The Portrait in the Louvre

by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé

translated by Patricia Worth

part 1

Here is something which happened not too long ago. For some years he had been assistant curator at the Louvre, in the old masters section, having obtained the position through the patronage of a distant relative. As he had shown himself to be punctual and unassuming, not seeking to become more than he was, he was sidestepped in the reshuffling of personnel.

He lived alone, and on little. No one ever knew him to have family or friends. He was born in a rather miserable cottage in Savoy in the mountains of the Maurienne, the son of landless nobles of Tuscan origin, and had grown up there in the pine forest like a poorly cultivated wild grass amid the rosemary and cyclamen. His discerning mind, in no way brilliant, had been educated through a few old books under the instruction of his grandfather, the only one who had ever loved him. This old man, still lingering in the previous century and imbued with St Martin’s doctrines, had turned the young boy’s mind to dangerous speculations.

As happens to those who have had a rugged childhood in constant communication with nature, this intense, sensitive soul was always either completely withdrawn into himself, or drifting miles away to the other side of reality. He believed in intermediary worlds; and while no mystery frightened him, he had a fear of practical life with which he was not well acquainted, and of which he expected little.

In any case, no one knew exactly what he believed and thought. He was a loner, hard to approach. Since coming to the Louvre he had shied away from any relationships with his colleagues. They teased him at first about his resemblance to certain Italian portraits, those students of Francia or Raphael whose pensive gaze seemed to wander further than the thinking of their time. He did indeed look like one of the family. Although he was no longer a very young man, his features retained the hesitancy of an adolescent whose voice had not yet broken. It could not be said they were handsome features, for they lacked something finished, but you felt they could be, once their contours were fixed in place. Jokes about “the stranger from the sixteenth century” fell flat before his haughty reserve. He wanted to be forgotten, which is the only thing easy to obtain from men.

He was of those who go through life without good fortune but without conflicts, asking nothing of what others coveted from life, seeking only that for which others cared not. His colleagues left him to his moods. Some said by way of explanation that he had travelled to the Orient and brought back an opium or hashish habit, a vague suspicion which nothing could confirm. Others claimed, with more likelihood, that he was nursing thwarted feelings.

There was a time when he had been seen constantly at the home of a very attractive woman, much admired in artists’ circles. She was a vain girl, a coquette, stunningly beautiful, too dizzied by the buzz around her success to hear a silent soul suffering. Was it because of her that he suffered? Was he suffering? You never know with people who conceal their true nature. If he was suffering, it must have been profound and unhealing, like a wound which does not weep.

Around the time when people were making these comments, he confined himself to the Louvre and seemed to be wholly occupied with his paintings. He was not credited with a solid knowledge of art nor a sound taste. He did not pretend to know this field, and no specific work tempted him. No one could guess what he did during the hours he spent in the galleries. He would stay there quite simply as one stays at home amongst family. A magnetism kept him in this calm, beautiful world.

Every day he became a little more accustomed to these figures. In his eyes, they each took on more expression, more of a personal life, and each one’s character and story became clear. To know their stories better, he began to read about them in old books; soon they absorbed him to the exclusion of all other reading. The newspapers piled up on the table yet he did not even break the wrapping. For him, the only current newspaper was the arts chronicle from France or Germany, Italy or Flanders, in which he would find names, facts and deeds about his friends. As soon as one of these names came up in the account, he felt that little twitch of curiosity we experience when we see a person of our intimate circle mentioned in the news of the day.

And so his life shifted and retreated; he carried back to another time that whole series of attachments, interests and petty concerns which make up the daily existence of every one of us. The more he settled into the past, the more the present drew away from him, disappearing in a fog. He saw it as we see history with a distant, distracted regard when we happen to read something that pulls us out of our real world and takes us back into that dead world. The most important contemporary events, when by chance he learned of them, caused him precisely that sort of cool emotion and retrospective curiosity that we would feel about the Battle of Pavia or the Field of Cloth of Gold.

Occasionally some requirement of his position would compel him to associate with his colleagues: he would appear in their meetings like a ghost from another century, a stranger to all that was being said. Only once was he seen to grow heated during a discussion. Someone had recalled the fable of Pygmalion. He held that it was crude and ill-conceived. According to him, the sculptor had never consented to bring his creation down into a world of flesh and misery. Since Pygmalion possessed a power of metamorphosis, he had had to use it to turn himself into marble in order to join his Galatea in a superior, indestructible life. After this sally he left, and they chatted about his odd ways, which were explained by a philosopher in the group:

“Some souls are poorly attached to their bodies; it seems that for them the sovereign manufacturer used the wrong casing, or that he did not fasten it firmly. Not content with their home, these souls aspire to freedom in space and in time; but the prison wall that hems us in allows no possible escape except backwards, into the past; it’s in this direction that certain souls try to flee. Unable to change their place, they change their era and believe themselves somewhat freed.”

This sentimental and intellectual exodus did not happen suddenly, in an irrevocable blow. We cannot analyse here, in all its elusive phases, until the end of time, the movement back and forth of a man’s every thought and point of view. It was slow and indecisive like a migration of birds moving as one in a circle as they swirl and merge, break apart, fuse together again, then fly away, leading one another towards a long-remembered country.

At times, life’s current would carry this wreck back to the rescuers who had taken him in. He was seen again more than once in the home of the woman whom they credited with his private sorrow. She would laugh cruelly and say, “Which frame did you come out of today, black Venetian?”

He did, indeed, seem to be someone from another place, brought back by an evil force. They knew he was still performing his duties at the Louvre, that no incident had modified his existence; and yet at his appearance in this lady’s salon everyone felt a bemusement, without realising it, as at the entrance of a traveller who we had been told the day before was in central Africa.

As for him, after these recurrences of anxiety, he would go back to his refuge, fatigued and spent; he was like a convalescent, having been long shut away in the peace of a dark room, who had just taken a great trek across rocks under the midday sun. The sweet seriousness of his friends would slowly calm him. These relapses into the present became rarer but did not completely cease, even though a new habit attached him better to his adopted family.

Disturbed all day long by the crowds of visitors, he often thought it would be a delight to come in the evening, at that hour when people have the most need for the company of those they love, and to find his own people in total freedom and solitude.

One night the museum employees noticed with surprise a light moving through the galleries. They made enquiries: it was the curator doing an inspection. There was nothing abnormal about this; but when it happened again and again they began to wonder. Almost every evening he would take the keys entrusted to him, and an oil lamp with a reflector, and in his Louvre Palace he would forget himself, sometimes sitting before his favourite canvas, sometimes walking about in search of another.

In the lamp’s rays the sought-after face would emerge from the darkness, animated and mobile; the shadows on temples and irises in eyes would dance in the flickering light. Eyelids would flutter, a man’s lips would half open to speak, a woman’s lips would part in a smile. He then fully understood all the thought accumulated for centuries behind these brows grown pale, all the life in these attentive faces whose eyes never closed. These eyes have looked at men for three hundred, four hundred years. The eyes would penetrate his own during silent nighttime tête-à-têtes; they would dig into the depths of his soul; they would imperceptibly tug on it and drink it, as loving eyes do when they empty a soul of all its substance.

These nocturnal conferences never gave him gooseflesh or made him uneasy. Among these people he felt only confidence and goodness. For him they were not ghosts but better kinds of living beings. If he ever happened to think about beings of flesh and blood, he would perceive them as ridiculous automatons. Real life, with all its power, drew breath here in the dark silence of the Grande Galerie. He was being subjected to its increasing pressure. A presence filled this place.

He instinctively lent an ear, as though so much thought must make some kind of noise. But only the hours were striking on the clock hidden in the shadow at the end of the long gallery; they were not the voice of contemporary hours which drive man and call him to action; they were asking for nothing, counting time backwards, weak and worn as though having worked for years. He was not listening to them; it was only the paleness of his lamp in the glow of dawn that reminded him he had to leave this sanctuary of rest.

After such a night, when the crowds returned to the museum in the morning, it was always painful and unexpected. These creatures of another species, hasty and heavy, enthusiastic and talkative, disturbed him like revenants who had burst into his real world. He would contemplate them with that state of mind we have when we study painted characters: a mix of critical severity and detachment. He did not wonder what any particular visitor was thinking of any particular portrait, but what the portrait was thinking of the visitor. Most often this crowd appeared to him in a great hazy and decreasing retreat; like a foreign people whom one is leaving and whose indistinct noise is dying behind us.

This splitting of his existence did not come without great physical fatigue. It was visible in his deep lined features and over his whole emaciated body. You could not say he was wasting away, at least these were not the words that came to mind when you looked at him closely. Instead, you would have said he seemed to be having difficulty stripping away a bothersome outer casing.

The good housemaid who served him, struck by this change, said one day: “Oh my Lord! Truly, you’d swear it’s one of his paintings, and that he no longer has skin, but canvas. You could see through it!” This naïve suggestion did not make him sad, nor did it frighten him; he even took an extreme pleasure in it.

One December evening during a full moon, just as he was beginning his regular tour of the galleries, a breath of air extinguished his lamp at the doorway of the Salon Carré. He did not try to relight it, for he was charmed by the bluish column descending through the glass ceilings, straight down into the empty space of the long gallery, a light from limbo that seemed to be the natural daylight of those who lived there. He was not surprised that he could make them out, even though the pale light left the walls in shadow where the paintings are hung.

Proceed to part 2...