A landscape, really? He was very nearly trembling; it wasn’t from the breeze and he knew it. He was more serious than ever, too serious. They were taking his breath away; in the presence of these little, eerily costumed hearts, aglow at being seen and at being at his mercy, he became someone else, his taste for farce disappeared, he lacked every word: all that remained was an intense reserve that seemed comic to me, a sort of total bodily embarrassment, a stiffness in his spine and his arms that left only his right hand free, unfettered, prodigiously free, and as brusque as ever, as distorted, stroking thick and fast. He seemed watchful, but you couldn’t tell whether he was exulting in having his prey within reach or conjuring it in vain. He paid as much attention to me at this point as he did to the furniture; I had disappeared; he only spoke to one or the other, in few words and rather rudely, to have them adjust their posture, to look at him or bend their necks away: they were praying, I think, that the way he was acting was only the terseness of a fine artisan, while it was really the exasperated, hidden sigh of a famished ogre sharpening his knives under the table — but of this I wasn’t certain until much later, and neither were they.
They returned often: they were taken with him or by the pose he held them in. I was no longer present for their encounters; but I know he used the cousins for several paintings, or at least I have since been able to recognize them, Agnès blonder and Elisabeth plumper, happier, with a more imperious neck and a sharper laugh, delighted. I wasn’t around in January, business with the bishop dictating a journey. I wasn’t back in Nogent until the end of March. One night — nearing the days of the Passion, night approaching, raining as it rains at the end of March — I paid another visit to the painter.
The grounds open out at the top of a little valley sloping gently toward the Marne; the house is halfway up the incline on the right, near groves that partially conceal it; along the length of the cloister to the left, the royal road dips toward pont de la Marne, which one does not see from here, beneath a double row of hazels; between the house and the road there is a vast expanse of open meadow, a virgin meadow that borders the sky, which, in summer, looked like those in his paintings. The rain beat down upon this meadow, the low sky crushed it, night fell from beneath it. I was drenched, I felt old. I was as far from the road as I was from the house, on a rise above them both; through this sheet of rain I saw a door blow violently open down below, rattling windowpanes; someone ran out onto the soaked earth, ardent but clumsy, as girls are wont to run: it was Elisabeth in blue satin, undone, dripping, whom I recognized as she passed within feet of me, without seeing me, into the middle of the virgin meadow, beneath this dirty sky; the water beat down upon her trussed-up hair; the feather hung down against her cheek like the wing of a dead bird; she was looking up at the empty sky, crying, her mouth was wide open in something resembling a laugh; she lifted her dress with both hands and stumbled heavily, falling to her white-stockinged knees onto the muddy grass. Far behind her, Agnès followed, walking quickly, not running, her cloak wrapped around her head; it seemed to me she was calling to her, that she too was either laughing or crying. The two silhouettes appeared desperate and passionate, outlined against the sky. The rain fell harder. The sound of galloping off to the left made me turn my head: on the royal road, disappearing and reappearing behind the rows of hazels, horsemen in uniform filed ceaselessly past toward pont de la Marne, greatcoats filling with wind, heads held close to their mounts’ manes, horses and riders as pallid as the sky: I thought I saw the great pale cross with its fleurs-de-lys flying like birds, like night: gray musketeers, undoubtedly, blind on their heavy horses, charging brutally beneath the downpour toward a harbor where they could dry boots and feathers at hearthside, just as they would have unsheathed swords in battle. The shadowy greatcoats disappeared suddenly, their hoofbeats collapsing away like the drums of armies long lost, languished and beaten by the rain in Flanders: the storm won out, the brutal scene was swallowed up, the girls were no longer there, the catastrophic field was ready again for the violins of summer. He was standing next to me, immobile, his wig dripping down onto his coat. He looked at me, mouth wide open, and suddenly began to laugh, interminably: my arms hung at my sides, I stood there like an imbecile; I tried to smile, and the shame of all this overwhelmed me. I didn’t ask him anything.
HE LEFT IN SPRING. HE GAVE ME the little drawing of a woman sitting, lifting her head, and seeming to ask something of someone whom we cannot see, with a lively, downtrodden look, perhaps on the brink of tears; it could be Agnès or Elisabeth, or any other. And of course he gave me this gift with the same disgusted air he always had when his eyes fell on one of his products: his execution was inferior to his inspiration, he believed art was something far above what he practiced, but you would suspect as much. So he carted his disgust at being Monseigneur le Peintre somewhere else; a barouche bearing Jullienne’s coat of arms took him away just when the weather turned beautiful, taking with it too his black humor and his pranks, his trunks of props for the women he painted, his big wig and the smaller ones they had begun to wear during that time, his frames, his phials of oil; perhaps he looked at the vibrant acacian foliage, at the little temple, all that he would no longer paint. He didn’t think he would see me again.
I remained in Nogent, and soon after his departure I found I missed my painter, his leaps of humor and maybe even the way he abused me, or at least surprised me. I didn’t bother with the beaux arts anymore; I was back at the card tables to lose a few louis, back at Mass to ensure that the world kept turning, back at the gossip of the bourgeoisie, their momentous problems over their daughters’ betrothals, and back walking with their daughters by the carp ponds during fine weather. As for the cousins, I no longer spoke to them about the one we had known, for his name made them blush — and I don’t know if it had to do with certain tender pleasures, with shame or with tears, perhaps both — they turned away; I wasn’t their confessor, just a tiresome acquaintance who loved women more than his uniform permitted, someone deserving little credit: and I don’t deserve much, I, Charles Carreau, by chance the curate of Nogent, whose true face was perhaps revealed over two mornings one winter, ignorance made flesh and dressed as a zany, forever turning my back on the poplars, an ass, and a scarlet harlequin, toward whoever might look at me, bravely, on a few inches of white and some linseed oil. I certainly didn’t know what had happened, that night of anger and rain, of horsemen, one March.
I do know that he went back to his native Hainaut, where he once again saw the little low wall, little cousins whom he had drawn and who had grown up, streets where no child painted; I know that the varnished tiles his father made didn’t seem like very much alongside the work of a Rubens, or perhaps it was just the opposite; I know that he went back to Paris because the dresses rustle more there, the princes are better spoken, and renown is less discrete; I know that he took walks through les jardins de Luxembourg, for although he didn’t particularly like nature, you needed to see it if you were to paint it. He slept chez Vleughels, Crozat, Gersaint, neither staying long in one place nor marrying a soul; he perhaps had an adventure with an Italian pastelist who sent him letters from the Florence, Rome, and Naples that he did not know, letters sent to Signor Vato; but certainly he painted scores of whispering women, women sighing while thinking about something else, women who said neither yes nor no; and before them, men planted valiantly, strumming their theorbos in vain. They tell me his works were hung on pont Notre-Dame and were admired by le Grand-Monarque; that everyone smiled at him, and that his great show of good spirits was only show. I know his fury earned him his lungs, that his black humor took up residence there and became that cough, black and short like his petite touche; I know his exasperation with having to paint was only compounded by that of having to die; that the scandal of not having every woman became that of not having had them all — all the more intolerable. But I’m ignoring how he seduced them, reduced them, or suffocated them; no, I don’t know what form the tempest took when his models’ smiles became something else, nor what happened to them in the ateliers, beaten down or terrified, fleeing into the rain, when perhaps the whole world — rustling, filled with beautiful skies and great industry — becomes a cavalry charge, disastrous hoofbeats in the night, something you can’t paint.