Back to Valac the Demon, Part III.
28 Raphael. Sachiel’s Hour. On to business with where we left off last week.
Valac saw to it that Gros was returned home. All that night, Gros was tormented in his dreams by the events of the evening. He awoke the next morning feeling altogether ill and sore from his missing molar, and he easily dismissed the more unusual events from his mind as products of a vivid and wine-soaked imagination. As he was preparing to sketch out a painting that morning, he was visited by a messenger. Napoleon wanted him to paint an episode from his campaigns in Egypt, suggesting in particular a grand scene of his visit to Jaffa in 1799.
Gros was aware of what had happened in Jaffa. Napoleon had been repulsed by the victims of the plague that had set into the city. He had even considered burning the entire city down with all its inhabitants, including the healthy, in a supposed act of mercy.
Still uncertain of exactly what had transpired the night before, he was intrigued by the idea of painting a lie, and Gros took to his studio and created his masterpiece, Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa. Gros thanked the young artist (whose name he couldn’t quite recall, but it had sounded much like Voulu) who had given him the idea of painting a lie by including him among the plague-stricken. Valac as the young artist is depicted as the young man in uniform in the lower right. Additionally, for reasons he didn’t quite understand or recall, Gros was moved to feature himself in the painting as the mysterious man with the cap bearing the number thirty-two.
The painting was a phenomenal success at the Salon of 1804. Gros was celebrated as a genius among his peers for the next eight years of his life. He had droves of admiring students. He had more money than he could spend. He was loved.
But on a bright day in November of 1811, he felt something shift within him while he was working on the cupola of St. Genevieve. It began as an uncertainty in the shoulder that crept down his arm and affected his ability to hold his brush. His eight years of brilliance were over. His twenty-four years of interest had begun, and it started with a mistrust in the precision of his fingers.
It took him thirteen years to complete the cupola. After he was finished, all of his work was met with sharp criticism. He tried to exhibit his paintings at every opportunity, but no one in Paris was willing to pay him any mind.
Gros’ last Salon was in 1834. No one—not even his students from his halcyon days—recognized him. However, the artist Camille Corot noticed that there was a drunken, destitute man who appeared to be the object of fascination to a strange, unaccompanied young boy clad in black. Corot himself was captivated, and he used his memory of the boy as the subject of a painting that he debated showing at the Salon the following year. (It was lucky he didn’t—he did much better with Hagar in the Wilderness.) To this day, human scholars debate whom Corot had employed as a model for Portrait of a Child.
Finally, on June 23, 1835, Gros dressed himself in the uniform that Napoleon had given him in appreciation for his magnificent painting of the plague victims at Jaffa, and he drowned himself in the Seine. He had tucked a note in his hat that read, “Tired of life, and betrayed by last faculties which rendered it bearable, he had resolved to end it.” His body was positively identified, examined thoroughly and released to an adolescent boy who claimed to be Gros’ nephew, unaccompanied and dressed in a manner that indicated he came from a family of means.
A new tale next week. Dominus tecum.
