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Updated: May 2, 2025
'You've never shown me your studies of that that lady John; you said you would. Relieved at the change of subject, he took a sketch-book out of his pocket and gave it to her. It contained a number of 'notes' for his portrait of Madame de Pastourelles sketches of various poses, aspects of the head and face, arrangements of the hands, and so forth. Phoebe pondered it in silence.
She could see none: but there was an unused half-sheet at the back of one of Madame de Pastourelles' letters, and she roughly tore it off. Making use of a book held on her knee, and finding the pen and ink with which, only half an hour before, Lord Findon had written his cheque, she began to write: Good-bye, John, I have found out all I want to know, and you will never see me again.
He came and went as he pleased, on brotherly terms with the son and the younger daughters, clearly an object of great affection to Lord Findon, and often made use of by her ladyship. What was the degree of friendship between him and Madame de Pastourelles? that had been already the subject of many meditations on Fenwick's part.
Watson began to talk of other things. But as he and Fenwick discussed the pictures on the easels, or Fenwick's own projects, as they talked of Manet, and Zola's 'L'Oeuvre, and the Goncourts, as they compared the state of painting in London and Paris, employing all the latest phrases, both of them astonishingly well informed as to men and tendencies Watson as an outsider, Fenwick as a passionate partisan, loathing the Impressionists, denouncing a show of Manet and Renoir recently opened at a Paris dealer's Watson's inner mind was really full of Madame de Pastourelles, and that salon of hers in the old Westminster house in Dean's Yard, of which during so many years Fenwick had made one of the principal figures.
What is poetical, if not the "Song of Roland," the only true national epic since Homer? What is frank, natural verse, if not that of the old Pastourelles? Where is there naivete of narrative and unconscious charm, if not in Aucassin et Nicolette?
'Society' had first admitted him as the protégé of Lord Findon and the friend of Madame de Pastourelles, and was now ready to amuse itself with him, independently, as a genius and an 'eccentric. He had many enemies; but so have all 'fighters. The critics spoke severely of certain radical defects in his work, due to insufficiency of early training; defects which time might correct or stereotype.
And here and there, amongst the rest, were the sketches and fragments, often the grandiose fragments, which represented his 'buried life' the life which only Eugénie de Pastourelles seemed now to have the power to evoke. When some hours of other work had weakened the impulse received from her, he would look at these things sadly, and put them aside.
For in her present nervous and fidgety state she would very likely be jealous of his sitter, and of the way in which Madame de Pastourelles' portrait possessed his mind. No, it really couldn't be done! it really couldn't! He must finish the two pictures persuade Lord Findon to buy the 'Genius Loci, and make the portrait such a success that he must needs buy that too.
After all, London was pleasant; there was some recognition of merit; and even something to be said for Academies. Then his picture began to hover before him. It was a big thing; suppose it took him years? Well, there would be portraits to keep him alive. Meanwhile it was true enough what he had said to Madame de Pastourelles. As a painter he had never been properly trained.
Through his painting, as we have seen, he wrestled out his first battles with fate and with temptation; and those early years were the years of his artistic triumph, as they were also the years of Madame de Pastourelles' strongest influence upon him.
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