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"Three hundred thousand francs of expectations, a house in the rue Boucherat, and a country-house at Ville d'Avray!" "Bottles and corks! bottles and corks!" said the painter; "they set my teeth on edge." "Safe from want for the rest of your days," said Elie Magus as he departed. That idea entered the head of Pierre Grassou as the daylight had burst into his garret that morning.
The portraits of the late lamented Madame Crevel, of Crevel himself, of his daughter and his son-in-law, hung on the walls, two and two; they were the work of Pierre Grassou, the favored painter of the bourgeoisie, to whom Crevel owed his ridiculous Byronic attitude.
His painter was Pierre Grassou, and not Joseph Bridau; his book was "Paul and Virginia." The greatest living poet for him was Casimire de la Vigne; to his eyes the mission of art was, above all things, utility. Parmentier, the discoverer of the potato, was greater to him that thirty Raffaelles; the man in the blue cloak seemed to him a sister of charity.
The portraits of the late lamented Madame Crevel, of Crevel himself, of his daughter and his son-in-law, hung on the walls, two and two; they were the work of Pierre Grassou, the favored painter of the bourgeoisie, to whom Crevel owed his ridiculous Byronic attitude.
"High art is at a low ebb," said his friend Pierre Grassou, who made daubs to suit the taste of the bourgeoisie, in whose appartements fine paintings were at a discount. "You ought to have a whole cathedral to decorate; that's what you want," declared Schinner; "then you would silence criticism with a master-stroke."
The faces of these three beings wore, as they looked round the studio, an air of happiness which bespoke in them a respectable enthusiasm for Art. "So it is you, monsieur, who are going to take our likenesses?" said the father, assuming a jaunty air. "Yes, monsieur," replied Grassou. "Vervelle, he has the cross!" whispered the wife to the husband while the painter's back was turned.
And, if the resemblances are closer between works of the de Goncourts less known, such as Charles Demailly, or Manette Salomon and the Lost Illusions, Peter Grassou, the Muse of the County, yet the means employed by the two brothers to endow with life and form Renee Mauperin and Germinie Lacerteux, fixing a background, stamping the outlines, filling in details, adding particularities, all this was Balzacian method, insufficient forsooth, in the domain of psychology, but furnishing idiosyncrasy in plentiful variations.
At the present day, Pierre Grassou, who never misses exhibiting at the Salon, passes in bourgeois regions for a fine portrait-painter. He earns some twenty thousand francs a year and spoils a thousand francs' worth of canvas. His wife has six thousand francs a year in dowry, and he lives with his father-in-law.
"Didn't I tell you," said Vervelle, "that I had three hundred thousand francs' worth of pictures?" "I painted those pictures," said Pierre Grassou in Vervelle's ear, "and I sold them one by one to Elie Magus for less than ten thousand francs the whole lot."
Pierre Grassou was, he said, one of the most honest fellows on earth; he had laid by thirty-six thousand francs; his days of poverty were over; he now saved about ten thousand francs a year and capitalized the interest; in short, he was incapable of making a woman unhappy. This last remark had enormous weight in the scales.
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