The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [28]
Every line of your beautiful book recalled so many memories. Especially the hours spent working alone in your room where the note of a yellow armchair bursts out! And the Impressionists! Two fans by Pissarro, solidly constructed of painstaking small strokes. The Sisleys, the Seine and the telegraph wires and the sky in springtime. The barge near Paris, with that loafer in the lanes. And Monet’s flowering apple trees scaling a hill. And Renoir’s dishevelled little savage and Berthe Morisot’s deep and fresh undergrowth, a seated woman, her child, a black dog, a butterfly net. And another Morisot, a maid with her charge – blue, green, pink, white, dappled with the sun. And the other Renoirs, the Parisienne with red lips in a blue jersey. And that carefree woman with a muff and the lacquer rose in her buttonhole . . . And the bare-shouldered dancer by Mary Cassatt in yellow, green, blond, rust on the red fauteuil. And the nervous dancers by Degas, Duranty by Degas – and of course Manet’s Polichinelle with Banville’s poem! . . . Ah! The tender hours spent there, losing myself in the catalogue of Albert Dürer, dreaming . . . in your bright room where bursts the note of the yellow armchair, yellow, so yellow!
Albert Dürer et ses dessins was Charles’s first proper book, a book that had taken him ‘vagabonding’ across Europe. Laforgue, twenty-one years old and new to Paris, had been recommended as a secretary to sift the lists, emendations, notes of ten years of study into appendices, tables and indices for publication. For Laforgue, Charles in his Chinese dressing-gown was an intoxicating patron in an intoxicating setting.
I’m pretty excited too, because I had no idea that Laforgue had worked for him, before coming across a footnote in a book on Manet. Laforgue is a wonderful poet of cities, park benches dripping wet, telegraph wires on roads that no one passes.
Charles is no longer the rushing young man. He has become the ‘benedictine-dandy of the rue Monceau’, a black-coated scholar, but flaneurial, whose top hat is tilted at an angle; someone who carries his cane under his arm with a sense of correctness and amour propre. Someone who has a valet to make sure that his hat is brushed. Someone, I am sure, who never carried things in his jacket pockets and spoilt the fall of the cloth. We see him here at thirty, with his mistress and his new role as the recently appointed editor of the Gazette, and find that he has grown into himself. He is a mondain art historian with a secretary. And a collector now not only of netsuke, but of pictures.
And he is so alive in this room. These colours – the black of his coat, and the black of his top hat, and the slightly reddish tinge to his beard – against the stream of fantastic paintings, set alight by this fierce clarity of the note of the yellow armchair. A study, you think, of a man who not only needs colour, but constructs his life around it. A man who wears the perfect uniform of rabbinical black in the rue de Monceau, and who has this other life behind this study door.
What kind of study could possibly go on in a room like this?
Jules Laforgue started work for Charles on 14th July 1881. He worked all summer in this study, staying up half the night. He was, I note with some severity, very badly paid by this Jewish Maecenas. It is through his eyes that we see Charles completing his book: ‘stone by stone you slowly and solidly build the pyramid which supports your beautifully bearded monument’. In a throwaway bit of marginalia Laforgue scribbles a picture of the two of them together. Laforgue, tiny with bouffant hair, walks in front, arms and legs akimbo blowing clouds of smoke, while the debonair, upright, tall, monumental, Assyrian-profiled Charles walks behind him. He has filled out splendidly.
Laforgue adores him, teases him. He is anxious to prove himself in this his first job. ‘And now, oh dandy-scholar of the Rue Monceau, what are you up to? I always see the summaries of the Gazette and Art. What are you plotting between