Artists Wives

Alphonse Daudet
Artists' Wives, by Alphonse
Daudet

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Title: Artists' Wives
Author: Alphonse Daudet
Illustrator: De Bieler, Myrbach; and Rossi
Translator: Laura Ensor
Release Date: September 5, 2007 [EBook #22522]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARTISTS'
WIVES ***

Produced by David Widger

ARTISTS' WIVES

By Alphonse Daudet
Translated by Laura Ensor
Illustrated by De Bieler, Myrbach; And Rossi
[Illustration: Frontispiece]
[Illustration: Titlepage]
[Illustration: p007-018]

PROLOGUE.
Stretched at full length, on the great divan of a studio, cigar in mouth,
two friends--a poet and a painter--were talking together one evening
after dinner.
It was the hour of confidences and effusion. The lamp burned softly
beneath its shade, limiting its circle of light to the intimacy of the
conversation, leaving scarcely distinct the capricious luxury of the vast
walls, cumbered with canvases, hangings, panoplies, surmounted by a
glass roof through which the sombre blue shades of the night
penetrated unhindered. The portrait of a woman, leaning slightly
forward, as if to listen, alone stood out a little from the shadow; young
with intelligent eyes, a grave and sweet mouth and a spirituel smile
which seemed to defend the husband's easel from fools and disparagers.
A low chair pushed away from the fire, two little blue shoes lying on
the carpet, indicated also the presence of a child in the house; and
indeed from the next room, within which mother and child had but just
disappeared, came occasional bursts of soft laughter, of childish
babble; the pretty flutterings of a nest going off to sleep. All this shed
over the artistic interior a vague perfume of family happiness which the
poet breathed in with delight:
"Decidedly, my dear fellow?" he said to his friend, "you were in the
right. There are no two ways of being happy. Happiness lies in this and

in nothing else. You must find me a wife!"
THE PAINTER.
Good Heavens, no! not on any account. Find one for yourself, if you
are bent upon it. As for me, I will have nothing to do with it.
THE POET.
And why?
THE PAINTER.
Because--because artists ought never to marry.
THE POET.
That's rather too good. You dare to say that, and the lamp does not go
out suddenly, and the walls don't fall down upon your head! But just
think, wretch, that for two hours past, you have been setting before me
the enviable spectacle of the very happiness you forbid me. Are you by
chance like those odious millionaires whose well-being is in-creased by
the sufferings of others, and who better enjoy their own fireside when
they reflect that it is raining out of doors, and that there are plenty of
poor devils without a shelter?
THE PAINTER.
Think of me what you will. I have too much affection for you to help
you to commit a folly--an irreparable folly.
THE POET.
Come! what is it? You are not satisfied? And yet it seems to me that one
breathes in happiness here, just as freely as one does the air of heaven
at a country window.
THE PAINTER.

You are right, I am happy, completely happy, I love my wife with all my
heart. When I think of my child, I laugh aloud to myself with pleasure.
Marriage for me has been a harbour of calm and safe waters, not one
in which you make fast to a ring on the shore, at the risk of rusting
there for ever, but one of those blue creeks where sails and masts are
repaired for fresh excursions into unknown countries, I never worked
as well as I have since my marriage. All my best pictures date from
then.
THE POET.
Well then!
THE PAINTER.
My dear fellow, at the risk of seeming a coxcomb, I will say that I look
upon my happiness as a kind of miracle, something abnormal and
exceptional. Yes! the more I see what marriage is, the more I look back
with terror at the risk I ran. I am like those who, ignorant of the
dangers they have unwittingly gone through, turn pale when all is over,
amazed at their own audacity.
THE POET.
But what then are these terrible dangers?
THE PAINTER.
The first and greatest of all, is the loss or degradation of one's talent.
This should count, I think, with an artist. For observe that at this
moment, I am not speaking of the ordinary conditions of life. I grant
you, that
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