A DUEL OF HEARTS
Broad daylight streamed down into the vast studio
through a skylight in the ceiling, which showed a
large square of dazzling blue, a bright vista of limitless
heights of azure, across which passed flocks of birds
in rapid flight. But the glad light of heaven
hardly entered this severe room, with high ceilings
and draped walls, before it began to grow soft and
dim, to slumber among the hangings and die in the portieres,
hardly penetrating to the dark corners where the gilded
frames of portraits gleamed like flame. Peace
and sleep seemed imprisoned there, the peace characteristic
of an artist’s dwelling, where the human soul
has toiled. Within these walls, where thought
abides, struggles, and becomes exhausted in its violent
efforts, everything appears weary and overcome as
soon as the energy of action is abated; all seems dead
after the great crises of life, and the furniture,
the hangings, and the portraits of great personages
still unfinished on the canvases, all seem to rest
as if the whole place had suffered the master’s
fatigue and had toiled with him, taking part in the
daily renewal of his struggle. A vague, heavy
odor of paint, turpentine, and tobacco was in the air,
clinging to the rugs and chairs; and no sound broke
the deep silence save the sharp short cries of the
swallows that flitted above the open skylight, and
the dull, ceaseless roar of Paris, hardly heard above
the roofs. Nothing moved except a little cloud
of smoke that rose intermittently toward the ceiling
with every puff that Olivier Bertin, lying upon his
divan, blew slowly from a cigarette between his lips.
With gaze lost in the distant sky, he tried to think
of a new subject for a painting. What should
he do? As yet he did not know. He was by
no means resolute and sure of himself as an artist,
but was of an uncertain, uneasy spirit, whose undecided
inspiration ever hesitated among all the manifestations
of art. Rich, illustrious, the gainer of all
honors, he nevertheless remained, in these his later
years, a man who did not know exactly toward what
ideal he had been aiming. He had won the Prix
of Rome, had been the defender of traditions, and
had evoked, like so many others, the great scenes of
history; then, modernizing his tendencies, he had
painted living men, but in a way that showed the influence
of classic memories. Intelligent, enthusiastic,
a worker that clung to his changing dreams, in love
with his art, which he knew to perfection, he had
acquired, by reason of the delicacy of his mind, remarkable
executive ability and great versatility, due in some
degree to his hesitations and his experiments in all
styles of his art. Perhaps, too, the sudden admiration
of the world for his works, elegant, correct, and
full of distinctions, influenced his nature and prevented
him from becoming what he naturally might have been.
Since the triumph of his first success, the desire
to please always made him anxious, without his being
conscious of it; it influenced his actions and weakened
his convictions. This desire to please was apparent
in him in many ways, and had contributed much to his
glory.
