Richard Temple. Patrick O’Brian

it he found it much more difficult than he had supposed. He was using a thin wooden panel, and in the bottom right-hand corner he had already painted three crossbow men, very close to the observer and crowded together, pointing their bows at the saint, who was tied to a low cross on the left of the picture and who had already received a great many arrows, or bolts: he was a little farther away than is usual in such a case – at the back of the foreground rather than in the middle of it. The light came from the bottom left-hand corner, the strong cold light of a declining January day in the south, and it lit the intent, crowded bowmen side-face, and their gleaming horizontal metal bows. The saint stared back at them with a harsh fortitude and in the pale space between, parched by winter, the ground was spotted with crimson flowers that showed the arrows’ path: the bowmen, their pointing, the flowers and the cross formed a right to left diagonal in the lower half of the picture, and he intended to fill the top right-hand part with his pattern, which in its main axis would form the other diagonal, pinning and suspending the martyr at the crossing of the two lines. The picture was lit from the bottom left-hand, and the pattern (which was essentially one of crosses) would start with the shadow of the saint’s gibbet stretching up towards the right-hand top; from this shadow others would arise, multiply, and superimposed fill the receding air.

      He had already painted the crossbow men, a villainous set of brutes, all with faces that Fifine would recognise (he was clever with likenesses), and he had already done the saint, a painstaking anatomical study: so far the picture was a competent piece of work that he had worked over with great industry in his spare time during the past few weeks – it was a little dull, even rather laborious, and it showed the uncertainty of his literal taste, for whereas the bowmen derived ultimately from Bosch, the saint had a faint air of Géricault, and they existed in different kinds of reality, in different states of mind. But now he was to attack the upper part of the picture: this pattern, which preoccupied his mind, was to provide the force of counterpoise and contrast that would draw the cross into the centre of the picture and make it rise and glow – give it a far greater significance and perhaps harmonise the incongruity that he sensed but could not see.

      He had the whole of the day – it was a Thursday – and he hoped to finish this piece and with it the whole picture before the evening. Yet it was far more difficult than he had supposed: he had made a few sketches, but he had not really related them to the whole picture; and now, having painted the hard shadow of the upright, he paused. He had meant to work directly from his palette on to the picture but suddenly he felt a waning of his confidence – doubted his own dexterity. This whole series of planes was to be based on straight lines and an impure edge at any point would be disastrous. He hooked his brush into the fingers of his left hand, and taking a piece of charcoal he drew in the uprights. It was easy enough, he thought, standing back to look at them – it was easy enough to get them perfectly exact, one behind the other, when it was only strokes of charcoal that he could blow off in a moment: and indeed they did look very well. He was excited by the prospect and yet he was afraid of it; he wanted to be at it, and yet he was unwilling to begin. He felt a strong temptation to fiddle about and he yielded to it for half an hour, until a recklessness that came from a mixture of guilt and shame drove him to mix his colour and to sweep it on with a stroke that had the good luck to fall between arrogance and caution. It needed a sure and disciplined hand: apart from the rigid precision of the drawing he was obliged to make a continuous gradation from umber to a high blue grey and from a moderately rich texture of paint to the flatness of a gouache, each stage imperceptible. He became quite absorbed in the technical problem: he rattled his easel down to breast level, upright, and worked with his nose almost touching the paint. Every few minutes he lunged backwards and stared, a disembodied pair of eyes, a hand.

      Unknown excitement began to rise in him, and on the wooden panel a complex series of planes came into a dream-like existence. From these planes rose others, ruled by a logic that was clear to him; and suddenly with a strong dark line, a receding parabola that he would presently touch with vermilion, he gave them a unity that they had never possessed in his idea before. It was a vital line, one that had never physically existed in the pattern, although his mind must have postulated it, and it did wonders; but he was not content, and standing back with narrowed eyes and screwed-up lips he saw why. His pattern was supposed to repeat the first cross, and certainly crosses were there, receding into infinity: but they were the reflection, the repetition, of something that did not appear in the first place – the first cross itself was wrong. The beautifully painted martyr and his cross were in the wrong place. In a moment he abolished the patient craftsmanship, and in another moment the martyrdom was re-enacting in another focus, in another shape.

      As far as he was conscious of himself he felt a tightness in his stomach, a trembling; and as he bent over his palette mixing he heard the sound of his own breath in his throat. He could not work fast enough and he had a furious need to go faster, although in fact his hand was working with a greater speed and happiness and ability than it ever had done before. He was not thinking: he directed his hand and the paint by an urgent spiritual pressure, and he not only prolonged his being beyond his hand to the brush but actually into the paint itself as it curled – he was himself the surface, the junction of the resilient brush and the unyielding wood: there were no ordinary limits to his being. The light increased to the impartial glare of noon: very slowly in the afternoon it declined; and in the evening it began to go in little pulsing beats lower every ten minutes, every five.

      At the bottom right-hand corner where the crossbow men had been he drew the last firm curve and stepped away. As he fumbled with his brushes and the paint-rag, blindly cleaning them, he began to smile: the tension was dying, and it was being replaced by a remarkable happiness. He was quite limp, and this happiness was of the passive kind: it kept flooding in, quite filling him. This was the picture that he had meant to paint, and whether it was good or bad it was the most complete thing he had ever done. It was probably very good, he thought; but that was a little beside the point: it was the wholeness that was the base of his satisfaction.

      It was not an experience that often repeated itself: indeed, throughout the year that followed he had scarcely more than one or two hints of it, but they were enough to tinge all the great long stretches of grey routine (life at the Durands’ was lived en grisaille) with lapis lazuli and gold; and it remained the most significant thing that happened to him in France, even including his acquaintance with the power of love.

      It was strange how late he came to this: Madame Durand’s ascetic diet may have helped, but it had not prevented his beard from growing, and it had never kept any other pupil from romance, far less from fornication.

      One of the few favourable conditions of Fifine’s servitude, if not the only one, was that she was let out for the saint’s day of her native village: the fête included a pilgrimage, a feast of snails and a visit to the sea, and in this last year of his she invited Richard to accompany her. He had leave to go, for although Monsieur Durand was a tyrant in the matter of holidays, which he hated, Richard had recently met him in the little local brothel, and although Monsieur Durand had carried it off pretty well, with high and distant formality – a remark upon the likelihood of rain – his Roman authority had cracked. They set out at four in the morning to catch a train that would intercept the village bus in its course, and when they arrived at the station a brisk shower overtook them. Fifine thought this an excellent sign, and with her best skirt tucked well up she strode about among the deserted railway shrubs catching the snails that the rain called forth, and called out in her strong voice to the dim forms among the churns, telling them (by way of feast-day merriment) not to piss in the milk and asking them for continual reassurance about the train. Richard, cold and wan without his breakfast, thought her excessively Gothic for a railway-station: but in the bus, which was conducted in the spirit of a mediæval wagon, she was much more in place. It was crammed with the inhabitants of Saint-Modeste in their Sunday clothes and with their provisions; they had no intention of buying food from any untrustworthy strange shops and they carried everything, including a huge quantity of bread and four barrels of wine. The snails were on the roof for the benefit of the air during the early hours of the journey, but as the sun climbed to its strength they were brought down, the younger men being sent up to make room for them. Fifine knew everybody there – she was related, more or less, to all of them except the curé and the new baker – and she shouted to them all in turn and they all shouted to her in the