In the Library
The Unknown Masterpiece
Honoré de Balzac, 1831
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 45 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Ellen Marriage
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 11k words
£1.99
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The aim of art is not to copy nature, but to express it.
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About the book
A December morning in 1612, and a boy dressed too thinly for it walks up and down outside a door in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, working up the nerve to knock. Inside he meets an old painter, Frenhofer, who has spent ten years on one canvas nobody has ever been allowed to see, and who talks about it the way a man talks about a woman he keeps hidden: she is mine, she loves me, I have lived with her ten years. The boy is Nicolas Poussin, twenty-two and nobody yet, and he wants to see that picture so badly that he offers the only thing he has. Gillette loves him. She will stand naked in another man's studio for as long as the old man needs her. Balzac saw before anyone that the pursuit of the absolute in art is an appetite like any other, and that somebody always settles the bill in the body.