At the end of a week the picture disappeared; Fougeres walked slowly up and approached the dealer's shop in a lounging manner. The Jew was at his door.
"Well, I see you have sold my picture."
"No, here it is," said Magus; "I've framed it, to show it to some one who fancies he knows about painting."
Fougeres had not the heart to return to the boulevard. He set about another picture, and spent two months upon it,--eating mouse's meals and working like a galley-slave.
One evening he went to the boulevard, his feet leading him fatefully to the dealer's shop. His picture was not to be seen.
"I've sold your picture," said Elie Magus, seeing him.
"For how much?"
"I got back what I gave and a small interest. Make me some Flemish interiors, a lesson of anatomy, landscapes, and such like, and I'll buy them of you," said Elie.
Fougeres would fain have taken old Magus in his arms; he regarded him as a father. He went home with joy in his heart; the great painter Schinner was mistaken after all! In that immense city of Paris there were some hearts that beat in unison with Pierre's; his talent was understood and appreciated. The poor fellow of twenty-seven had the innocence of a lad of sixteen. Another man, one of those distrustful, surly artists, would have noticed the diabolical look on Elie's face and seen the twitching of the hairs of his beard, the irony of his moustache, and the movement of his shoulders which betrayed the satisfaction of Walter Scott's Jew in swindling a Christian.
Fougeres marched along the boulevard in a state of joy which gave to his honest face an expression of pride. He was like a schoolboy protecting a woman. He met Joseph Bridau, one of his comrades, and one of those eccentric geniuses destined to fame and sorrow. Joseph Bridau, who had, to use his own expression, a few sous in his pocket, took Fougeres to the Opera. But Fougeres didn't see the ballet, didn't hear the music; he was imagining pictures, he was painting. He left Joseph in the middle of the evening, and ran home to make sketches by lamp-light. He invented thirty pictures, all reminiscence, and felt himself a man of genius. The next day he bought colors, and canvases of various dimensions; he piled up bread and cheese on his table, he filled a water-pot with water, he laid in a provision of wood for his stove; then, to use a studio expression, he dug at his pictures. He hired several models and Magus lent him stuffs.
After two months' seclusion the Breton had finished four pictures. Again he asked counsel of Schinner, this time adding Bridau to the invitation. The two painters saw in three of these pictures a servile imitation of Dutch landscapes and interiors by Metzu, in the fourth a copy of Rembrandt's "Lesson of Anatomy."
"Still imitating!" said Schinner. "Ah! Fougeres can't manage to be original."
"You ought to do something else than painting," said Bridau.
"What?" asked Fougeres.
"Fling yourself into literature."
Fougeres lowered his head like a sheep when it rains. Then he asked and obtained certain useful advice, and retouched his pictures before taking them to Elie Magus. Elie paid him twenty-five francs apiece. At that price of course Fougeres earned nothing; neither did he lose, thanks to his sober living. He made a few excursions to the boulevard to see what became of his pictures, and there he underwent a singular hallucination. His neat, clean paintings, hard as tin and shiny as porcelain, were covered with a sort of mist; they looked like old daubs. Magus was out, and Pierre could obtain no information on this phenomenon. He fancied something was wrong with his eyes.
The painter went back to his studio and made more pictures. After seven years of continued toil Fougeres managed to compose and execute quite passable work. He did as well as any artist of the second class. Elie bought and sold all the paintings of the poor Breton, who earned laboriously about two thousand francs a year while he spent but twelve hundred.
At the Exhibition of 1829, Leon de Lora, Schinner, and Bridau, who all three occupied a great position and were, in fact, at the head of the art movement, were filled with pity for the perseverance and the poverty of their old friend; and they caused to be admitted into the grand salon of the Exhibition, a picture by Fougeres. This picture, powerful in interest but derived from Vigneron as to sentiment and from Dubufe's first manner as to execution, represented a young man in prison, whose hair was being cut around the nape of the neck. On one side was a priest, on the other two women, one old, one young, in tears. A sheriff's clerk was reading aloud a document. On a wretched table was a meal, untouched. The light came in through the bars of a window near the ceiling. It was a picture fit to make the bourgeois shudder, and the bourgeois shuddered. Fougeres had simply been inspired by the masterpiece of Gerard Douw; he had turned the group of the "Dropsical Woman" toward the window, instead of presenting it full front.