Now that the sound of the final visitor’s footsteps was fading down the stairs, Madame Alice T. remained in semi-darkness—neglecting to turn on a light—and daydreamed in her studio, drowsy from the praise and kindness lavished on her. She had become one of those women painters who, almost instinctually, senses the weaknesses of the masses and panders to their tastes, stooping more and more to popular demand with each passing day. This was why she was adored without reserve, why people wrested her paintings out of one another’s hands and why, even in her most trivial pieces, people tried to find the mark of the artistic, capricious and exceedingly profound inspiration they ascribed to her.  

Madame T. was the overindulged child of the fickle Parisian masses. With unusual feminine guile, she had managed to keep an excitement for her work burning bright over the years. By penetrating the collective desires of the people every day, she could serve them every day. What did it matter if today’s work was at odds with yesterday’s?

It was perhaps for precisely this reason that the paintings arranged next to one another on the wall—the paintings she considered her best—had been produced in such a range of styles that they made her studio look like a museum.

Driven entirely by the praise she received, she ardently believed in the lofty social importance of her work. Resting her head on a pillow, she looked confidently at her paintings, studying, in particular, the one that had brought her success for the first time.

Amid a slender bouquet of tulips with limp, blood-red petals, a girl stood dressed in white. Her skirt hugged her legs within its rumpled folds and fanned out on the green grass, where here and there yellow flowers were arranged symmetrically. The ground rose to reach the horizon and the girl’s golden eyes also came to resemble yellow flowers. In the early days of Decadent literature, this painting had sparked a kind of giddy fervor among young people, who seemed to see in it a depiction of the elusive images in their minds: a girl in white with a golden gaze tinged red by the fiery hues of the tulips. She fully recalled the indescribable joy she felt on the day when, still a young woman, she had been intoxicated by the thought of her name on everyone’s lips in the very room where her husband’s one painting—a portrait in profile made up of vigorous, earnest brushstrokes—was growing pale all alone in the light that poured in freely from the glass skylight.

Her husband—Monsieur Jacques—was also a painter. He was one of those artists whose particular temperament caused his hand to work slowly on the canvas, aware of the difficulty of achieving absolute beauty, always dissatisfied with his work yet stubbornly in pursuit of the very ideal that tormented him.

Since that day, husband and wife had felt as though a trench had been dug between them. Their intimate relations had stopped altogether, and they had started to act like two rival artists—only that one was wounded by not being understood in his painful pursuit of beauty while the other was satiated by the praise lavished on her talent.

The darkness grew even heavier in the room, and all the shadows, cast by everything from the strips of fabric covering the doors to the smallest trinkets, lengthened. Her paintings—half-concealed in the shadows—offered only their most brilliant colors, which created a meaningless assortment of striking hues, intermingling and making the entire studio look like a palette. Madame Alice T. was now thinking about the early years of her marriage with all of its trials and tribulations. The only daughter of an aristocratic Norman family, she had been fiercely enamored by the Jewish artist. She thought about the difficulties they had faced hand in hand. She thought about her parents’ stubborn disapproval and about the death of her mother, all alone and embittered by the intolerance in her soul. They had arrived in Paris nearly destitute, and her husband had taken arduous jobs to try, little by little, to provide his aristocratic wife with the easy, sumptuous life she deserved, the life that she had willingly deprived herself of for him. At that time, they had both been happy.

Her husband’s quickening footsteps in the studio next door suddenly roused her from her memories.

While his wife was receiving her many guests, Jacques had spent the entire day in quiet solitude, pacing his studio like a caged lion.

The plaintive creaking of those footsteps on the polished wood floor had poisoned Madame Alice’s reception day, which she had been looking forward to all week. It was as if the footsteps had stung her conscience, and yet she did not know how she was at fault. What could she do if all the visitors repeated the same stock phrase as they left?

“Madame, I really would have liked to visit your husband, but the time went by so easily with you. Next week, we will once again have the pleasure of seeing new pieces by you and Monsieur Jacques.”

The darkness gradually grew denser, and the voices from the other apartments in the building fell silent. A discreet hush particular to remote Parisian neighborhoods halted life on the street. Sometimes the dull rumbling of a carriage could be made out in the distance, and, in the studio next door, Madame Alice kept hearing her husband’s almost weary shuffling until he stopped suddenly, making it sound as though a body had hit the ground with a thump.

Yet all of their friends and acquaintances thought they were perfectly happy. They assumed that the couple understood each other, that they almost completed each other, all while being able to help each other with their art and to give each other advice. But it was always Madame Alice’s persona that rushed into the minds of those who thought this way. Jacques always assumed a secondary role, eclipsed by his wife’s fame to such an extent that many—without knowing that they were effectively dealing the final blow to the poor artist—would refer to Jacques as “Monsieur T.,” using his wife’s public name. It had not yet occurred to anyone to refer to his wife as Madame Jacques.

When Madame Alice had wanted to take up painting, Jacques had not given it much thought at first. Years burdened by financial concerns went by with him devoting only one or two hours a day to his beloved art and acquiring a great sensibility for true beauty. He had spent his early adulthood embittered and deprived, barely consoled by the idea of making a supreme sacrifice for his wife.

Like all artists who feel within themselves the force to produce but who are thwarted for one reason or another, Jacques—uneasy and tense—had always been dissatisfied with his work. Colors accumulated one on top of the other. Barely touched canvases were tossed aside. Every day he was enlivened by the desire to do his best and every evening he found himself disappointed by the knowledge of his insufficient efforts. Unable to endure the perpetual fatigue, his models would abandon him and the financial concerns of not finishing a painting would pile up until Jacques, his heart wounded, would leave his studio for a while. Yet through all these difficulties, he felt the ever-constant strength of his character and was prepared to face all kinds of obstacles. His major weakness was the intense pain he felt every time he heard about the success of one of his friends. Absolute in all of his emotions, he would suffer with an intensity particular to his Semitic soul every time he saw others encircled by the trappings of success, all while he—entirely alone before an unattainable ideal—felt in his soul the same divine blaze that great artists have used to produce their masterpieces.

It was under these circumstances that he had managed to finish a portrait in profile of one of his friends and have it accepted by the Salon. That same year, his wife also exhibited her work and immediately gained a kind of celebrity that would become a source of torment for him, even in his own home. Madame Alice T. was not an evil woman, but this unexpected success intoxicated her in such a way that she now firmly believed in her own superiority. If, knowing Jacques’s envious spirit, she hinted at that superiority and made him feel it, he would slowly grow cautious, almost defensive. Her advice—at first sound—gradually became overbearing:

“My love, how can you expect people to like these eyes? They look like they belong on the Sphinx. They do send a shiver down my spine, but have you ever seen eyes like these on a real person?”

Jacques smiled. How many nights had those very eyes visited him—eyes in which there was a longing for the impossible, a yearning for the invisible, eyes as deep as an infinite abyss, and others veiled in unspeakable anguish? He spent an entire day painting those eyes on a canvas until, beaten down by exhaustion, he sprawled out on the divan, weary in body and soul:

“If only I could fix a pair of these eyes onto a face. . .”

His wife shrugged in disdain. On the wall beside those unusual eyes, her paintings grinned: chrysanthemums; a face in profile; woods on the banks of a stream; a field of sweetbriar in golden twilight. In short, the classic repertoire of a woman painter. Sometimes, demoralized by an unshakable listlessness, he would spend hours on the divan watching his wife, who always worked with sustained momentum. Colors would flow from her brushes with the steadiness of a calm stream and Jacques would suddenly wish for the ability to produce without so much labor, though deep down he knew that the ideas he conceived were derivative and often aborted.  

He would weep over his unfinished paintings in the same way people weep over children they have lost. Thinking of the unrealized paintings he had envisioned, he would say to himself:

“If only I could paint them. Then, my success would be guaranteed.”

It was amid this kind of emotional turmoil that one day he left the studio where he had been working with his wife and rented another one next door. There, in that bare room, he worked before a black easel. His wife’s fame—more certain by the day—made him writhe in envious agony. Acquaintances would congratulate him on his wife’s work and had even started to forget that he too was a painter. If deep down he had felt shame at first for envying his wife, after being pricked by the idea day after day, he had grown accustomed to seeing in his wife, more than anything else, the reason for his obscurity. Considered by others to be a weak artist, he began to waver in his sense of self.

His bitterest hours were spent before his black easel, which stood like a crucifix in the bare room. He would have bouts of defiance and resign himself to suicide, and in these moments, the image of his wife would rise like a nightmare. The sight of her gradually became unbearable. Even her voice infuriated him.

This is how husband and wife, who had once adored each other, became mortal enemies in private. They would eat in silence, almost wary to speak to each other, and would never appear together in public.

On reception days, Jacques would shut himself away in his studio, trembling with eager anticipation and childlike hope:

“They are going to come visit me, too.”

But each time, the visitors would leave one by one without knocking on his door, and at night, he would have a maddening urge to burn everything he owned and move far away. When the salon rejected him for the second time, not allowing him to exhibit an unfinished piece, this time the blow was so powerful that he left Paris, indignant.

Shortly after he left, news reached Paris of the death of Madame Alice’s husband in America. At that time, Parisian newspapers were praising Madame Alice’s newly exhibited paintings, and foreign newspapers were republishing the praise. She was at the height of her fame when people came to ask her for details about Jacques’s life, which was of interest to readers only by virtue of the fact that he was Madame Alice’s husband. Among the various details she gave, Jacques’s wife forgot to mention that he had been an artist.