Edgar Degas: A Private Life

1917, Paris.

I am eighty-three years old, and if the matter is to be stated without the sentimental falsity with which old age is usually surrounded by those who do not yet suffer it, I am blind enough for the practical arts to have been taken from me and not blind enough to be spared the humiliation of knowing precisely what has been taken. The doctors may phrase it as they please. Ten years blind in the full sense, twenty in the operative sense, a gradual dimming, the line lost first, then the colour, then the faces, then the print on the page, and now at the end the city itself reduced to pressure, direction, warmth, noise, the old Paris known by the body after the eye has abdicated. The studios are sold. The waxes are dispersed. The pastels are elsewhere under other people’s care, which is another way of saying beyond my command. The apartment on the Boulevard de Clichy is not the studio and will not become it merely because visitors, stupid from piety, insist on confusing the lodging of an old man with the site of a working life.

I sit by the window because the light is still where it always was, which is to say on one side, and the body continues to orient toward it even after the light itself has become an abstraction more than a visible fact. This is not pathos. It is habit, and habit, unlike consolation, is dependable. The old rooms on the rue Victor Massé had the proper north light and the space the work required. These rooms do not. They contain chairs and books and the imbecile kindness of people who lower their voices as if diminished volume could compensate for the absence of sight. It cannot. What it does is announce pity, and pity is the least bearable of the late furnishings. The studios were sold in 1912 after the eviction from the apartment that preceded them, and with the sale the accumulation of fifty years ceased to be a governed body and became a market. One says dispersed because it sounds civilised. One means taken out of hierarchy and handed over to appetite.

Paris is at war and I continue to walk because walking is the one discipline not yet wholly canceled by the eye’s surrender. I go out in the afternoons, when the city has warmed enough that the direction of the sun can still be felt on the face, and I keep to the boulevards where the width of the street and the change in echo tell me more than the eye now can. People imagine that sight served walking. It did, certainly. But the habit of walking also served judgement. One moved through Paris and took its measure. That remains possible in another form. The city is altered, condensed, thinned of young men, heavy with uniforms and hospitals and managed fear, but it is still Paris, still the only city that could have produced my eye and my subjects and the whole vexed authority of a man who spent fifty years watching its bodies at work and at preparation.

I write because painting is no longer available and because the impulse to arrange what the looking found has not submitted merely because the instrument has failed. Yesterday I wrote four lines and could not read them back, which is amusing if one likes irony and insufferable if one has spent a life depending upon precision. I go on because stopping would concede too much to decay. This document is not for publication and not for any tribunal of posterity; those tribunals are composed chiefly of latecomers and incompetents. It is to keep the faculty of ordering from atrophying entirely, to continue, in language if not in pastel or charcoal, the work of placing things correctly: one figure before another, one grievance before its cause, one truth before the distortions by which lesser people have so often tried to make the account manageable to themselves.