The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [31]
And he was a friend of the artists. ‘It is now Thursday,’ writes Manet to Charles, ‘and I still haven’t heard from you. You are evidently enthralled by your host’s wit . . . Come on, take up your very best pen and get on with it.’
Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lifes, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: ‘This seems to have slipped from the bundle.’
Proust, who knew Charles’s paintings well from visits to his apartment, retells the story to his credit. In his novels there is an Impressionist painter, Elstir, modelled partly on Whistler and partly on Renoir. The Duke de Guermantes fumes that ‘There was nothing else in the picture. A bundle of asparagus exactly like what you’re eating now. But I must say I declined to swallow Monsieur Elstir’s asparagus. He asked three hundred francs for a bundle of asparagus. A Louis, that’s as much as they’re worth, even if they are out of season. I thought it a bit stiff.’
Edouard Manet,Une botte d’asperges, 1880
Many of the pictures on the walls of Charles’s working study were of his friends. There was a pastel by Degas of Edmond Duranty, captured in a description by the young writer J. K. Huysmans: ‘Here is Monsieur Duranty, among his prints and his books, sitting at a desk. And his neighbouring tapering fingers, his sharp mocking eyes, his acute searching expression, his wry smile of an English humorist . . .’ There was a canvas by Constantin Guys, the ‘painter of modern life’, as well as a portrait of him by Manet, looking very unkempt and bushy and slightly wild-eyed. From Degas, Charles bought the double portrait of General Mellinet and the Chief Rabbi Astruc, in which the heads of these two redoubtable men – friends from their shared experiences of the war of 1870 – are seen in half-profile together.
Then there were Charles’s pictures of his Paris life: a scene by Degas of the start of the races at Longchamp, where he would go to see his uncle Maurice Ephrussi’s famous racehorses. ‘Courses – Ephrussi – 1000 [francs],’ writes Degas in his notebook. And images of the demi-monde, of dancers and a scene at the milliner’s with the backs of the heads of two young women on a sofa (2,000 francs), and one of a solitary woman in a café nursing a glass of absinthe.
Most of Charles’s pictures were of the country, of the fast-moving clouds and wind in the trees that spoke to his feeling for the disappearing moment. There were five landscapes by Sisley and three by Pissarro. From Monet he purchased, for 400 francs, a view of Vétheuil with scudding white clouds across a field with willows, and a picture of apple trees, Pommiers, painted in the same village. He also bought a scene of a wintry early morning on the Seine, Les Glaçons, with the break-up of the ice, a painting beautifully described by Proust in his early novel Jean Santeuil as ‘a day of thaw. . . the sun, the blue of the sky, the broken ice, the mud, and the moving water turning the river to a dazzling mirror’.
Even the portrait of the ‘dishevelled little savage’ to whom Laforgue asked to be remembered captures this feeling of impermanence, of imminent change. La Bohémienne, the red-headed gypsy girl with her unkempt hair, is in country clothes standing amongst grasses and trees in fierce sunlight. She is clearly part