Оноре де Бальзак
Cousin Betty
“Proof!” was all the Baron could say.
Crevel took a flat candlestick and led Hulot into the adjoining room, where he saw, on a sofa, a superb dressing-gown belonging to Valerie, which he had seen her wear in the Rue Vanneau, to display it before wearing it in Crevel’s little apartment. The Mayor pressed the spring of a little writing-table of inlaid work, known as a bonheur-du-jour, and took out of it a letter that he handed to the Baron.
“Read that,” said he.
The Councillor read these words written in pencil:
“I have waited in vain, you old wretch! A woman of my quality does not expect to be kept waiting by a retired perfumer. There was no dinner ordered – no cigarettes. I will make you pay for this!”
“Well, is that her writing?”
“Good God!” gasped Hulot, sitting down in dismay. “I see all the things she uses – her caps, her slippers. Why, how long since – ?”
Crevel nodded that he understood, and took a packet of bills out of the little inlaid cabinet.
“You can see, old man. I paid the decorators in December, 1838. In October, two months before, this charming little place was first used.”
Hulot bent his head.
“How the devil do you manage it? I know how she spends every hour of her day.”
“How about her walk in the Tuileries?” said Crevel, rubbing his hands in triumph.
“What then?” said Hulot, mystified.
“Your lady love comes to the Tuileries, she is supposed to be airing herself from one till four. But, hop, skip, and jump, and she is here. You know your Moliere? Well, Baron, there is nothing imaginary in your title.”
Hulot, left without a shred of doubt, sat sunk in ominous silence. Catastrophes lead intelligent and strong-minded men to be philosophical. The Baron, morally, was at this moment like a man trying to find his way by night through a forest. This gloomy taciturnity and the change in that dejected countenance made Crevel very uneasy, for he did not wish the death of his colleague.
“As I said, old fellow, we are now even; let us play for the odd. Will you play off the tie by hook and by crook? Come!”
“Why,” said Hulot, talking to himself – “why is it that out of ten pretty women at least seven are false?”
But the Baron was too much upset to answer his own question. Beauty is the greatest of human gifts for power. Every power that has no counterpoise, no autocratic control, leads to abuses and folly. Despotism is the madness of power; in women the despot is caprice.
“You have nothing to complain of, my good friend; you have a beautiful wife, and she is virtuous.”
“I deserve my fate,” said Hulot. “I have undervalued my wife and made her miserable, and she is an angel! Oh, my poor Adeline! you are avenged! She suffers in solitude and silence, and she is worthy of my love; I ought – for she is still charming, fair and girlish even – But was there ever a woman known more base, more ignoble, more villainous than this Valerie?”
“She is a good-for-nothing slut,” said Crevel, “a hussy that deserves whipping on the Place du Chatelet. But, my dear Canillac, though we are such blades, so Marechal de Richelieu, Louis XV., Pompadour, Madame du Barry, gay dogs, and everything that is most eighteenth century, there is no longer a lieutenant of police.”
“How can we make them love us?” Hulot wondered to himself without heeding Crevel.
“It is sheer folly in us to expect to be loved, my dear fellow,” said Crevel. “We can only be endured; for Madame Marneffe is a hundred times more profligate than Josepha.”
“And avaricious! she costs me a hundred and ninety-two thousand francs a year!” cried Hulot.
“And how many centimes!” sneered Crevel, with the insolence of a financier who scorns so small a sum.
“You do not love her, that is very evident,” said the Baron dolefully.
“I have had enough of her,” replied Crevel, “for she has had more than three hundred thousand francs of mine!”
“Where is it? Where does it all go?” said the Baron, clasping his head in his hands.
“If we had come to an agreement, like the simple young men who combine to maintain a twopenny baggage, she would have cost us less.”
“That is an idea”! replied the Baron. “But she would still be cheating us; for, my burly friend, what do you say to this Brazilian?”
“Ay, old sly fox, you are right, we are swindled like – like shareholders!” said Crevel. “All such women are an unlimited liability, and we the sleeping partners.”
“Then it was she who told you about the candle in the window?”
“My good man,” replied Crevel, striking an attitude, “she has fooled us both. Valerie is a – She told me to keep you here. – Now I see it all. She has got her Brazilian! – Oh, I have done with her, for if you hold her hands, she would find a way to cheat you with her feet! There! she is a minx, a jade!”
“She is lower than a prostitute,” said the Baron. “Josepha and Jenny Cadine were in their rights when they were false to us; they make a trade of their charms.”
“But she, who affects the saint – the prude!” said Crevel. “I tell you what, Hulot, do you go back to your wife; your money matters are not looking well; I have heard talk of certain notes of hand given to a low usurer whose special line of business is lending to these sluts, a man named Vauvinet. For my part, I am cured of your ‘real ladies.’ And, after all, at our time of life what do we want of these swindling hussies, who, to be honest, cannot help playing us false? You have white hair and false teeth; I am of the shape of Silenus. I shall go in for saving. Money never deceives one. Though the Treasury is indeed open to all the world twice a year, it pays you interest, and this woman swallows it. With you, my worthy friend, as Gubetta, as my partner in the concern, I might have resigned myself to a shady bargain – no, a philosophical calm. But with a Brazilian who has possibly smuggled in some doubtful colonial produce – ”
“Woman is an inexplicable creature!” said Hulot.
“I can explain her,” said Crevel. “We are old; the Brazilian is young and handsome.”
“Yes; that, I own, is true,” said Hulot; “we are older than we were. But, my dear fellow, how is one to do without these pretty creatures – seeing them undress, twist up their hair, smile cunningly through their fingers as they screw up their curl-papers, put on all their airs and graces, tell all their lies, declare that we don’t love them when we are worried with business; and they cheer us in spite of everything.”
“Yes, by the Power! It is the only pleasure in life!” cried Crevel. “When a saucy little mug smiles at you and says, ‘My old dear, you don’t know how nice you are! I am not like other women, I suppose, who go crazy over mere boys with goats’ beards, smelling of smoke, and as coarse as serving-men! For in their youth they are so insolent! – They come in and they bid you good-morning, and out they go. – I, whom you think such a flirt, I prefer a man of fifty to these brats. A man who will stick by me, who is devoted, who knows a woman is not to be picked up every day, and appreciates us. – That is what I love you for, you old monster!’ – and they fill up these avowals with little pettings and prettinesses and – Faugh! they are as false as the bills on the Hotel de Ville.”
“A lie is sometimes better than the truth,” said Hulot, remembering sundry bewitching scenes called up by Crevel, who mimicked Valerie. “They are obliged to act upon their lies, to sew spangles on their stage frocks – ”
“And they are ours, after all, the lying jades!” said Crevel coarsely.
“Valerie is a witch,” said the Baron. “She can turn an old man into a young one.”
“Oh, yes!” said Crevel, “she is an eel that wriggles through your hands; but the prettiest eel, as white and sweet as sugar, as amusing as Arnal – and ingenious!”
“Yes, she is full of fun,” said Hulot, who had now quite forgotten his wife.
The colleagues went to bed the best friends in the world, reminding each other of Valerie’s perfections, the tones of her voice, her kittenish way, her movements, her fun, her sallies of wit, and of affections; for she was an artist in love, and had charming impulses, as tenors may sing a scena better one day than another. And they fell asleep, cradled in tempting and diabolical visions lighted by the fires of hell.
At nine o’clock next morning Hulot went off to the War Office, Crevel had business out of town; they left the house together, and Crevel held out his hand to the Baron, saying:
“To show that there is no ill-feeling. For we, neither of us, will have anything more to say to Madame Marneffe?”
“Oh, this is the end of everything,” replied Hulot with a sort of horror.
By half-past ten Crevel was mounting the stairs, four at a time, up to Madame Marneffe’s apartment. He found the infamous wretch, the adorable enchantress, in the most becoming morning wrapper, enjoying an elegant little breakfast in the society of the Baron Montes de Montejanos and Lisbeth. Though the sight of the Brazilian gave him a shock, Crevel begged Madame Marneffe to grant him two minutes’ speech with her. Valerie led Crevel into the drawing-room.
“Valerie, my angel,” said the amorous Mayor, “Monsieur Marneffe cannot have long to live. If you will be faithful to me, when he dies we will be married. Think it over. I have rid you of Hulot. – So just consider whether this Brazilian is to compare with a Mayor of Paris, a man who, for your sake, will make his way to the highest dignities, and who can already offer you eighty-odd thousand francs a year.”
“I will think it over,” said she. “You will see me in the Rue du Dauphin at two o’clock, and we can discuss the matter. But be a good boy – and do not forget the bond you promised to transfer to me.”
She returned to the dining-room, followed by Crevel, who flattered himself that he had hit on a plan for keeping Valerie to himself; but there he found Baron Hulot, who, during this short colloquy, had also arrived with the same end in view. He, like Crevel, begged for a brief interview. Madame Marneffe again rose to go to the drawing-room, with a smile at the Brazilian that seemed to say, “What fools they are! Cannot they see you?”
“Valerie,” said the official, “my child, that cousin of yours is an American cousin – ”
“Oh, that is enough!” she cried, interrupting the Baron. “Marneffe never has been, and never will be, never can be my husband! The first, the only man I ever loved, has come back quite unexpectedly. It is no fault of mine! But look at Henri and look at yourself. Then ask yourself whether a woman, and a woman in love, can hesitate for a moment. My dear fellow, I am not a kept mistress. From this day forth I refuse to play the part of Susannah between the two Elders. If you really care for me, you and Crevel, you will be our friends; but all else is at an end, for I am six-and-twenty, and henceforth I mean to be a saint, an admirable and worthy wife – as yours is.”
“Is that what you have to say?” answered Hulot. “Is this the way you receive me when I come like a Pope with my hands full of Indulgences? – Well, your husband will never be a first-class clerk, nor be promoted in the Legion of Honor.”
“That remains to be seen,” said Madame Marneffe, with a meaning look at Hulot.
“Well, well, no temper,” said Hulot in despair. “I will call this evening, and we will come to an understanding.”
“In Lisbeth’s rooms then.”
“Very good – at Lisbeth’s,” said the old dotard.
Hulot and Crevel went downstairs together without speaking a word till they were in the street; but outside on the sidewalk they looked at each other with a dreary laugh.
“We are a couple of old fools,” said Crevel.
“I have got rid of them,” said Madame Marneffe to Lisbeth, as she sat down once more. “I never loved and I never shall love any man but my Jaguar,” she added, smiling at Henri Montes. “Lisbeth, my dear, you don’t know. Henri has forgiven me the infamy to which I was reduced by poverty.”
“It was my own fault,” said the Brazilian. “I ought to have sent you a hundred thousand francs.”
“Poor boy!” said Valerie; “I might have worked for my living, but my fingers were not made for that – ask Lisbeth.”
The Brazilian went away the happiest man in Paris.
At noon Valerie and Lisbeth were chatting in the splendid bedroom where this dangerous woman was giving to her dress those finishing touches which a lady alone can give. The doors were bolted, the curtains drawn over them, and Valerie related in every detail all the events of the evening, the night, the morning.
“What do you think of it all, my darling?” she said to Lisbeth in conclusion. “Which shall I be when the time comes – Madame Crevel, or Madame Montes?”
“Crevel will not last more than ten years, such a profligate as he is,” replied Lisbeth. “Montes is young. Crevel will leave you about thirty thousand francs a year. Let Montes wait; he will be happy enough as Benjamin. And so, by the time you are three-and-thirty, if you take care of your looks, you may marry your Brazilian and make a fine show with sixty thousand francs a year of your own – especially under the wing of a Marechale.”
“Yes, but Montes is a Brazilian; he will never make his mark,” observed Valerie.
“We live in the day of railways,” said Lisbeth, “when foreigners rise to high positions in France.”
“We shall see,” replied Valerie, “when Marneffe is dead. He has not much longer to suffer.”
“These attacks that return so often are a sort of physical remorse,” said Lisbeth. “Well, I am off to see Hortense.”
“Yes – go, my angel!” replied Valerie. “And bring me my artist. – Three years, and I have not gained an inch of ground! It is a disgrace to both of us! – Wenceslas and Henri – these are my two passions – one for love, the other for fancy.”
“You are lovely this morning,” said Lisbeth, putting her arm round Valerie’s waist and kissing her forehead. “I enjoy all your pleasures, your good fortune, your dresses – I never really lived till the day when we became sisters.”
“Wait a moment, my tiger-cat!” cried Valerie, laughing; “your shawl is crooked. You cannot put a shawl on yet in spite of my lessons for three years – and you want to be Madame la Marechale Hulot!”
Shod in prunella boots, over gray silk stockings, in a gown of handsome corded silk, her hair in smooth bands under a very pretty black velvet bonnet, lined with yellow satin, Lisbeth made her way to the Rue Saint-Dominique by the Boulevard des Invalides, wondering whether sheer dejection would at last break down Hortense’s brave spirit, and whether Sarmatian instability, taken at a moment when, with such a character, everything is possible, would be too much for Steinbock’s constancy.
Hortense and Wenceslas had the ground floor of a house situated at the corner of the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Esplanade des Invalides. These rooms, once in harmony with the honeymoon, now had that half-new, half-faded look that may be called the autumnal aspect of furniture. Newly married folks are as lavish and wasteful, without knowing it or intending it, of everything about them as they are of their affection. Thinking only of themselves, they reck little of the future, which, at a later time, weighs on the mother of a family.
Lisbeth found Hortense just as she had finished dressing a baby Wenceslas, who had been carried into the garden.
“Good-morning, Betty,” said Hortense, opening the door herself to her cousin. The cook was gone out, and the house-servant, who was also the nurse, was doing some washing.
“Good-morning, dear child,” replied Lisbeth, kissing her. “Is Wenceslas in the studio?” she added in a whisper.
“No; he is in the drawing-room talking to Stidmann and Chanor.”
“Can we be alone?” asked Lisbeth.
“Come into my room.”
In this room, the hangings of pink-flowered chintz with green leaves on a white ground, constantly exposed to the sun, were much faded, as was the carpet. The muslin curtains had not been washed for many a day. The smell of tobacco hung about the room; for Wenceslas, now an artist of repute, and born a fine gentleman, left his cigar-ash on the arms of the chairs and the prettiest pieces of furniture, as a man does to whom love allows everything – a man rich enough to scorn vulgar carefulness.
“Now, then, let us talk over your affairs,” said Lisbeth, seeing her pretty cousin silent in the armchair into which she had dropped. “But what ails you? You look rather pale, my dear.”
“Two articles have just come out in which my poor Wenceslas is pulled to pieces; I have read them, but I have hidden them from him, for they would completely depress him. The marble statue of Marshal Montcornet is pronounced utterly bad. The bas-reliefs are allowed to pass muster, simply to allow of the most perfidious praise of his talent as a decorative artist, and to give the greater emphasis to the statement that serious art is quite out of his reach! Stidmann, whom I besought to tell me the truth, broke my heart by confessing that his own opinion agreed with that of every other artist, of the critics, and the public. He said to me in the garden before breakfast, ‘If Wenceslas cannot exhibit a masterpiece next season, he must give up heroic sculpture and be content to execute idyllic subjects, small figures, pieces of jewelry, and high-class goldsmiths’ work!’ This verdict is dreadful to me, for Wenceslas, I know, will never accept it; he feels he has so many fine ideas.”
“Ideas will not pay the tradesman’s bills,” remarked Lisbeth. “I was always telling him so – nothing but money. Money is only to be had for work done – things that ordinary folks like well enough to buy them. When an artist has to live and keep a family, he had far better have a design for a candlestick on his counter, or for a fender or a table, than for groups or statues. Everybody must have such things, while he may wait months for the admirer of the group – and for his money – ”
“You are right, my good Lisbeth. Tell him all that; I have not the courage. – Besides, as he was saying to Stidmann, if he goes back to ornamental work and small sculpture, he must give up all hope of the Institute and grand works of art, and we should not get the three hundred thousand francs’ worth of work promised at Versailles and by the City of Paris and the Ministers. That is what we are robbed of by those dreadful articles, written by rivals who want to step into our shoes.”
“And that is not what you dreamed of, poor little puss!” said Lisbeth, kissing Hortense on the brow. “You expected to find a gentleman, a leader of Art, the chief of all living sculptors. – But that is poetry, you see, a dream requiring fifty thousand francs a year, and you have only two thousand four hundred – so long as I live. After my death three thousand.”
A few tears rose to Hortense’s eyes, and Lisbeth drank them with her eyes as a cat laps milk.
This is the story of their honeymoon – the tale will perhaps not be lost on some artists.
Intellectual work, labor in the upper regions of mental effort, is one of the grandest achievements of man. That which deserves real glory in Art – for by Art we must understand every creation of the mind – is courage above all things – a sort of courage of which the vulgar have no conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.
Driven by the dreadful stress of poverty, goaded by Lisbeth, and kept by her in blinders, as a horse is, to hinder it from seeing to the right and left of its road, lashed on by that hard woman, the personification of Necessity, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born poet and dreamer, had gone on from conception to execution, and overleaped, without sounding it, the gulf that divides these two hemispheres of Art. To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation. It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the life of a courtesan who follows her own fancy. The work then floats in all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juices of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.
The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother’s heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in painting to every memory, in music to every heart! – This is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward and obey the brain. But the brain has no more a creative power at command than love has a perennial spring.
The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which makes a mother – that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly understood – the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the opportunity of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor’s edge, she is in the air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the sportsman’s despair. And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are often broken by it. A great poet of our day has said in speaking of this overwhelming labor, “I sit down to it in despair, but I leave it with regret.” Be it known to all who are ignorant! If the artist does not throw himself into his work as Curtius sprang into the gulf, as a soldier leads a forlorn hope without a moment’s thought, and if when he is in the crater he does not dig on as a miner does when the earth has fallen in on him; if he contemplates the difficulties before him instead of conquering them one by one, like the lovers in fairy tales, who to win their princesses overcome ever new enchantments, the work remains incomplete; it perishes in the studio where creativeness becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent.
Rossini, a brother genius to Raphael, is a striking instance in his poverty-stricken youth, compared with his latter years of opulence. This is the reason why the same prize, the same triumph, the same bays are awarded to great poets and to great generals.
Wenceslas, by nature a dreamer, had expended so much energy in production, in study, and in work under Lisbeth’s despotic rule, that love and happiness resulted in reaction. His real character reappeared, the weakness, recklessness, and indolence of the Sarmatian returned to nestle in the comfortable corners of his soul, whence the schoolmaster’s rod had routed them.
For the first few months the artist adored his wife. Hortense and Wenceslas abandoned themselves to the happy childishness of a legitimate and unbounded passion. Hortense was the first to release her husband from his labors, proud to triumph over her rival, his Art. And, indeed, a woman’s caresses scare away the Muse, and break down the sturdy, brutal resolution of the worker.
Six or seven months slipped by, and the artist’s fingers had forgotten the use of the modeling tool. When the need for work began to be felt, when the Prince de Wissembourg, president of the committee of subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas spoke the inevitable byword of the idler, “I am just going to work on it,” and he lulled his dear Hortense with fallacious promises and the magnificent schemes of the artist as he smokes. Hortense loved her poet more than ever; she dreamed of a sublime statue of Marshal Montcornet. Montcornet would be the embodied ideal of bravery, the type of the cavalry officer, of courage a la Murat. Yes, yes; at the mere sight of that statue all the Emperor’s victories were to seem a foregone conclusion. And then such workmanship! The pencil was accommodating and answered to the word.
By way of a statue the result was a delightful little Wenceslas.
When the progress of affairs required that he should go to the studio at le Gros-Caillou to mould the clay and set up the life-size model, Steinbock found one day that the Prince’s clock required his presence in the workshop of Florent and Chanor, where the figures were being finished; or, again, the light was gray and dull; to-day he had business to do, to-morrow they had a family dinner, to say nothing of indispositions of mind and body, and the days when he stayed at home to toy with his adored wife.
Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg was obliged to be angry to get the clay model finished; he declared that he must put the work into other hands. It was only by dint of endless complaints and much strong language that the committee of subscribers succeeded in seeing the plaster-cast. Day after day Steinbock came home, evidently tired, complaining of this “hodman’s work” and his own physical weakness. During that first year the household felt no pinch; the Countess Steinbock, desperately in love with her husband cursed the War Minister. She went to see him; she told him that great works of art were not to be manufactured like cannon; and that the State – like Louis XIV., Francis I., and Leo X. – ought to be at the beck and call of genius. Poor Hortense, believing she held a Phidias in her embrace, had the sort of motherly cowardice for her Wenceslas that is in every wife who carries her love to the pitch of idolatry.
“Do not be hurried,” said she to her husband, “our whole future life is bound up with that statue. Take your time and produce a masterpiece.”
She would go to the studio, and then the enraptured Steinbock wasted five hours out of seven in describing the statue instead of working at it. He thus spent eighteen months in finishing the design, which to him was all-important.
When the plaster was cast and the model complete, poor Hortense, who had looked on at her husband’s toil, seeing his health really suffer from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor’s frame and arms and hands – Hortense thought the result admirable. Her father, who knew nothing of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.
Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy. Stidmann, the best of good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be the test.
“In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble,” wrote Claude Vignon, “a masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful. The plaster is the manuscript, the marble is the book.”
So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son. The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.
The clock for the Prince and the price of the statue paid off the young couple’s debts. Steinbock had acquired fashionable habits; he went to the play, to the opera; he talked admirably about art; and in the eyes of the world he maintained his reputation as a great artist by his powers of conversation and criticism. There are many clever men in Paris who spend their lives in talking themselves out, and are content with a sort of drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating these emasculated but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew swiftly away at the sight of this effete lover.
Sculpture – like dramatic art – is at once the most difficult and the easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a woman – this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men. Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.
Superficial thinkers – and there are many in the artist world – have asserted that sculpture lives only by the nude, that it died with the Greeks, and that modern vesture makes it impossible. But, in the first place, the Ancients have left sublime statues entirely clothed – the Polyhymnia, the Julia, and others, and we have not found one-tenth of all their works; and then, let any lover of art go to Florence and see Michael Angelo’s Penseroso, or to the Cathedral of Mainz, and behold the Virgin by Albert Durer, who has created a living woman out of ebony, under her threefold drapery, with the most flowing, the softest hair that ever a waiting-maid combed through; let all the ignorant flock thither, and they will acknowledge that genius can give mind to drapery, to armor, to a robe, and fill it with a body, just as a man leaves the stamp of his individuality and habits of life on the clothes he wears.
Sculpture is the perpetual realization of the fact which once, and never again, was, in painting called Raphael!
The solution of this hard problem is to be found only in constant persevering toil; for, merely to overcome the material difficulties to such an extent, the hand must be so practised, so dexterous and obedient, that the sculptor may be free to struggle soul to soul with the elusive moral element that he has to transfigure as he embodies it. If Paganini, who uttered his soul through the strings of his violin, spent three days without practising, he lost what he called the stops of his instrument, meaning the sympathy between the wooden frame, the strings, the bow, and himself; if he had lost this alliance, he would have been no more than an ordinary player.