From summer to winter the change is gradual and slow
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From summer to winter the change is gradual and slow. Days are separated by nights of darkness; but seasons pass almost imperceptibly, flowing into one another until the casual observer can hardly say where one begins and another ends. If we are astronomers, we may go out on a cold snowy day about the twenty-first of March, perfectly confident that spring will begin in another twenty minutes; but the snowstorm continues without any regard for the calendar; our feet freeze as they did in December; and we turn back, cursing the calendar with a mighty oath. Yet, we were right in this. Spring really had come, though we could not see it; and the prophecies held true--within a few days we could see the results.
Our magazines help us to prophesy. On their covers they blazon human figures which symbolize the seasons. The sturdy, rather precocious infant haunts us around the first of January. We all know how to interpret the aged man with flowing beard who marks the declining year. They are the same figures which heralded the seasons for our remote ancestors; one and all they are copied from ancient Egyptian monuments.
The very indefinite nature of the seasons challenged keen observation. Primitive man learned how to anticipate the seasons long before he began to make himself historical. He watched the various places where the Sun rose and set along the horizon. He correlated this movement with the shortening of the noon shadows toward summer, with the corresponding length of day; and he knew that these variations had something to do with the change of temperature. Primitive tribes today hold festivals to mark the beginning of spring, midsummer's day, the autumnal equinox, and that day in December when the Sun reaches its farthest point to the south.
Renoir's social life was at first that of a needy little employee who, at his office-studio to the very minute and most exact in his work there, went early to bed, after his game of draughts or dominoes. Every form of excess he avoided so as to serve his master the better; but his master was painting, and the narrowness of his existence in those days was gradually enlarged and enlightened. Later, his life became that of a modest middleclass fundholder; and still it was art which engrossed him.
Young Renoir, although born at Limoges on February 25, 1841, was a child of Paris and of the suburbs, a frequenter of the balls on the Boulevards and of the circuses whenever one of these erected its tent at the city-gates. He loved to saunter on the Boulevard du Temple and, fond of melodrama, he was passionately fond, not only of La Tour de Nesle, Le Bossu, and La Dame deMontsoreau Montsoreau, but also of Alfred de Musset's comedies, which were then held in great disdain. Young Auguste's ambition was to work at the Sevres Manufactory and become an art-worker, so he entered a studio for painting on porcelain, -- a very natural profession for a native of Limoges possessed of taste and certain gifts. Economically and worthily he lived in the Rue d'Argenteuil with his family, the head of which was a tailor in a small way of business. Gounod, at one time, wanted to inveigle his little soloist of Saint-Eustache towards music, and Renoir, who had a sound knowledge of ancient and modern music, retained a desire to be connected with musicians, including Chabrier, Cabaner, and Wagner, whose portrait he painted at Palermo on January 15, 1882, on the day after that on which the great composer completed Parsifal.
On becoming a painter, Renoir, ever faithful to the suburbs, removed to Montmartre, and extended his field even to Asnières, where he found both great cordiality and many models. He also aspired to other faubourgs and in particular the faubourg Saint-Germain, where, in the Rue de Grenelle, Mme Charpentier reigned in her salon. And there he met the most celebrated men and women of the day in politics, literature and the arts,-- Gambetta, Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, Huysmans, Théodore de Banville, Carolus Duran, Henner, Jules Ferry, Judith Gautier, Jeanne Samary, Juliette Adam, and Maupassant, whose celebrity filled Goncourt and Zola with jealousy. Not that Renoir had an inordinate love for fashionable gatherings; he merely appreciated them because of the intelligence and the sympathy, as well as the atmosphere of the times to be found there. He often called upon Daudet, whose sensitiveness he so well understood; he was a constant reader of Verlaine; and he came under the influence of the charm of Mallarmé. In his studio of the Rue Saint-Georges there came together a little circle composed of Paul Arène, Norbert Goeneutte, Théodore Duret, Chocquet, Maître Félix Bouchor, Cordey, Lestringuez, Cabaner, and Paul Lhote. At the Café Guerbois, and later at the Nouvelle Athènes, Renoir gladly encountered both the friends of his own studio and those of Mme Charpentier's salon, -- Mallarmé, Zola, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Castagnary, Philippe Burty (who wrote critical articles in the République Française), Jules de Marthold (who filled the same rôle in the Monde Thermal), Jean Richepin (who had just published La Chanson des Gueux), Edouard Duranty, Charles Cros (who had just written Le Coffret de Santal), and also Manet, Degas, Marcellin Desboutin, Cézanne (but rarely), Guérard (the engraver, who married Eva Gonzalès), -- even Gervex and Carolus Duran, who was to fall through ambition. He went there fairly regularly. «He used to arrive,» relates Georges Rivière, who also attended those gatherings, «with hurried step, a serious face, and absent-minded look, because his imagination always carried him far from the place where he might be. Seated in a corner, he rarely took part in the general conversation, and, almost indifferent to what was being said around him, he rolled between his fingers a cigarette, which he frequently allowed to go out; or with the charred end of a spent match he drew some insignificant line or other on the table.» In such a manner it was that Renoir traversed society.
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