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"Mauclair is not to be found!" repeated Mercier, taken aback. "Well, what about his assistants?" "There's no Mauclair and no assistants! No one at the lights, I tell you! You can imagine," roared the stage-manager, "that that little girl must have been carried off by somebody else: she didn't run away by herself!
A box beside the prompter's box was reserved for the chief gas-man, who from there gave his orders to his assistants and saw that they were executed. Mauclair stayed in this box during all the performances. But now Mauclair was not in his box and his assistants not in their places. "Mauclair! Mauclair!" The stage-manager's voice echoed through the cellars. But Mauclair did not reply.
In 1860 he literally resuscitated Watteau's manner, adding a personal note and a richness hitherto unknown to French paint. Mauclair thinks that to Watteau can be traced back the beginnings of modern Impressionism; the division of tones, the juxtaposition of tonalities. Monticelli was the connecting link between Watteau and Monet.
This is what Camille Mauclair said of him at the time of his début: "An admirably skilful etcher, a draughtsman of keen vision, and a painter of curious character, who has in many ways forestalled the artists of to-day.
Without Watteau's initiative Monticelli might not be the Monticelli we know, while Claude Monet, Manet, Renoir are the genuine flowering of his experiments in the division of tones and the composition of luminous skies. Mauclair smiles at Caylus for speaking of Watteau's mannerisms, the mannerisms that proclaim his originality.
Camille Mauclair eloquently ends his study with the confession that the mere utterance of Watteau's name "suffices to evoke in men's minds a memory of the melancholy that was his, arrayed in garments of azure and rose. Ah! crepuscular Psyche, whose smile is akin to tears!"
His most loving critic, Camille Mauclair, who, above any one, has battled valiantly for his art, tells us that Monticelli once took eighteen francs for a small canvas because the purchaser had no more in his pocket! In this manner he disposed of a gallery. He smoked happy pipes and sipped his absinthe in his case as desperate an enemy as it had proved to De Musset.
Gustave Kahn, the symbolist poet who was introduced to the English reading world in one of the most eloquent pages of George Moore, thinks that Legrand is frankly a symbolist. We side with Mauclair in not trying to pin this etcher down to any particular formula. He is anything he happens to will at the moment, symbolist, poet, and also shockingly frank at times.
This is the secret of Watteau, says Mauclair, which was not yielded up in the eighteenth century, not even to his followers, Pater, Lancret, Boucher, Fragonard, whose pagan gaiety and artificial spirit is far removed from the veiled melancholy of Watteau. In these works we find the aura of consumption.
The riddle is solved by Mauclaìr: These flights into the azure, these evocations of a country west of the sun and east of the moon, these graceful creatures of Watteau, the rich brocade of Chopin's harmonies, the exquisite pictures of Keats, the youthful joy in far-away countries of Stevenson, all, all are so many stigmata of their terrible affliction.
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