Spots

Artists ought never to marry, says a happily married painter

A painter, content with wife and child, warns his poet friend off marriage: artists live apart from life and need a rare, tactful woman almost impossible to find. He cites a sculptor who fled his family and the musician Dargenty, whose wife chats over his mazurkas. He hands over a manuscript of true cases. The first is Heurtebise, a fiery poet whose shopgirl wife's chatter and parasite guests drain his talent, fortune and life, after which she marries the linen-drapers Aubertot and Fajon.

PROLOGUE.

The wrong partner turns triumph into humiliation at home

A poet marries Maria Assunta, a Roman beauty glimpsed catching eels in the Tiber, and finds in Paris a coarse, raging woman before whom he trembles over a broken wine bottle, begging a guest to say, "Say it's you." Two opera stars marry onstage, until the husband's jealousy of his wife's greater voice ends in his own hired hisses. A bourgeois wife cannot fathom why her poet tore up the government post she secured him. Another poet tries to educate a statue-like provincial bride and fails.

A COUPLE OF SINGERS. → ASSAULT WITH VIOLENCE.

Every household bends the artist toward or away from work

A wife stages a quarrel before witnesses to win a legal separation, but ends up slapping her patient husband. The sculptor Simaise chisels potboilers nonstop to fund a hammock-bound wife and four ball-going daughters whose chaotic poverty scares off every suitor, even a dancing lawyer in Normandy. A jealous bride banishes her sculptor husband's model, then poses herself. A great composer's widow remarries a timid admirer and rules him through her dead husband's fame and love letters.

BOHEMIA AT HOME. → THE DECEIVER.

Some wives are the hidden author of the husband's life

A lover discovers on his mistress's deathbed that five years of stories, including a rabbi uncle and music pupils, were lies, and she dies without revealing her name. The poet d'Athis is maneuvered by his model-mistress Irma Salle, through their son Robert, into making her a Comtesse, only for the child to die. The sculptor Guillardin dreams his new Academy coat mocks him: his honours, fortune and seat were bought by his beautiful wife's favours, not his talent.

THE COMTESSE IRMA. → That morning was the dawn of a glorious…

Book

Artists' Wives

A dozen sharp case studies of how marriage can feed an artist's work or quietly strangle it.

@spots #marriage #artists #paris #satire
Read Artists' Wives in full
Discuss
See more like this