He returned at the end of the spring of 1721. This time, Haranger had sent for him, Haranger, the abbot; had sent for him and would soon be rid of him, would abandon him there, where he would no longer move princes to pity nor cough on the naked shoulders of marquises, but where he nonetheless would be housed like a prince, because certain grand things— the beaux arts, the nearness of death, a well-known name— dictate a bit of consideration; he was housed in the most beautiful house in Nogent, a rocaille palace with fountains and grounds and terraces, all beneath a swarm of golden leaves; it was Le Fevre’s summer house, Le Fevre whom no one ever saw there, steward of Menus Plaisirs du Roi, an intimate of the Orléans; it was a palace on the Marne. At first, I didn’t know that he was there.
I met him one midday on the road to Charenton. It rained hardly at all that summer, and April had already been dry; on the dusty road I saw a dusty little valet carrying tripods and easels on his back, cumbersome paint boxes; my heart tightened, I thought I could smell a scent from long ago in winter; there was someone sitting beneath the apple trees, hunched over. I had them stop the chair, I descended; it was he; he lifted his head and watched me approach, mouth wide open.
The pink shade of the apple tree fell over him; other shadows softly surrounded him, firm and round, vast and rustling like painted dresses; blue skies reigned, burned into the new leaves: everything, this time, was as he had painted it, everything except for him. Old age, which he painted little and to which he doubtless had given scant thought, had taken him early; he wasn’t forty, he looked sixty; it seemed cruelly appropriate that the great fatigue won of so many painted pleasures would paint itself on his features. Beneath the silk of his morning coat, beneath the rigor of his stockings and the ribboned ladder of his tie, everything cried out of the final debacle: he was bag of bones, with sinister, clownlike wrinkles ringing his eyes; his big nose stuck out extraordinarily; his hair was white, like the wig resting on his knee: a ghost once again, but in daylight, and sweating like a sick man on the sunny road to Charenton, far from his icy home. The big, unsatisfied eyes began to smile, to laugh, he rose with a painful somersault. He was happy to see me.
He did the whole “Your Eminence” bit, just as long ago; he started out volubly, still dumbfounded but this time feverish, in every sense of the word. He told me he’d had his fill of Crozat, Gersaint, Jullienne, who were small potatoes anyway; chez Le Fevre he was cherished like a Persian, served like a Mongol, a sybarite; he told me that he just painted the expected little things so as not to lose his hand, little landscapes, little marquises, little fools, all the hackneyed work he could draw and make dance with his eyes closed, the little interminable minuet; that if His Eminence deigned to come by he would find himself in good company, with so many Pierrots around; that he eats late, since life is short; that now he was steward of his own Menus Plaisirs, Monseigneur le Peintre. He laughed; he threw himself into an imitation of Le Fevre, affected, pretending to use a snuffbox or to wield some porcelain bauble, chattering away as Le Fevre would to the accompaniment of an absent oboe, peering at the shadow of the little dears of whom the other was so fond. I laughed. He stopped in the middle of his routine, livid, bathed in sweat, as though he had remembered something momentarily forgotten that had suddenly come back to him like a blow to the chest or a woman running off — but this one had neither body, nor name, nor dress. He put on his wig, he said goodbye to me abruptly, leaned on his valet; he was coughing; I offered him my chair, he stammered out an excuse and then, with a grand, derisory gesture to the surrounding countryside: “Trees to paint, Your Eminence,” and with disgust: “Trees!” He headed off with a hand on the shoulder of his dusty little flunky; weightless, the pink of the apple trees flew across the blue sky.
CHEZ LE FEVRE, THINGS were sinister. The sybarite lived on bread and onions; the Mongol was served only by his little paint-toting valet, who also half carried his master when he lagged behind, and who would be made to hold a cello or wear a harlequins hat, who soon became pigment and who soon looked as though he wanted to say something, he too, this valet who spoke little and meant even less; as far as girls went, I saw only that servant whom Crozat had given to him long before and of whom he had not rid himself, though she didn’t lift a finger; she laughed in hallways while applying her rouge and slept beneath trees on the grounds, exasperating him: you didn’t have to be a sorcerer to divine the nature of their relations. In the salons, the mannered boudoirs, and the bedrooms of the north wing that only he occupied, he had piled everything pell-mell into the corners — furniture, Chinese bibelots, snuffboxes, and mother-of-pearl knickknacks, his easels set up everywhere, his colors ruining the tapestries: it was all a studio to him, put together in monument to this lost but incurably paintable world, and he painted with a growing urgency, this time quite real, with all his old furor, this time well founded, the expression of which was either in a perpetual eruption or was in a slow release endlessly deferring the inevitable blast, petite touche after petite touche, fit after coughing fit, little rigadoon after little minuet that the plague-stricken bravely dance rather than succumb then and there, blackly, mouths agape, buboes bursting: but we didn’t see them fall; with a whisper, they asked the name of a certain tree, of an air, lifting their dresses between two fingers and pivoting into the next step. And so, inside, with all the windows shut in summer, with the thick fumes of hellebore and borage that the doctor from London had prescribed, with the stink of spirits and oil, in this unbreathable hospital where stubborn little marquises, lunatics all of them, smiled unbearably from ear to ear, whispered from canvas to canvas — inside this little palace his cough reigned supreme, unfurling across ceilings that Coypel had designed and experts had executed, cabinetmakers, painters, brigades of specialists, the cough climbed the stairs and banged around in the attics, bloomed in the shower of light, banged on the windows, perhaps called to the sun, but no, it never escaped, it just shot a bit of purple into the purple paint of the autumn poplars; it was prisoner too, hurling itself outside yet nonetheless trapped there, caged in a throat, sad as a broken theorbo. It remained in the palace of Le Fevre, beneath the sun of 1721, in this great box, beating this white stone drum beneath the trees, killing him from within.