# Millet (Rolland)/Chapter 3

III
Millet at Barbizon
​In 1849 Millet went to Barbizon. Theodore Rousseau had been there as early as 1833, and had pretty well settled there about 1837 at the same time as Aligny and Diaz.
For some twenty years or more before this time, French painters had felt the need of diving deep into nature and living in intimate communion with her. As late as 1824 Constable could still write: "The French landscape painters study much but only pictures; and they know no more of nature than cab-horses do of meadows. The worst of it is that they generally paint detached objects such as leaves, rocks and stones, so that they only see isolated bits detached from the whole, and neglect the general aspect of nature as well as its different effects." It is precisely that feeling of the "general aspect" of a landscape and of its living and moving "different effects" that the Barbizon masters were about to acquire in all its fulness. Of the ​vanguard in that glorious phalanx of French landscape painters, especially Paul Huet owed much to the example of English landscape painters and of Constable and Bonnington in particular; the masters were soon out-stripped by the pupils, and the painting of French landscapes attained a greatness unknown since Poussin and Claude Lorraine.
Barbizon at that time was a hamlet buried amid heaths and woods, scarcely so much as a village, without a church, without a burying-ground, without a post-office, a schoolhouse, a market or shops—even without a public-house: everything had to be fetched from Chailly, the nearest village. It had no visitors except a few artists, unknown at that time; and its inhabitants were wood-cutters and labourers poorly enough off. Alfred Sensier tells us the sort of life—half that of an artist, half that of a Trappist monk—that Rousseau led in this country place which was so near Paris, but at that time seemed so remote. Rousseau spent the autumns and winters alone in the dull, low and cold house of a wood-cutter; there he dreamed and created, undisturbed, having no companions but the crows ​and the cows, sleeping little, always deep in thought, not speaking at all and in continual ecstasies over the trees of the forest whose mysterious life he watched in silence for days at a time. "I heard the voice of the trees;" he said himself, "the surprises of their movements, their varieties of form and even the strangeness of their attraction to the light suddenly revealed to me the language of forests. This whole leafy world was a world of the dumb, whose signs I guessed and whose passions I discovered."
This same religious emotion seized upon Millet from the moment that he set foot on the soil of this silent forest where there are no streams and no song-birds. He came for a few weeks. He was to remain at Barbizon twenty-seven years—until his death.
Here is the moment to sketch a portrait of Millet at home.
Millet was above the middle height and ​strongly built, with the neck and shoulders of a bull and "ploughman's hands." His curly dark hair was brushed back and showed a fine attentively serious brow. His eyebrows were apt to frown. His eyes, grey or very dark blue and not widely opened, "penetrated to the depths of the soul"; their expression was often melancholy and stern, sometimes a little ironical. The nose was correct and not particularly characteristic. A very thick black beard covered the rather full cheeks. The jaw was solid and a little prominent, and the neck thick. Judging from his portraits, his countenance was marked not so much by thought or feeling as by will. The refinement of certain features too is striking and contrasts with the general aspect of the rather heavy head and with its suggestion of a good, intelligent big dog. Millet had "the drawl of the Lower Normans and stammered a little." Other writers say, "a slight hesitation in his speech and slow movements." With people whom he did not know he was conspicuously reserved, measured his words and expressed ​himself in rather a formal way, but with "a mixture of cordiality and dignified reserve." In his own home and among his friends he "resumed his distinguished judgment about men and things, his extreme good temper and his natural speech." Piédagnel says that he spoke concisely, with picturesque and unexpected turns. Wheelwright, who was much struck by "the dignity of his manners and the serious charm of his conversation," says that "when he grew warm over some favourite subject he would talk for an hour or two with extraordinary clearness, eloquence and choice of expressions." He possessed a remarkable memory and genuine erudition, fed chiefly by the Bible, Theocritus and Virgil. His dress was of the simplest and pretty negligent. When Sensier saw him for the first time in 1847, he found him wearing a brown cloak and a woollen cap like a coachman, and presenting the appearance, he says, of a mediæval painter. At Barbizon he dressed more rustically still in an old red jersey or a knitted vest that met his trousers but imperfectly and allowed a glimpse of shirt at the waist, an old straw hat limp from exposure to many rains, so ​that its wide brim dropped in a bell shape on his head; and heavy wooden shoes on his feet.
Madame Millet was "a woman of simple habits, accustomed from childhood to the life of the fields; she considered her husband as altogether a superior being." She bore Millet nine children; the first being born in 1846, and the last in 1863. Millet loved her very much. Wheelwright says he always remembers the affectionate tenderness with which Millet used to call her "my old woman," as he rested his hand on her shoulder. Burty describes them at the family meal: "Millet with his deep chest and grave head, presiding at the long table which had no cloth, and around which half-a-dozen children passed up their earthen plates to the smoking soup tureen. Madame Millet would be trying to put a child to sleep on her lap. There would be great pauses of silence in which no sound was heard but the purring of the cats curled up before the stove."
THE MEAL (LA BECQUÉE)
Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co.]
In the morning Millet worked in his garden, dug, planted and gathered. Sometimes he even built, like a mason. He and his brother Pierre entirely built a little straw-thatched structure at the end of the garden. After this exercise he used to work in the studio, sometimes sketching the ideas that occurred to him on the walls. When his headaches took hold of him he used to wander about in the forest. "I know no pleasure," ​he said, "equal to that of lying on the ferns and looking at the clouds." The forest filled him with rapture and terror. "If you were to see how beautiful the forest is! I run there sometimes at the end of the day, when my day's work is over, and I come back every time crushed! The calmness and grandeur are appalling, so much so that I find myself feeling really frightened. I don't know what those rascals of trees say to one another, but they say something and we don't understand it, because we don't talk the same language, that is all. Only I don't think they make puns." In the evenings he busied himself with his children, his "toads," as he laughingly called them, and would tell them fanciful stories or read aloud. A charming letter to Rousseau which has recently come to light, and which dates no doubt from 1855 or 1856, shows us Millet in a cheerful mood, amid the noisy little throng whom he worshipped, in the intimacy of his family life, and amid the peace of the august forest whose lofty and restful silence surrounded his home.
​"My Dear Rousseau,—Ask me to describe an earthquake, a very complicated aurora borealis, the veneration of old Ganne (the innkeeper) for a five franc piece, the stupefaction of an Englishman expecting to arrive first at the top of some inaccessible peak and finding himself face to face with another Englishman, and many other things all very difficult to describe, I should do any of them fully as easily as I could make you understand the admiration, the frenzied enthusiasm of my toads over the opening of the famous hamper.
THE FIRST STEPS
Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co. ]
"Without knowing what your fine festivities are at Notre Dame and the Hotel de Ville, I prefer the more modest ones that are prepared for me, when I choose to go and see them, by the trees, the forest rocks, the black flights of crows dropping down to the plain, or even by the dilapidated roof whose chimney sends out the smoke that spreads so poetically into the air and tells of the woman cooking supper for the tired home-coming field-workers; or even the little star shining from a cloud, as we saw it one evening after a splendid sunset, or the human outline advancing solemnly on the heights, and many other things dear to those who do not think the noise of omnibus wheels or the music of a marchand de robinets the finest things in the world. Only these tastes must not be confessed to everyone, for they are regarded as great weaknesses and cause ​one to be called by most disagreeable names. I only speak of them to you because I know that you suffer from the same infirmities. . . ."
It was in these surroundings that Millet spent the greater part of his life. Its principal episodes are his works and the continually recurring struggles with poverty.
In 1850 Millet sent The Sower and The Binders of Hay to the Salon. We have already spoken of the revolutionary allusions attributed by critics to the figure of the sower, that wild-looking young man in the red jacket and blue trousers, casting the seed, broadcast, with a violent action, amid the clouds of rooks that are sweeping down upon the field. The picture made some stir, although Corot was attracting the chief attention that year by his Funeral at Ornans. At the same period Millet painted Peasants going to work in the fields; a Woman beating Hemp; Wood Gatherers in the forest; a Virgin for the signboard of a fancy ​shop at the corner of the Rue de Notre Dame de Lorette and the Rue St Lazare; Young women sewing, a Man spreading Manure, and The Four Seasons. He was also busy upon a picture of Ruth and Boaz.
In 1851 he lost his grandmother. She had had a paralytic stroke but retained all her mental powers to the end. Her death threw Millet into deep despair. He remained obstinately silent for many days. His mother was now alone, in the country, far from him; she wrote painful and plaintive entreaties that he would come and embrace her before she too passed away. Millet's heart was rent by this pressing appeal; but he was short of money and unable to take the journey. "My poor child," wrote his mother, "if you could only come before the winter! I have a great longing to see you this one little time more. I have done without everything; there is nothing left for me but to suffer and die. I am so worried with suffering in my body and my mind, when I think of what is to become of you all in the future, with no provision; I neither sleep nor rest. You tell me that you wish very much to come and see me and stay some ​time with me. I wish it very much too; but it seems you have none too much money; how do you manage to live? My poor child, when the thought of that comes over me, I am very uneasy. Ah, I hope you will come and take us by surprise just when we are least looking for you; as for me, I don't know either how to live or to die, I want to see you again so much." The poor woman was to die, in 1853, without seeing him again. We may imagine what these years of anguish and mourning were to Millet.
In 1853 Millet was awarded a second-class medal at the Salon; he had sent three pictures: The Reapers' Meal, or Ruth and Boaz; The Shepherd and the Woman shearing Sheep. The antique majesty of their realism struck the critics, especially Théophile Gautier and Paul de St Victor. But Millet was not satisfied. He had not yet found his true style.
THE WOOD GATHERERS
Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co. ]
'Insere, Daphni, pyros; carpent tux poma nepotes.'"
His poverty reached such a point that Millet had but two francs left.
WOMAN SHEARING SHEEP
Photograph—Braun, Clement & Co.]
With the proceeds of the Woman feeding Chickens, for which the amateur Letrône paid 2000 francs, a sum that seemed to him fabulous, Millet was able to take a little journey and spend four months with his children in his native district at La Hague (June 1854). He painted with pious precision everything that had belonged to his family, the homestead, the garden, the cider-press and the stables; he made fourteen paintings, twenty drawings, and filled two sketch-books. After his mother's death the inheritance had been divided among the eight children. Millet gave up his share of the house and land; he only asked for the books and the old oak cupboard. He undertook the education of two of his brothers who wished to become artists too, and who came to live with him at Barbizon.
This was the period of Rousseau's greatest ​popularity. At his house Millet met Diaz, Barye, Daumier, Ziem, Etcheverry, etc. A plan was made by several of them: Barye, Dupré, Delacroix, Rousseau, Daumier, Diaz and Millet, to collaborate in illustrating La Fontaine's Fables; but the work was interrupted when only a few drawings had been made. A little later Millet made the acquaintance of Decamps, who came and took him by surprise in an odd way, almost incognito, had long talks with him, admired his pictures and said that he should have liked to paint so, but who would never consent to enter the house. Millet was much struck by his visits. He wrote about Decamps, giving in a few lines a portrait of which the psychology is searching: "I never heard him speak a word from the heart. His witticisms were cruel, his sarcasm crushing, his criticism very just, even about his own painting. One could see that he suffered like a man looking for his way and always losing it. His was a superior mind in a troubled soul."
THE FARMER'S WIFE
Photograph—Giraudon]
During these years it was that he produced his finest works: in 1856-57 a series of shepherds: Shepherd in the fold at night, Shepherd bringing home his flock at sunset, Cowherd standing and leaning on his staff. He had been attracted by that most mysterious of all country figures: the contemplative peasant, the pastor, and by the poetic solitudes of ​great pastures, vast plains asleep in the last hours of the day, or at night under the cold rays of the moon when the damp vapour of the meadow and the warm exhalations rising from the flock float in the air. Thus his selection of this figure of the Shepherd naturally drew him to give a greater place in his work to the landscape which he had hitherto sacrificed to the persons.
THE GLEANERS
Photograph—Neurdien Brothers]
In 1859 Millet exhibited his famous Angelus which was far from making the success that it afterwards achieved, and which was purchased a little later by the Belgian minister Van Präet. The whole world is acquainted with this famous picture; incredible advances in price and millions of reproductions have declared its universal popularity. An exaggerated reaction has now set in against the perhaps excessive enthusiasm aroused by it. Critics are attacking the faults of the composition such as the too high horizon, the stiffness of the figures, the basket in the foreground serving to mask an empty space in front of a wheelbarrow. People are right when they ​say that Millet has painted pictures of more strength and meaning than this. The Angelus nevertheless has a musical charm of its own. Millet meant the sounds of a country evening, the distant chime of bells, to be heard in it. He deeply felt and has expressed the melancholy poetry of the hour when man's struggle with the earth passes into peace, and the august grandeur of the simple lonely prayer in the vast deserted plain at twilight.
Together with The Angelus Millet sent a dramatic picture to the Salon, Death and the Woodcutter, which was refused by the hanging committee. The refusal made a great stir. Friends and foes of Millet's alike, all felt that by this time he was an artistic and moral force; and all were indignant that the committee should have dared to treat him with so little respect. Alexandre Dumas took up Millet's defence and Mantz began a campaign against the committee in the "Gazette des Beaux Arts" (15th June 1859). In the same year ​Millet passed through another bout of dangerous illness, of which his sturdy constitution got the better.
In 1860 Millet at last escaped from his position of indigence. He signed an agreement for three years, by which in return for a payment of a thousand francs monthly, he engaged to sell an art-patron all the pictures and drawings that he could produce in that space of time. He managed, however, to arrange his affairs so badly that, on the conclusion of the agreement, he owed nearly six thousand francs and undertook to pay the amount in paintings. This was, at least, a period of tranquillity in his life and the works belonging to this time reflect its peacefulness. In 1860 he painted, and in 1861 exhibited at the Salon, the Woman feeding her Child, La Becqueé, the Woman carrying Pails, Waiting, and ​Sheep-shearing, in which he had tried, he says, "to paint a happy place where life is kind amid its roughness, a pure air and a fine August day." In spite of their charm, these pictures gave rise to violent debates. Millet's old admirers, Théophile Gautier and Paul de St Victor, had become his fiercest enemies. Corot would give no opinion, did not understand, was scared by this sort of painting, and preferred, as he said, "his little tunes." On the other hand, Delacroix and Barye were on Millet's side, and with them Daumier, Diaz, Meissonier, Stevens and Gerôme. Such names were enough to outweigh the critiques of literary men.
THE ANGELUS
Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co. ]
"Certain wild animals may be seen scattered over the country, males and females, black, livid, and burnt up by the sun, bound to the earth, in which they poke and fumble with invincible obstinacy: they have a kind of articulate speech, and when they rise upon their feet they show a human countenance, and indeed are men."
"The Man with the Hoe will cause me to be abused by many people who do not like to have their minds filled with things that do not belong to their own circle nor to be disturbed," wrote Millet. This result duly followed. Gautier and St Victor were merciless. It was declared that Millet slandered the peasant and could not see the beauty of the country. He replied in a letter of magnificent religious grandeur. "The things said of my Man with the Hoe seem to me very strange. Is it impossible, then, to receive quite simply the ideas that occur to the mind on seeing a man ​doomed to earn his living in the sweat of his brow? Some people say that I deny the charms of the country. I find much more in it than charms—infinite splendours; I see as they do, the little flowers of which Christ said, 'I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' I see the haloes of the dandelions, and the sun breaking forth yonder, far beyond these regions, and its glory amid the clouds. None the less do I see the horses in the plain, smoking as they plough; and then, in some rocky spot, a man completely errené, whose panting gasps have sounded since morning, and who tries to stand upright a little to get breath. The drama is surrounded by splendours; it is no invention of mine."
THE MAN WITH THE HOE
Photograph—Giraudon]
But though he had a sincere love for antique art, he was not at ease in it; and even in these hotel decorations, the most original part is the ​ceiling, where his realism found fuller scope. He painted on it a gap in the blue sky, bordered by light clouds, and in it, flying children pursuing owls and bats; all round ran a border from which stood out fowls on the spit, haunches of venison, melons, flowers, vases and musical instruments, all painted in perspective.
He soon left these mythological fancies and returned wholly to his rough rural poems. In the Salon of 1864 he exhibited both the charming Shepherdess and her Flock, and the Peasants carrying home a Calf born in the Fields, which aroused fresh protests, jeers and caricatures. The sceptical "society" public could not understand the importance which Millet's peasants attach to the smallest acts of life. They are wholly absorbed in what they are doing; they believe in it absolutely. This did not harmonise with the dilettantism of Paris, nor with truth as it appears on the stage. Theodore Rousseau had the courage to write a severe letter to Théophile Gautier: "You have been exploring art since 1830," he said. "Sailing as on an ocean, you have doubled many capes, passed through many breakers; ​yours has been the genius that always sees the right rallying point; like Christopher Columbus, you knew where America lay. Well, now, take care; I see the point of your vessel over the torrent, and torrents only lead to the abyss. You are in contact with vulgarity, and I defy you to stay there without feeling its infection. You have already given way to the allurements of the cockney spirit by receiving ill the only true painter that has appeared since 1830. I mean François Millet."
In 1866 Millet, who had been back to Normandy on account of his sister Emilie's death, exhibited a Landscape: Gréville, which had no success. His wife, who was ill, was sent to Vichy and he went with her. The Bourbonnais country interested him greatly. He plunged afresh into a rustic life simpler than that of Barbizon, where the influence exerted by the neighbourhood of Paris was growing year by year more perceptible. "The country is bright," he wrote to Sensier, "and has some likeness to many parts of Normandy. The country people are far more really peasants than those of Barbizon; they have a good, stupid awkwardness. The women's faces in ​general bespeak the reverse of any evil disposition, and are quite the type of many countenances in Gothic art." He filled his sketch-books with material to the amount of more than fifty drawings and water-colours. A few days' journey into the adjacent district of Auvergne moved him even more deeply. "My head is full of all I have seen," he said, "Everything is dancing pell-mell in my brain: expanses of burnt-up earth, sharp rocks, subsidences, arid stretches and patches of greenness. The glory of God resting on the heights. Other heights in shadow." These vivid impressions of nature turned his talent more and more towards landscape. He worked at a Winter and a Sunset "stamped with sadness."
At the Universal Exhibition of 1867, Millet exhibited his greatest creations of previous years: The Gleaners, The Angelus, Death and the Woodcutter, The Woman Shearing Sheep, The Shepherd, The Sheep-Fold, Potato Planters, the Potato Harvest. He also sent to the Salon in the same year, The Goose Girl and Winter. The collection of these masterpieces was a revelation to the general public. Millet received a first-class medal. The decoration ​of The Legion of Honour followed in the next year. This year, however, was darkened by one of the deepest sorrows of his life. His friend and equal, Theodore Rousseau, who had been attacked some months before by paralysis affecting the brain, died in his arms at Barbizon, after terrible sufferings, on the 22nd of December 1867.
In 1868 Millet made a second stay at Vichy, and travelled into Alsace and Switzerland, visiting Bâle, Lucerne, Berne and Zurich. He does not seem to have felt the beauty of the Alps so keenly as Rousseau, who found in them his earliest and his latest inspirations. To the Salon of 1869 he sent, besides The Knitting Lesson and the Woman at a Spinning Wheel, the Pig-Killers, which excited hardly less sarcasm than the Peasants carrying a Calf, or the Man with the Hoe. It is a work of savage realism. All the old brutality of man revives in this struggle of heavy, hoggish ​human beings, against this great bulk of living flesh in its desperate resistance, a struggle carried on in a farmyard shut in by great dark walls under a gloomy leaden sky. "It is a drama," said Millet.
THE PIG-KILLERS
Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co. ]
​affirming on this decisive occasion, his absolute dissociation from the socialists and revolutionaries among whom people had, all his life, insisted upon including him. On the other hand, his Biblical temper awoke into greater ardour and inspiration under the blows and the shames of the period that he calls "the time of the great killing." He cries with the prophet: "Oh, sword of the Lord, wilt thou never take rest!" In order to drive away these sad thoughts, he went with Sensier to pay a long visit to the scenes of his childhood, and to his dear village which he loved with so passionate a tenderness. He found there fresh subjects of sadness. Where were now the dear beings whom he had once known and loved in these places? "I feel my heart so full that I cannot bear it," he writes on the 20th of June 1871. "Where are the poor eyes which used to look out with me over the immense expanse of the sea?"
He returned to Barbizon in November 1871. His health was much impaired, and from this time grew worse and worse. He was surrounded by family affection; he was on the ​eve of becoming a grandfather; and in this last stage of his life when his soul had found calm, he became the painter of children. From 1871 to 1873 appeared a charming series of pictures and drawings into which Millet put a delicacy of feeling and a tenderness that are quite maternal: Evening, The Sick Child, the Little Girl keeping Geese, The First Steps, the Young Mother putting her Child to Sleep. Complete success had come. He saw his pictures, once scorned, now selling for considerable prices (though far short indeed of the amazing figures to which they have attained of late years, in the course of those famous sales in which actual battles of wealth were fought between Europe and America for the possession of them). At last the State remembered Millet and Mr de Chennevières got a commission given to him for eight pictures intended for the decoration of the Pantheon: The Miracle of les Ardents, and The Procession of the Shrine of St Geneviève. For these works Millet was to receive 50,000 francs.
THE SHEPHERDESS
Photograph—Braun, Clément & Co.]
Some days before, a sad and poetic omen that had the beauty of a legend had foretold his death. A poor stag pursued by dogs had come to die in his garden. It was a touching symbol of that fellowship of all beings in suffering and in death which had been the very soul of Millet's genius, the constant inspiration of this great painter of the sorrow of the world.
* ↑ As he grew old he became rather stout. Otherwise his appearance changed but little.
* ↑ This portrait is composed from the recollections of Sensier, Burty and Wheelwright, and from Millet's portraits of himself.
* ↑ Published by Charavay in the review "Cosmopolis" in April 1898.
* ↑ Rousseau had sent Millet's children a hamper of toys and sweets.
* ↑ Probably rejoicings over the Prince Imperial's christening.
* ↑ Sellers of taps or cocks—a variety of the hawker genus peculiar to Paris.—Translator's Note.
* ↑ Engraft your pear-trees, Daphnis; your grandchildren will eat your apples.
* ↑ The committee was composed at the time of Ingres, Horace Vernet, Heim, Abel de Pujol, Picot, Schnetz, Couder, Brascassat, Cogniet, Robert Fleury and Hersent.
* ↑ There is no English word corresponding to this term, since although we say "mouthful" we do not admit "beakful."—Translator's Note.
* ↑ La Bruyère, "Characters," Chapter xi., "Of man."
* ↑ The Woman with the Lamp, 38,500 francs. The Flock of Geese, 25,000 francs.