The aged man raised himself with effort in his wheeled chair, then turned to a companion at his side and said:
"Give me a pencil, Jean."
The companion left the presence of the weary old man with bowed head, a warm imprisoned tear in his eyes, and on his lips something like a bound-up curse that he longed to loose from the depths of his heart, yet held back in fear and dread. He went out without closing the door behind him.
Silence settled over the room where the old man sat with his thick white beard and his abundant drooping mustache, weakness showing in every one of his limbs, feebleness coursing through every one of his joints. His hands had contracted so that his grip had no strength; his knees had given way so that he could no longer walk. Fearing that his growing nails would eat into the flesh of his palms, he had stuffed his fists with cotton and gauze.
He was, more than anything, like a statue of pain and weakness — except that he was alive, of flesh and blood, and of God's making, blessed be His mercy.
In the next room the companion set about searching for the pencil, but for some reason known only to God, it had lost its place and he could not find it. So he began rummaging among the heaped piles of painted papers, thrusting his head, with its combed, glossy hair, among the great colored canvases, and the smell of oil and paints rose to his nostrils; he breathed it in with eagerness and passion, as though
it were perfumed young brides, or sweet, fragrant roses... And why wonder?... Is not sweet fragrance a part of "Renoir's" canvases?... Does not perfume waft from the supple bodies of his nudes?...
And there came crowding upon the man's imagination the memory of days gone by, when "Renoir" was in the full strength and freshness of his youth; when he walked on his own two feet like all his fellow men, and at the same time defied them all; when he himself carried his pencils and his papers, his colors and his canvases, moving with them from place to place in Paris and from place to place outside Paris; when he walked the streets of the city choosing his models from among the beautiful, comely girls. He still remembers how he would refuse any girl whose skin reflected the lights scattered upon it, for Renoir was passionately fond of the skin that absorbs the light, so that it neither shines in the face nor glitters. He remembers, too, his aged master in the days when he would go out into the fields, choosing from nature whatever it pleased him to paint and whose colors delighted him.
Renoir was one of those who fought against the old schools; with the "Wild Beasts" he carried the banner of absolute artistic liberation; he befriended the "Impressionists" and took a great deal from them. Yet with all this he was unique in his colors, unique in his drawings, unique in his figures and his women — and unique in his success as well, for he exhibited in the academicians' exhibitions without an obstacle confronting him all his life long.
"But where is the pencil!"
Here are papers the man tries to lift in the hope of finding the wanted pencil among them, and they bring back to his memory his master's youth, brimming with life and ambition. And there are papers that carry in their folds all that stirred his sensitive soul and his delicate feelings; and others, pictures into which he put all the love that toyed with his heart, all the passion and infatuation that played upon his mind; and others still, drawings of innocent children. And the artless girls are many, upon whom he bestowed, from his own being, every beauty and every delicacy.
And these famous nudes, these women with bodies whose like no human being had ever seen before, overflowing with life and strength, teeming with warmth and feeling, their folds full of movement and ripeness, their frames brimming with suppressed gaiety and quiet, artless delight — as though they did not know their place in man's regard, yet at the same time making you feel that place, its loftiness and its gravity... They shake your feelings to the core, so that you stand, as it were, and perhaps truly, before truth naked and bare, having cast her ornaments aside, forsaken her embellishment and her lies, stripped off her false vanity and her lying deceit; as though she did not know you stood before her, and so displays to you, unawares, her deep, pure beauty — that beauty which submits to no law or code, yet to whose will every human being and every heart submits: the beauty of the innocent flower, not of the temptress.
Yes. When you stand before "Renoir's" women you stand before "Woman" in the abstract, exalted above reality, in revolt against customs and distinctions,