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"We'll talk of Paris after Nantes," he finished, supremely matter-of-fact, "just as we will definitely decide on Nantes after Redon." The persuasiveness that could sway a mob ended by sweeping M. Binet off his feet.
Seized with an indefinable uneasiness in the presence of these sketches, the same sensation caused by certain Proverbs of Goya which they recalled, or by the reading of Edgar Allen Poe's tales, whose mirages of hallucination and effects of fear Odilon Redon seemed to have transposed to a different art, he rubbed his eyes and turned to contemplate a radiant figure which, amid these tormenting sketches, arose serene and calm a figure of Melancholy seated near the disk of a sun, on the rocks, in a dejected and gloomy posture.
"Douarnenez, for Audierne, Brittany," was the legend written in Meyerbeer's note-book. And after that: "Journey twenty hours change at Rennes, Redon, and Quimpere." "Too far. I've enough for now," said Meyerbeer, chuckling, as he walked away. "But I'd give five hundred dollars to know who Zoug-Zoug is. I'll make another try." So he held his sensation back for a while yet.
No one will quarrel with Redon on account of what is not in him. What we do find in him is the poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest always of perfect beauty, longing to make permanent by means of a rare and graceful art some of those fragments which have given him his private and personal clue to the wonders of the moment, creating a personal art by being himself a rare and lovely person.
Carrying matters with a high hand entirely in his own fashion, he had ordered at Redon the printing of playbills, and four days before the company's descent upon Nantes, these bills were pasted outside the Theatre Feydau and elsewhere about the town, and had attracted being still sufficiently unusual announcements at the time considerable attention.
No one has ever felt more that fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has been more jealous of the bounty contained in the single glancing of the eye upward to infinity or downward among the minuter fragments at his feet. It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid gardens, so much of the morning is in each of his fragile works.
The very thought of Redon, cherished as it had come to be by M. Binet, gave him at moments a cramp in the stomach, so dangerously ambitious did it seem to him. And Redon was a puppet-show by comparison with Nantes.
Charles offered Rollo Flanders, which the Northman refused, considering it too swampy; as to the maritime portion of Neustria, he would not be contented with it; it was, he said, covered with forests, and had become quite a stranger to the plough-share by reason of the Northmen's incessant incursions; he demanded the addition of territories taken from Brittany, and that the princes of that province, Berenger and Alan, lords, respectively, of Redon and Del, should take the oath of fidelity to him.
Then, missing the footpath in the dark, he struck out across a sodden meadow in quest of the road. Coming presently upon the Redon road, Andre-Louis, obeying instinct rather than reason, turned his face to the south, and plodded wearily and mechanically forward. He had no clear idea of whither he was going, or of whither he should go.
There is never anything in his pictures outside the conventional logic of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, it is only because Redon himself was like them, joyfully living out the days because they were for him ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is Redon who has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme artistry, the fragment.