Story of the Month: The Model

The town of Etretat, with its gray rock, its white shingle, and its blue sea, lay resting beneath the blazing sun on one of July's radiant days. Its general aspect was like a crescent, the two ends of its curve terminating in two gateways — one small, the one on the right; the other large, the one on the left — which advanced into the still water, both of them wading in, while a pinnacle rose until it stood level with the cliffs. On its long beach sat a company of summer visitors watching the bathers; and on the terrace of the casino another crowd had gathered, standing or seated, displaying beneath the light of the shining sun a flowering garden of finery, amid which glittered red and blue parasols embroidered with flowers of colored silk. At the far end of the terrace, along the promenade, yet another party of summer folk kept themselves apart, wanting quiet and seeking rest; they timed their slow steps to the music of the waves, far from the press of bodies and the din of voices. Among these was a well-known and gifted young man, the painter Jean Summer. He walked abstracted and downcast beside one of those small carriages used by cripples, pushed slowly and gently by a servant; and in this carriage sat his wife, a girl in the first bloom of life, letting her sad gaze wander over the beauty of the sky, the adornment of the earth, and the gaiety of the people.

The husband and wife went along in this fashion, exchanging neither word nor glance, until the wife said:

"Let us stop a little." So they stopped, and the servant brought the painter a little canvas chair, and he sat down on it. Everyone who passed the silent, silent pair cast on them a look of tenderness and sorrow, for tongues had been busy with the report that an affair of devotion and sacrifice had taken place between them, since the young man had married her in spite of her lasting infirmity, touched, as it was said, by her love for him. One man said to another — the two were sitting on chairs, letting their eyes roam over the open space:

"No, that is not true. I know Jean Summer very well indeed."

"Then why did he marry her? For she already bore this infirmity at the time of the marriage — is that not so?"

"Yes, it is so; and yet he married her. He married her as people marry — in truth, and in folly."

"And then?"

"And then? There is no then and no before, my friend. A man is a fool because he is a fool. You know that ridiculous marriages are a specialty of painters: they marry very nearly all their models (modèles), and they will marry old mistresses, or feeble-minded ladies — for what reason under the sun? Why? Nobody knows why. One would imagine, on the contrary, that their long familiarity with that breed of women whom people call 'models' would have made them loathe the female sex; instead, after seating them to paint their pictures from them, they marry them. Read the truthful, cruel, beautiful little book that Alphonse Daudet wrote under the title Artists' Wives.

"As for the couple you see there, what happened between them happened in a particular fashion and in a dreadful way.

"That girl played out a farce — or rather, a grievous tragedy. She staked all she possessed to win everything or lose everything. Was she sincere? Did she love Jean? God alone knows that. Who can determine with any finality what is false and what is true in what a woman does? They are always sincere in the visible workings of their emotions and the manifestations of their feelings. They are indignant, criminal, devoted, generous, or base according to the impulses and impressions that pass through their hearts. They lie perpetually, without wishing to, without knowing, without understanding; and yet, with all that and in spite of it, they have an absolute frankness of sensation and sentiment, which they show in violent resolutions and decisions — unexpected, incomprehensible — that defeat our logic of opinion and judgment and our habit of weighing and reconciling. The suddenness and violence of their resolves make riddles of them that cannot be solved; and so we never cease asking this question: 'Are they sincere?' 'Are they false?'

"But they are, my friend, sincere and false at one and the same time, because it lies in their nature to be sincere and false to the utmost degree of sincerity and falsehood — or else to be nothing of either at all.

"Look at the means by which the most honorable of women contrive to get from us what they want, and you will find them complicated and artless: complicated, in that they never fell within our surmise beforehand; and artless, in that after we have become their victims we can do nothing but marvel at them and say: 'What! She deceived me truly and stupidly.' And they always succeed, my dear fellow, above all when it is a question of their getting married. And here is the story of Monsieur Jean Summer:

"The girl was a model, as you have learned. She would sit in his studio in whatever poses he wished — exquisite in form, droll in temper, graceful in figure — and he fell in love with her as a man falls in love with any girl of her stamp in beauty and charm; then he fancied that love of her had seized his whole heart. Here is a strange phenomenon: when a man desires a woman, he sincerely believes he could not live without her for the rest of his days; yet once he possesses her he tires of her. Brute appetite can never keep him at her side for a whole lifetime; something else is needed — an accord of soul, of nature, and of temperament. It is a man's duty, when a woman bewitches him, to consider whether this bewitchment proceeds from the enticement of the body or from the attraction of the soul. The short of it is that he loved her, or thought he did; he pledged her his devotion and promised her his constancy, and he and she lived on that hope. In truth the girl was charming, and her charm was heightened by that amiable silliness which belongs to the little Parisiennes: she would chatter and rattle on and utter absurdities which the odd manner of her delivery made seem like feats of wit. At every moment she had gestures that captivated the painter's eye: when she lifted her arms, when she spread her hands, when she bent over, when she climbed into a carriage, her movements were exact, measured, and apt. For three months Jean did not notice that in the truth of her nature she resembled all the other models; then he rented a little house at Andrésy for the two of them to spend the summer in. I was there one evening when the first cares began to sprout in my friend's heart. It was a moonlit night, and we wanted to take a turn along the bank of the river; the moon poured down on the shivering water a torrent of light, breaking its yellow beams

on the eddies of the water, the current of the deep, and the swell of the slow, escaping river.

"We walked along the shore, drunk with that vague exhilaration which such dreaming nights kindle in us. Our souls were disposed to deeds beyond the deeds of men; our hearts lay open to the love of unknown poetic beings; we felt raptures and desires and longings stirring within us. So we kept silence, enchanted by the clearness of the sky, the freshness of the beautiful night, and the sweetness of the sea, which seemed to us to have entered the body, flooded the mind, perfumed it, and steeped it in happiness.

"All at once Josephine (that was the girl's name) cried out:

"Did you see the big fish that jumped over there?"

Jean answered, without looking and without knowing:

"Yes, my dear."

She said angrily:

"No, you did not see it, for your back was turned to it."

He smiled and said: "Yes, that is true. The beauty of the air had so taken hold of me that I thought of nothing else."

She held her tongue; but after a moment the craving to talk mastered her, and she asked Jean:

"Are you going to Paris tomorrow?"

He answered:

"I don't know."

Her anger returned, and she said:

"Perhaps you find it very cheering to go strolling about without a word! A human being is human because he talks!" He made no answer to what she said. Then she, guided by the instinct of cunning within her, perceived that this would exasperate him, and she began to sing that maddening tune which for two years past has assaulted ears and minds, and which begins: I was gazing into the air...

He murmured:

"Be quiet, if you please." She said heatedly:

"And why do you want me to be quiet?" He answered:

"You are spoiling the scene for us."

And then came the odious, senseless scene, with its sudden reproaches and its rash reckoning: faces flushed, eyes streamed, and they went back to the house. Jean had let her run her course of fury without parrying and without attacking, for his nerves were drugged with the rapture of that celestial night which this witless storm had dragged down to earth.

Three months passed after that, during which the young man struggled like a captive in those strong, invisible bonds with which habit ties us

in such a case. The girl never ceased to wear him down as the persecutor wears down his victim, and to torment him with a martyr's torments; their days and their nights became one unbroken quarrel, not free of abuse and blows.

At last he resolved that this state of things should end, in any manner and at any price. He sold his pictures and borrowed some money from his friends, until he had twenty thousand francs in hand; one morning he laid them on the mantelpiece with a letter of farewell, left her the house, and took refuge in my rooms.

At three o'clock in the afternoon there came a knock at the door. I went to open it, and there she stood before me, scarcely able to master her fury and agitation. I was confounded; she came in; he saw her from a distance and rose to his feet; she came straight up to him and flung down at his feet the envelope with the banknotes inside, and said, with a noble bearing and in curt speech: "There is your money. I have no need of it." She was then livid of face and distraught of mind, ripe for any folly; and he likewise was dark of countenance and choking with anger, ripe for any violence. He asked her: "What do you want?" She said: "I will not have you treat me as you would treat a harlot. You pleaded with me until I gave myself into your keeping; I ask nothing but that you keep me with you."

He stamped his foot upon the floor and said, beside himself:

"No — this is too much. If you imagine that you..." I pulled him by the hand and said to him: "Let me manage this, Jean." Then I went up to her and set about breaking down her anger with everything the mind suggests in such a case, while she listened to me straining, staring, silent, unbending. When my quiver was empty and things stood as bad as ever, I had recourse to the last of stratagems and said: "He loves you still, my little one; but his family wishes him to marry, and you understand...!" A violent shudder ran through her and she said:

"Ah...! Ah! Now I understand!" Then she turned to him and said: "You mean to marry?" He answered with harshness and decision:

"Yes." She took a step toward him and said: "If you marry, I will kill myself. Do you hear?" He shrugged his shoulders and said: "Very well — kill yourself!" She brought out a word or two, throttled by a deadly anguish: "You say?.. you say?.. you say?.. Say it again!" He repeated: "Kill yourself, if that pleases you!" She said, her pallor deepening and her condition growing worse: "I need no daring from you. I shall throw myself from the window." Jean laughed with all his might, walked to the window and opened it; then he saluted and bowed, like a man who wishes to yield another precedence in walking, and said: "There is the way! After you!" She fixed her bewildered, darting gaze upon it for an instant; then she gathered herself like one about to leap a hedge in a field, passed in front of him and in front of me to the window — and vanished!

Never, so long as I live, shall I forget the impression that open window made upon me, with that body just fallen through it! In that instant it seemed to me as wide as the sky and as empty as space. I shrank backward, not daring to look, as though I feared I should fall myself. Jean stood stupefied, unable to move or to look. People came running and carried in the girl, both her legs broken; she never walked upon her feet again from that day. Her lover, his breast drenched by the stings of conscience, his soul shaken by the girl's devotion, took her to himself and married her.

That, my dear fellow, is the story of that husband and wife. And evening was coming on, and the young wife wished to go back for fear of the cold; so the servant began pushing the crippled woman's carriage toward the village, and the painter walked at his wife's side — and a full hour had passed over them in which no tongue addressed tongue and no glance answered glance.