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By Root 1613 0

figure in old-fashioned clothes, lost in those solitudes, seemed often to be stopped short on the edge of a precipice, the path which he had been following ending there, while, a thousand feet above him in those pine-forests, it was with a fond eye and a relieved heart that we saw reappear the threadlike whiteness of its sandy surface, grateful to the wayfarer’s feet, though the mountainside had concealed from us its intervening bends as it skirted the waterfall or the gulf.

The effort made by Elstir to strip himself, when face to face with reality, of every intellectual notion, was all the more admirable in that this man who made himself deliberately ignorant before sitting down to paint, forgot everything that he knew in his honesty of purpose (for what one knows does not belong to oneself), had in fact an exceptionally cultivated mind. When I confessed to him the disappointment I had felt on seeing the porch at Balbec:

“What!” he exclaimed, “you were disappointed by the porch! Why, it’s the finest illustrated Bible that the people have ever had. That Virgin and all the bas-reliefs telling the story of her life—it’s the most loving, the most inspired expression of that endless poem of adoration and praise in which the Middle Ages extolled the glory of the Madonna. If you only knew, side by side with the most scrupulous accuracy in rendering the sacred text, what exquisite trouvailles came to the old carver, what profound thoughts, what delicious poetry! The idea of that great sheet in which the angels carry the body of the Virgin, too sacred for them to venture to touch it with their hands” (I mentioned to him that this theme had been treated also at Saint-André-des-Champs; he had seen photographs of the porch there, and agreed, but pointed out that the eagerness of those little peasant figures, all scurrying together round the Virgin, was not at all the same thing as the gravity of those two great angels, almost Italian, so slender, so gentle); “and the angel who carries away the Virgin’s soul, to reunite it with her body; or in the meeting of the Virgin with Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s gesture when she touches the Virgin’s womb and marvels to feel that it is swollen; and the outstretched arm of the midwife who had refused, without touching, to believe in the Virgin Birth; and the loincloth thrown by the Virgin to St Thomas to give him proof of the Resurrection; that veil, too, which the Virgin tears from her own breast to cover the nakedness of her son, whose blood, the wine of the Eucharist, the Church collects from one side of him, while on the other the Synagogue, its kingdom at an end, has its eyes bandaged, holds a half-broken sceptre and lets fall, together with the crown that is slipping from its head, the tables of the old law. And the husband who, on the Day of Judgment, as he helps his young wife to rise from her grave, lays her hand against his own heart to reassure her, to prove to her that it is indeed beating, isn’t that also rather a stunning idea, really inspired? And the angel who is taking away the sun and the moon which are no longer needed since it is written that the Light of the Cross will be seven times brighter than the light of the firmament; and the one who is dipping his hand into Jesus’ bath, to see whether the water is warm enough; and the one emerging from the clouds to place the crown on the Virgin’s brow; and all the angels leaning from the vault of heaven, between the balusters of the New Jerusalem, and throwing up their arms in horror or joy at the sight of the torments of the wicked or the bliss of the elect! Because it’s all the circles of heaven, a whole gigantic poem full of theology and symbolism that you have there. It’s prodigious, it’s divine, it’s a thousand times better than anything you will see in Italy, where for that matter this very tympanum has been carefully copied by sculptors with far less genius. Because, you know, it’s all a question of genius. There never was a time when everybody had genius, that’s all nonsense, it would be more extraordinary than the golden age.