7. THE YELLOW ARMCHAIR

The netsuke – my tiger, my hare, my persimmon – have settled in Charles’s study where he was finally finishing his book on Dürer. It is a room lit up in a breathless letter to Charles from the young poet Jules Laforgue:

Every line of your beautiful book recalled so many memories. Especially the hours spent working alone in your room where the note of a yellow armchair bursts out! And the Impressionists! Two fans by Pissarro, solidly constructed of painstaking small strokes. The Sisleys, the Seine and the telegraph wires and the sky in springtime. The barge near Paris, with that loafer in the lanes. And Monet’s flowering apple trees scaling a hill. And Renoir’s dishevelled little savage and Berthe Morisot’s deep and fresh undergrowth, a seated woman, her child, a black dog, a butterfly net. And another Morisot, a maid with her charge – blue, green, pink, white, dappled with the sun. And the other Renoirs, the Parisienne with red lips in a blue jersey. And that carefree woman with a muff and the lacquer rose in her buttonhole…And the bare-shouldered dancer by Mary Cassatt in yellow, green, blond, rust on the red fauteuil. And the nervous dancers by Degas, Duranty by Degas – and of course Manet’s Polichinelle with Banville’s poem!…Ah! The tender hours spent there, losing myself in the catalogue of Albert Dürer, dreaming…in your bright room where bursts the note of the yellow armchair, yellow, so yellow!

Albert Dürer et ses dessins was Charles’s first proper book, a book that had taken him ‘vagabonding’ across Europe. Laforgue, twenty-one years old and new to Paris, had been recommended as a secretary to sift the lists, emendations, notes of ten years of study into appendices, tables and indices for publication. For Laforgue, Charles in his Chinese dressing-gown was an intoxicating patron in an intoxicating setting.

I’m pretty excited too, because I had no idea that Laforgue had worked for him, before coming across a footnote in a book on Manet. Laforgue is a wonderful poet of cities, park benches dripping wet, telegraph wires on roads that no one passes.

Charles is no longer the rushing young man. He has become the ‘Benedictine-dandy of the rue de Monceau’, a black-coated scholar, but flaneurial, whose top hat is tilted at an angle; someone who carries his cane under his arm with a sense of correctness and amour propre. Someone who has a valet to make sure that his hat is brushed. Someone, I am sure, who never carried things in his jacket pockets and spoilt the fall of the cloth. We see him here at thirty, with his mistress and his new role as the recently appointed editor of the Gazette, and find that he has grown into himself. He is a mondain art historian with a secretary. And a collector now not only of netsuke, but of pictures.

And he is so alive in this room. These colours – the black of his coat, and the black of his top hat, and the slightly reddish tinge to his beard – against the stream of fantastic paintings, set alight by this fierce clarity of the note of the yellow armchair. A study, you think, of a man who not only needs colour, but constructs his life around it. A man who wears the perfect uniform of rabbinical black in the rue de Monceau, and who has this other life behind this study door.

What kind of study could possibly go on in a room like this?

Jules Laforgue started work for Charles on 14th July 1881. He worked all summer in this study, staying up half the night. He was, I note with some severity, very badly paid by this Jewish Maecenas. It is through his eyes that we see Charles completing his book: ‘stone by stone you slowly and solidly build the pyramid which supports your beautifully bearded monument’. In a throwaway bit of marginalia Laforgue scribbles a picture of the two of them together. Laforgue, tiny with bouffant hair, walks in front, arms and legs akimbo blowing clouds of smoke, while the debonair, upright, tall, monumental, Assyrian-profiled Charles walks behind him. He has filled out splendidly.

Laforgue adores him, teases him. He is anxious to prove himself in this his first job. ‘And now, oh dandy-scholar of the Rue de Monceau, what are you up to? I always see the summaries of the Gazette and Art. What are you plotting between Monet’s Grenouillère, Manet’s Constantin Guys, and the…strange archaeologies of Moreau – tell me.’

The ‘Benedictine-dandy of the rue de Monceau’: a self-portrait with Charles, by Jules Laforgue, 1881

Laforgue wishes to be remembered to ‘our’ room, signs off with ‘good wishes to the Monet – you know which’. His summer with Charles was an encounter with Impressionism, an encounter that would challenge him to find a new kind of poetic language. He tries out a kind of prose-poem, calls it ‘Guitare’, and dedicates it to Charles. But surely these descriptions of Charles’s study are prose-poems themselves: there are the mixtures of the exact markings of colour – ‘la tâche colorée’ – the yellow armchair, the red lips and blue jersey of Renoir’s girl. The letters, pell-mell with sensation, high on ideas, are close to Laforgue’s description of Impressionist style as one in which spectator and spectacle are knitted together: ‘irrémédiablement mouvants, insaisissables et insaissants’.

Charles was very attached to Laforgue. After the long summer in Paris he arranged for the young poet to get a job in Berlin as reader of French to the Empress – Charles had a casually impressive social reach – and wrote to him, sent him money, advised him, critiqued his reviews and then helped Laforgue to get published. Charles kept more than thirty letters from Laforgue from this time, publishing them in the journal La revue blanche after the poet’s early death from tuberculosis.

In these letters you feel the room. I wanted to be here with the netsuke, and have worried that I would never get beyond a connoisseurial inventory of the grand furnishings of Charles’s apartment. I’ve worried how I could construct a life entirely through objects. The room overflows, like Laforgue’s writings, with unexpected conjunctions and disjunctions. I can hear their digressive night-time conversations and am here at last.

Everything in this salon is heightened emotion. It is difficult not to feel alive in a place saturated with images of freedom and lassitude, days out in the countryside, young women, a gypsy girl, bathers in the Seine, a loafer in a lane with nowhere to go, a gorgeous faun framed amongst the broderies and all those curious, funny, tactile netsuke.