close weather which sticks.
Mess, mud, nothing but mud, in heavy puddles, in shining
trails in the gutters, vainly chased by the street-scrapers
and the scavengers, heaved into enormous carts which
carry it slowly towards Montreuil—promenading
it in triumph through the streets, always moving, and
always springing up again, growing through the pavements,
splashing the panels of the carriages, the breasts
of the horses, the clothes of the passers-by, spattering
the windows, the door-steps, the shop-fronts, till
one feared that the whole of Paris would sink and
disappear under this sorrowful, miry soil where everything
dissolves and is lost in mud. And it moves one
to pity to see the invasion of this dirt on the whiteness
of the new houses, on the parapets of the quays, and
on the colonnades of the stone balconies. There
is some one, however, who rejoices at the sight, a
poor, sick, weary being, lying all her length on a
silk-embroidered divan, her chin on her clinched fists.
She is looking out gladly through the dripping windows
and delighting in all the ugliness.
“Look, my fairy! this is indeed the weather
I wanted to-day. See them draggling along!
Aren’t they hideous? Aren’t they dirty?
What mire! It is everywhere—in the
streets, on the quays, right down to the Seine, right
up to the heavens. I tell you, mud is good when
one is sad. I would like to play in it, to make
sculpture with it—a statue a hundred feet
high, that should be called ‘My weariness.’”
“But why are you so miserable, dearest?”
said the old dancer gently, amiable and pink, and
sitting straight in her seat for fear of disarranging
her hair, which was even more carefully dressed than
usual. “Haven’t you everything to
make you happy?” And for the hundredth time
she enumerated in her tranquil voice the reasons for
her happiness: her glory, her genius, her beauty,
all the men at her feet, the handsomest, the greatest—oh!
yes, the very greatest, as this very day—But
a terrible howl, like the heart-rending cry of the
jackal exasperated by the monotony of his desert,
suddenly made all the studio windows shake, and frightened
the old and startled little chrysalis back into her
cocoon.
A week ago, Felicia’s group was finished and
sent to the exhibition, leaving her in a state of
nervous prostration, moral sickness, and distressful
exasperation. It needs all the tireless patience
of the fairy, all the magic of her memories constantly
evoked, to make life supportable beside this restlessness,
this wicked anger, which growls beneath the girl’s
long silences and suddenly bursts out in a bitter
word or in an “Ugh!” of disgust at everything.
All the critics are asses. The public? An
immense goitre with three rows of chains. And
yet, the other Sunday, when the Duc de Mora came with
the superintendent of the art section to see her exhibits
in the studio, she was so happy, so proud of the praise
they gave her, so fully delighted with her own work,
which she admired from the outside, as though the work
of some one else, now that her tools no longer created
between her and her work that bond which makes impartial
judgment so hard for the artist.
