At the end of the day, the little girls returned to sing in the meadow; the last frames burned on the embers; perhaps they saw this exhausted old man, living chez Le Fevre, who was burning litter or old clothes. They didn’t see the king with a big nose, his red clothes in the shadows. They were holding each other’s hands; they passed from shadow into light and their dresses were changing; their song in the lindens seemed as heartbreaking as the smoke of a work that was burning down; I thought about my youth, about the uniform I wore, opportunities I had missed. I watched them for a long time. The little valet took me by the hand, showed me the window, laughing: he had fallen asleep like a good little boy, his nose in his tie, cradled by these songs after the carnage, like a warrior, like a child.
Let us go to Cythera
on pilgrimage, I presume.
Young girls rarely return, O no,
without a lover or a groom.
He died on the eighteenth. Early in the morning a storm gathered. Nothing stirred, stilled trees in a white sky. The storm didn’t burst, nothing came. In the interim, he wandered: he said that he had never painted bad weather; he said that his painting was gay; he affirmed that he too had been gay, at great pains propped himself up on his elbows, begging me to agree with him. Yes, I told him, he had had nothing but joy, pleasure. The storm took its time; he wanted a crucifix; I offered him mine, which is cheaply made but artful enough for the good people here, for their final glance; I prayed; he made a sound like a laugh, the crucifix felclass="underline" “Take it away,” he said. “Can one have so poorly served one’s master?” Then: “Your face is enough for me.” This last bit of coquetry moved me more than I am able to say. There were a few thunderclaps, no wind; stone trees began to lean toward Monseigneur le Peintre like taciturn monseigneurs; a flash of lightning carried off the scandalized little rogue, in the falling afternoon, at the hour when dresses begin to assemble on the terraces that the fountains besiege, the innumerable leaves.
Toward seven, the rain began to fall. The trees resumed their old palaver; Watteau was cold. I left him to the servant and her tears, to the astonished little valet. On the grounds, beneath the gray sky, on the road to a little vicarage, I saw neither girls nor musketeers, saw no choruses, saw neither panaches nor girandoles. Birds were leaving trees, returning to them. The skies were changing, neither rain nor sun repaying us. Who pays our wages? What master counts such coin? I hear the laughter of his young girls, and the others, his women, I hear them crying. Perhaps they await their wages too. Now, I’m alone in the world; I’ll die one of these autumns. Autumn is coming, the world will yellow; processions of girls leave each morning with baskets of fruit, with amorous schemes, with their dresses and their rouge; they laugh; they wriggle in scarlet frocks; later in the day, they lie undone at the feet of trees; I, lagging behind this procession, adrift, too tired to go on, I’m not walking any more, I lower my arms and peer out, at you.
Trust This Sign
VASARI, THAT IS, THE LEGEND, tells us that Lorentino, a painter from Arezzo and a disciple of Piero, was poor; that he had a big family; that he never rested; that he painted on commission, from nature, members of religious committees and parish priors, merchants; that undoubtedly he fought feature after feature to capture these faces of men of gain, striving to attain the merciless indulgence of Piero’s hand and scarcely succeeding; that on occasion he did not have a commission; that one brief February at the far end of the Quattrocento, no one knows in what year since Vasari doesn’t say a word about it, the disciple didn’t have the wherewithal to buy a pig. Nonetheless, his little children begged him to kill this pig that he didn’t have, as was done at this time of year in Tuscany and elsewhere. They asked, “Without money, how will you manage, Papa, to buy a pig?” And Lorentino, Vasari tells us — fifty years later, from the comfort of his sprawling baroque palace in Arezzo, his little Vatican born from a hand as poorly suited to painting as it was ideal for writing — Lorentino told his children that one saint or another would provide for them: he probably said this because he was both pious and stoic, because he indulged in Hope or wanted to challenge this invisible, immanent justice, the disappearance of which is the final deception in the lives of disappointed artists; and because Vasari, a painter without genius but a delicious writer, was a romantic. So came the feast days of Saint Antoine, Saint Vincent, Saint Blaise, and whether via theological virtue or authorial fantasy, Lorentino repeated this prayer to Saint Antoine, Saint Vincent, Saint Blaise. As Mardi Gras approached, the saints had yet to show. And since the family was preparing to celebrate the fat feast with beans alone, and since the beans were already on the fire, a farmer appeared in this poor neighborhood of lower Arezzo and knocked on the painter’s door: to fulfill a promise he needed a portrait of Saint Martin, but to fulfill payment on this portrait he had nothing more than a pig weighing ten pounds.
The scene is pleasant and seems to come to us from a simpler time. Vasari doesn’t describe it. It was after dinner. The farmer had spent the day being shooed from the various studios in the upper part of town, where he had been pushed around and humiliated; he didn’t look like he had come from Arcady; his leggings had slipped to his knees; he wore a little wool bonnet pulled down tightly past his ears; he was somewhat corpulent, with a redness in his cheeks that comes from working outside all the time, like a permanent shame at having to work outside all the time. He was around forty and exuded the expected mix of amazement and wiliness of those born in the country; he grumbled in the street while searching for this painter who didn’t even have a sign and who had been suggested to him in desperation or as a joke. It was cold; in the great, bright sky above rushed winds from the Verna, with snows, and this weather was getting under the farmer’s collar, making him stoop a little. Lorentino opened the door: he was corpulent too, was also wearing a bonnet, but was older than the farmer and of course was short, as his name implies; his bonnet was red. When Lorentino spoke, he found himself short of breath — the cold, the stairs, the anguish, age; but he didn’t have to talk much since the farmer— with the wealth of explanation and the genius for digression that dealing with city dwellers brings out, the fear of not being understood, and, more profoundly, the anguish at being in the world without having enough words to bear witness to it — the farmer launched into a long, hazy monologue. He spoke too quickly, in loud bursts; he stood on the step to the doorway, the wind from the Verna lifted little wisps of hair from around his hat; he was holding a long lead at the end of which was a pig — or perhaps he carried it in his arms, because ten pounds isn’t heavy and we really want it to weigh about ten pounds, a little pig. Lorentino was looking at the pig. While the farmer spoke, Lorentino eyed the pig.
THE WIND FROM THE VERNA had taken what little breath he had in him. He was hearing bells. Nevertheless, through these hazy ramblings he could imagine Saint Martin interceding, in person, in the life of this farmer whose mother was some old Maria whom the saint had cured of a long illness that had kept her moaning and groaning; he imagined old Maria dancing around after pigs with her cane, since Saint Martin’s heart and his efficacious hand that one never actually observes aren’t reserved for the dukes alone but for old Marias too; and he imagined that this little pig had been their largest, that the farmer had nothing better to offer Saint Martin: the saint and the old woman came out the most vividly in all this talk, they danced in the midst of it. Lorentino well understood that this farmer both loved his mother and believed, however vaguely, in the somehow too-efficacious handiwork of saints: this didn’t surprise Lorentino. But behind it, behind the wobbly dance of mother and saint, the farmer was doing his best to explain something yet more surprising; something that he wasn’t accustomed to naming. Who can say where he had gotten the idea, by what metaphors he had made sense of it, because we’re no longer in the Quattrocento, we didn’t leave before dawn for the city with a pig in our arms; but somehow he had gotten the idea. And we have no idea how he had become possessed by the magic of images, deep in his countryside. He expressed this after a fashion. The painter looked at him for a moment. The painter understood that, because of some peculiar hierarchy imagined in the wide fields during squalid work, the farmer, far from images, had deemed them important, had elevated them to a place of grace within his own somewhat suspect personal pantheon; and while watching his mother die, in his helplessness he had promised the saint, without thinking, something so beyond his grasp, so remote and impenetrable, something princes purchase for the price of a farm and that is executed with colors that cost half a farm and still remains out of reach, even if one has an entire principality with which to pay: a portrait, an object resembling a saint, a painted thing that would once again give the saint flesh, if he wanted to give an old Maria a little more life. And certainly the farmer hadn’t believed, he hadn’t held any hope that the cure would take, the yokel, because he wouldn’t have indebted himself so immoderately. Such a debt astonished him.