Usable according to the Creative Commons License Attribution Non-commercial Share-alike.
Our editorial method is informed by social-text editing principles. By “text” we mean verbal and visual printed material, including non-referential physical elements such as bindings, page layouts, and ornaments. We view any text as the outcome of collaborative processes that have specific manifestations at precise historical moments. The Yellow Nineties Online publishes facsimile editions of a select collection of fin-de- siècle aesthetic periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception such as cover designs, advertising materials, and reviews. This historical material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed scholarly commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates; and critical introductions to each title and volume by experts in the field. All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editor(s) and peer- reviewed by them and/or an international board of advisors. The site as a whole is peer- reviewed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Contributors to the site retain personal copyright in their material. The site is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Both primary and secondary materials, including all visual images, are marked up in TEI- (Textual-Encoding Initiative) compliant XML (Extensible Markup Language). To ensure maximum flexibility for users, magazines are available on the site as virtual objects (facsimiles) in FlipBook form; in HTML for online reading; in PDF for downloading and collecting; and in XML for those who wish to review and/or adapt our tag sets. In order to make ornamental devices, such as initial letters, head- and tail- pieces, searchable, we have developed a Database of Ornament in OMEKA, and linked it to the relevant pages of each magazine edition. As a dynamic structure, a scholarly website is always in process; Phase One of The Yellow Nineties Online (2010-2015) is completed and Phase Two (2016-2021) is underway.
INDOORS, in the austere northern light of the studio, one hardly
realised
that the trees on the boulevard were all a-flutter in
their pale green
garments, that outside, all over Paris, the fairy-
tale of spring was being
told. The only vernal sound which the
painter could hear as he worked, was
the monotonous cooing of a
pair of ring-doves, whose cage hung at the end
of the passage, at
an open door which gave on a strip of sun-flooded court.
Inter-
mittently, he could hear, too, the shuffling of a pair of
feet—feet
which pottered about in the aimless way of the old and
tired.
The familiar sound brought up a vision of Virginie, the woman
who swept out the studio, kept the models from the door, and
made him an
excellent
Virginie certainly had her uses, although she was old, and
shrivelled and
unsightly. The young man hummed a love-song
of Chaminade's as he stepped
away from his picture, screwing up
his eyes the better to judge of the
values. Poor, bent old
Virginie, with the failing memory, the parchment
skin, and the
formless lips ! He was sorry for women—even for old
women.
Being a Frenchman, he had an innately tender regard for the
sex.
"The world is made for men," he said to himself, "
glad I was born a man."
And all the while Virginia, busy among her pots and pans at
the end of the
passage, was thinking about her master. She was
proud of his talent, of his
success, above all, of his youth and good
looks. She rejoiced that,
although M. Georges was barely thirty,
he was already
big a
studio. The young men made more money nowadays.
. . . Why, it was a finer
atelier than
greatest
painter of his day in France, the famous Jean Vaillant.
The stove had not yet been lighted, and, in spite of the
sunshine outside,
it was chilly in the kitchen, where Virginie
was scouring the pans. At
seventy, after a lifetime of anxiety
and of toil ; of rising at the dawn,
of scrubbing, cleaning, cooking,
washing : at seventy, one has no longer
much warmth in one's
veins. And then the blond, spring sunshine only made
her feel
dizzy ; she had a cough which troubled her, and queer pains in
her
bones. ... "Maybe," she nodded to herself, " that it is not for
long that I am here. Poor M. Georges."
An imperious ring at the outer bell made her hurry to the door.
Her face
fell as she encountered a fantastic hat loaded with lilac, a
fresh spring
toilet, a pair of handsome eyes, and a triumphant
smile. She began to
grumble.
"M. Georges was at home, yes. But he was
busy. He was hard at work on a
picture. The back-ground of a portrait which
must be finished this week.
Could not Mademoiselle call again ? "
" Ah, but he will see me," declared
the Lilac Hat, pushing by,
and leaving a pungent odour of chypre behind her
as she passed,
with her rustling silk linings and her overpowering air of
femi-
ninity. Virginie shuffled after her to the studio door.
"Mlle. Rose," she announced.
The young man threw down his palette and brushes, and
turned, his face
alight.
As Virginie went back alone down the narrow passage, there
was a curious
silence in the atelier, broken, at last, by the murmur
of soft, happy
voices.
" Tas de saletés," grumbled Virginie, " she'll not let him do
any more work
to-day." A strange spasm of jealousy seized her.
The little
incident—though she had often witnessed it before—
seemed
somehow to accentuate to-day her own senility, her
failing powers, her
rapid detachment from life. It reminded her,
too, of things that had
occurred half a century ago. . . . . Well,
she would like to show M. Georges that
she, too .... At any
rate, she had the letters still ; she would give them
to him this
afternoon— when Mlle. Rose had gone, before he went
out.
After all, who should have them except M. Georges ? He, at
least,
would keep them if anything happened to her. . . . . Sud-
denly the old woman felt a
lump at her throat, a curious, choking
sensation. She stepped to the
window, and pushed it open.
Outside, a light easterly wind was shaking an almond-tree in
full blossom,
making a fluttering pink cloud against the clear
April sky. The ring-doves
in their wicker cage were cooing in
an amorous ecstasy. . . .
Presently, with her heavy step, she turned into the cupboard
which served
her for a bed-room. In one corner stood a locked
box, dusty with disuse, at
which she fumbled nervously with a
rusty key. Then, with palsied, trembling
fingers, she drew out
an ancient packet of letters, tied with a ribbon
which had perhaps
once been rose-coloured.
By and bye, when the light had lessened, Virginie knocked
timidly at the
studio-door. Mile. Rose had been gone some
time now, yet there still hung
about the room a faint odour of
chypre.
" Mais entrez donc, ma vieille ! " called out the young painter,
kindly, glancing over his shoulder as he stood at his easel. "What
is it
that you want ? "
" Nothing, M. Georges. It is something that I thought you
might like to
have. You collect such things—letters, autographs.
And you, too, are
an artist. One day—who knows—you may be
as great as him ?
"
He came forward, surprised, and took the bundle of letters from
her shaking
fingers—dingy, folded sheets of paper, which had once
been fastened
by wafers, and which bore the dates of April and
May, 1846. Running his eye
across some of the yellow pages,
covered with faded ink, he glanced at the
signatures. "Why,
they are priceless ! " he cried. " Love-letters from Jean
Vaillant ?
Where, in Heaven's name, did you get them, Virginie ? "
" But they are mine ! Yes, yes, M. Jean wrote them to me.
Ah, but I did not
always sweep studios and open doors.....
I was pretty once, M. Georges. I
was a model. He chose me
for his
will be in the Louvre. . . . . M. Jean was
very fond of me.....
stooping, with the patient humility of the poor, to pick up
some of the yellow sheets which had fallen to the ground.
He knelt down, too, and helped to collect the letters.
" But read them, M. Georges ! " A rosy flush of belated
feminine pride had
crept over her shrunken cheeks. He began
to read aloud the letter he held
in his hand. It was an intimate
revelation of the heart of him whom the
younger generation
spoke of always as the Master.
"
delight in your beauty
She stood there timidly, as he read aloud, with her seamed face,
and her
little, faded eyes fixed on her master. A white cap was
tied beneath her shrivelled chin ; a loose camisole covered her
shrunken
chest, a meagre petticoat revealed her bony ankles.
"
child's sweetness, but a woman's seduction. Ah, you are indeed an
exquisite creature
He raised his eyes and looked at the familiar figure of Virginie.
.... All
at once the bent, unsightly form seemed invested
with the sweetness, the
purity, the dignity of the young girl ;
round her head, with its sparse
white hair, there rested, for an
instant, the aureole of the woman who is
beloved.
"
my dream, my reward, I was like a man asleep, and you,
Virginie,
have awoken me
A feeble smile of satisfied vanity flickered over the old woman's
face. She
nodded her head as he went on reading, her knotted
hands twisted nervously
together. Time, with his corroding
finger, had seared and branded her out
of all semblance of a
woman. She represented nothing but the long, the
inexorable degradation of life.
"
face, nor the hours we have passed together
Gently the young man laid the letter down. His eyes had
filled with tears ;
he could no longer see the words. And
then, reverently, he folded it with
the rest, and, opening the drawer
of an antique cabinet, he locked his
new-found treasures up.
" Sapristi ! Mais ce n'est pas amusant—la vie," he muttered,
watching
the bent figure of the old woman as she passed,
presently, mumbling and
nodding, out of the studio, to be
swallowed up in the vague shadows of the
passage. Suddenly it
felt cold and dismal in the great room.
" Non, ce n'est pas gaie, la vie," he repeated ; " at least, not
when we live too long. Well, let us make haste to amuse our-
selves while we
are young."
Rapidly he cleaned up his palette, and put on another coat.
Rose had
promised to wait for him for dinner, he remembered,
and there had even been
talk of a ball in the Quartier.
Virginie was patching an old skirt as he passed out by the
little kitchen.
It had turned much colder, and she had drawn up
a chair near the stove.
Gently, deferentially, he took her withered hand and kissed it.
" Hommage à
la maîtresse de Jean Vaillant," he murmured
gaily. " Has she any commission
for her humble servant ? "
The old woman's eyes lit up. Outside, there was already some-
thing of the
cold serenity of evening in the still, primrose-coloured
sky. The
ring-doves were silent now, huddled together in their
wicker cage, their
beaks tucked beneath their wings.
" If monsieur," she said humbly, " would give himself the
trouble to bring
me a small bottle of some cordial ?
the
spring one feels chilly, M. Georges. . . . . Yes, the old feel
chilly in the
spring."