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(Fragment Of A Woman’s Letter Found In The Rue Notre-Dame-Des-Champs)

… What it has cost me to marry an artist! Oh, my dear! if I had known! but young girls have singular ideas about so many things. Just imagine that at the Exhibition, when I read in the catalogue the addresses of far-away quiet streets at the further end of Paris, I pictured to myself peaceable, stay-at-home lives, devoted to work and the family circle, and I said to myself (feeling beforehand a certainty that I should be dreadfully jealous), “That is the sort of husband to suit me. He will always be with me. We shall spend our days together; he at his picture or sculpture, while I read or sew beside him, in the concentrated light of the studio.” Poor dear innocent! I had not the faintest idea then what a studio really was, nor of the singular creatures one meets there. Never, in gazing at those statues of bold undressed goddesses had the idea occurred to me that there were women daring enough to–and that even I myself—-. Otherwise, I can assure you I should never have married a sculptor. No, indeed, most decidedly not! I must own, they were all against this marriage at home; notwithstanding my husband’s fortune, his already famous name, and the fine house he was having built for us two. It was I alone who would have it so. He was so elegant, so charming, so eager. I thought, however, he meddled a little too much about my dress, and the arrangement of my hair: “Do your hair like this; so,” and he would amuse himself by placing a flower in the midst of my curls with far greater skill than any one of our milliners. So much experience in a man was alarming, wasn’t it? I ought to have distrusted him. Well, you will see. Listen.

We returned from our honeymoon. While I was busy settling myself in my pretty and charmingly furnished rooms, that paradise you know so well, my husband, from the moment of his arrival, had set to work and spent the days at his studio, which was away from the house. When he returned in the evening, he would talk to me with feverish eagerness of his next subject for exhibition.

The subject was “a Roman lady leaving the bath.” He wanted the marble to reproduce that faint shiver of the skin at the contact of air, the moisture of the delicate textures clinging to the shoulders, and all sorts of other fine things which I no longer remember. Between you and me, when he speaks to me of his sculpture, I do-not always understand him very well. However, I used to say confidently: “It will be very pretty,” and already I saw myself treading the finely sanded walks admiring my husband’s work, a beautiful marble sculpture gleaming white against the green hangings; while behind me I heard whispered: “the wife of the sculptor.”

At last one day, curious to see how our Roman lady was getting on, the idea occurred to me, to go and take him by surprise in his studio, which I had not yet visited. It was one of the first times I had gone out alone, and I had made myself very smart, I can tell you. When I arrived, I found the door of the little garden leading to the ground floor, wide open. So I walked straight in; and, conceive my indignation, when I beheld my husband in a white smock like a stone mason, with ruffled hair, hands grimed with clay, and in front of him, upright on a platform, a woman, my dear, a great creature, almost undressed, and looking just as composed in this airy costume as though it were perfectly natural.