222
PARTISAN REVIEW
His eyes, into which I stared in amazement, dismissed me. I did
not leave, I was resolutely indiscreet. I knew, from long study of
a certain portrait of Philip II in the library of the Escurial, that when
one looks directly at a face that dazzles with its right, after a moment
the fire becomes extinguished, leaving a residue of ashes: it was this
residue which interested me.
Parrottin put up a good fight. But suddenly his eyes lost their
fire, the picture became spiritless. What was left? Sightless eyes, the
mouth, dried up like a dead snake, the cheeks. The pale round cheeks
of a child: they sprawled on the canvas. The employees of S.A.B.
had never suspected their existence: they did not stay long enough
in Parrottin's office. When they entered they came up against this
terrible gaze as against a wall. But behind it, in concealment, were
the cheeks, white and soft. After how many years had his wife
noticed them. Two years? Five years? One day, I imagine, as her hus–
band slept at her side, a moonbeam caressing his nose, or perhaps in
daytime as he lay back in an armchair, laboriously digesting his
dinner,
his
eyes half-closed, a stream of sunlight on his chin, she had
dared look
him
in the face: all that flesh had appeared defenceless,
puffy, drivelling, vaguely obscene. Undoubtedly from that day on
Mme. Parrottin had taken command.
I moved back a few steps so as to take in at one glance all these
great personages: Pacome, President Hebert, the two Parrottins,
General Aubry. They had worn fashionable high hats; on Sundays
they met in Tournebride Street Mme. Gratien, the wife of the mayor,
who saw Saint Cecilia in a dream. They greeted her with fine cere–
monial bows, the secret of which has been lost.
They had been painted with great exactness; however, under
the brush, their faces had been stripped of the mysterious weakness
of the faces of men. Their faces, even the flabbiest, were as tidy as
pieces of crockery: I sought there in vain some kinship with the trees
and the beasts, with thoughts of earth or water. I thought that they
certainly had not felt that necessity in their lifetimes. But at the
moment of passing over into posterity they had entrusted themselves
to a fashionable painter, so that he might discreetly work into their
faces the dredgings, the drillings, the irrigations by which they had
transformed the sea and the fields all around Bouville. Thus, with
the assistance of Renaudas and Bordurin, they had mastered all
Nature: outside themselves and within themselves. What these gloomy
canvases offered my eyes was man reworked by man, with the finest
conquest of man as their only adornment: the bouquet of the Rights
