That gold
That thing that gold
He shut his eyes and it was as if a door had slammed shut inside his head.
The boys appeared over the brow of the dunes in time to see him rise up slowly on one leg, like a big old dying bird, his arms clutching helplessly at hoops of air. He wavered a moment, then slowly toppled over and collapsed full-length upon the sand.
*
I dreamed last night that — No, no, I can’t. Some dreams are too terrible to be told.
Pain in my breast suddenly. Ah! it pains. Perhaps I am the one who is dying of his heart. That would be a laugh, for me to die and leave them there, trapped, the tide halted, the boat stuck fast forever. End it all, space and time, one huge flash and then darkness and a blessed silence as the babble stops. Serve them right. Serve us all right. We are the dangerous ones, no other species like us, all of creation cowering before us, the death-dealers. I see a forked beast squatting on the midden of the world, red-eyed, regardant, gnawing on a shinbone: poor, dumb destroyer. Better without us, better the nothing than this, this shambles we have raised. Yes, have done with it alclass="underline" one universal neck and I the hangman. In the end. Not yet. In the end.
Vaublin’s double. Curious episode. (See how quicky I recover my poise?) All the experts, Professor Kreutznaer included, agree that it was all a delusion, a phantasm spawned by fever and exhaustion in that last, desperate summer of the painter’s brief life. I am not so sure. The deeper I look into the matter the stranger it becomes. He was living on the Île de la Cité, last resting place in his fitful wanderings at the end, in big rooms high above the Seine. He was thirty-seven; his lungs were ruined. The paintings from that period, hurried dream-scapes bathed in an eerie, lunar radiance, have a shocked look to them, the motionless, inscrutable figures scattered about the canvas like the survivors of a vast calamity of air and light. What he is seeking here is something intangible, some pure, distilled essence that perhaps is not human at all. He speaks in one of his last letters of coming to the realisation that the centre of a painting, that packed point of equilibrium out of which every element of the composition flows and where at the same time everything is ingathered, is never where it seems it should be, is never central, or obviously significant, but could be a patch of sky, the fold of a gown, a dog scratching its ear, anything. The trick is to locate that essential point and work outwards from it. By now he had given himself up entirely to theatricality. The actors from the Comédie-Française sat for him in costume, all the leading figures, Paul Poisson, La Thorillière, the tragedienne Charlotte Desmares, Biancolelli whose Pierrot was the talk of the season. They were perfect for his purposes, all pose and surface brilliance. They would strike an attitude and hold it for an hour without stirring, in a trance of self-regard. He was drawing too on his memories of the fêtes and staged spectacles years before in the great gardens of the city. Those green and umber twilights of which he was so fond are surely recollections of the Duchesse de Maine’s grands nuits at Sceaux, the soft shadows among the trees, the music on the water, the masked figures strolling down the long lawns as the last light of evening turned to blackening dusk and the little bats came out and flittered in the darkening air. The melancholy that was always his mark is mingled in these final scenes with a kind of shocked hilarity. The luminance in which they are bathed seems always on the point of being extinguished, as if it had its source in the little palpitant flame of the painter’s own enfeebled, failing life.
When the notion came to him of a shadowy counterpart stalking him about the city he thought the thing must be a joke, an elaborate hoax got up perhaps by someone with a grudge against him — he had always been of a suspicious nature. In the street an acquaintance would stop and stare in surprise, saying he had seen him not five minutes ago walking in the opposite direction and wearing a black cloak. He was not amused. Then he began to notice the pictures. There were fêtes galantes and amusements champêtres, and even theatre scenes, his speciality, the figures in which seemed to look at him with suppressed merriment, knowingly. They were executed in a style uncannily like his own, but in haste, with technical lapses and scant regard for quality of surface. This slapdash manner seemed a gibe aimed directly at him and his pretensions, mocking his lapses in concentration, the shortcuts and the technical flaws that he had thought no one would notice. When he tried to get a close look at this or that piece somehow he was always foiled. He would glimpse a Récréation galante being carried between two aproned porters out of a dealer’s shop, or a gold and green Île enchantée, which for a dizzy second seemed surely his own work, hanging over the fireplace of a fashionable salon just as he was being ushered from the room. Who was this prankster who could dash off imitation Vaublins with such assurance, who knew his secret flaws, who could imitate not only his strengths but his weaknesses too, his evasions, his failures of taste and technique? He tells in a letter to his friend and obituarist, the collector Antoine de La Roque, of having a feeling constantly of being hindered; some days, he says, he has almost to fight his way to the easel, as if indeed there were an invisible double there before him, crowding him aside, and when he steps to the canvas another, heavier arm seems to lift alongside his. I seem to hear mocking laughter, he wrote, and someone is always standing in the corner behind me, yet when I turn there is no one there.
He had begun work on Le monde d’or, hastening while his strength lasted. The summer was hot. I see him aloft in his attic rooms, all doors and windows open to the air and the noises of the city, the breezes and sudden smells and shimmering water-lights. His hands shake, everything shakes, flapping and straining as if the house were a great, lumbering barquentine in full sail. He tells La Roque, I have embarked for the golden world. He wants to confess to something but cannot, something about a crime committed long ago; something about a woman.
STEALTHILY THE DAY BURGEONS, climbing towards noon. The wind has died. On the ridge the oaks are motionless, dark with heat, and the air above the fields undulates like a blown banner. The hens have departed from the yard, fleeing the sun, the old dog is asleep again under the wheelbarrow. The beech tree at the corner of the garden stands unmoving in the purple puddle of its own shadow. Something squeaks and then is still. Hushed, secret world! The back door is open, an up-ended box of soft black darkness; glide through here, light as a breeze, touch this and that, these dim things, with a blind man’s feathery touch. The narrow passageway beside the stairs smells of lime, the hall is loud with light. Voices. Upstairs a door opens and rapid footsteps sound. Listen! they are living their little lives.
In the kitchen Sophie stood with one haunch perched on the edge of the table taking photographs of Alice, who sat before her on a chair with her little wan face meekly lifted up to the lens, intent and motionless, like a flower holding itself up to the light. Felix came in from the hall, with Licht, rabbit-eyed and shaky, trotting worriedly at his heels. Sophie held up a hand to them and they stopped in the doorway, watching.