As he grew older Guys became an apparition in the life of Paris.  The smash-up of the Empire destroyed the beloved world he knew so well.  Poor, his principal pleasure was in memory; if he couldn’t actually enjoy the luxury of the rich he could reproduce its images on his drawing-pad.  The whilom dandy and friend of Baudelaire went about dressed in a shabby military frock-coat.  He had no longer a nodding acquaintance with the fashionable lions of Napoleon the Little’s reign, yet he abated not his haughty strut, his glacial politeness to all comers, nor his daily promenade in the Bois.  A Barmecide feast this watching the pleasures of others more favoured, though Guys did not waste the fruits of his observation.  At sixty-five he began to go down-hill.  His habits had never been those of a prudent citizen, and as his earning powers grew less some imp of the perverse entered his all too solitary life.  With this change of habits came a change of theme.  Henceforth he drew filles, the outcasts, the scamps and convicts and the poor wretches of the night.  He is now a forerunner of Toulouse-Lautrec and an entire school.  This side of his career probably caused Dr. Muther to compare him with Paul Verlaine.  Absinthe, the green fairy of so many poets and artists, was no stranger to Guys.

In 1885, after dining with Nadar, his most faithful friend, Guys was run over in the Rue du Havre and had his legs crushed.  He was taken to the Maison Dubois, where he lived eight years longer, dying at the venerable age of eighty-seven, though far from being a venerable person.  Astonishing vitality!  He did not begin to draw, that is, for a living, until past forty.  His method of work was simplicity itself, declare those who watched him at work.  He seemingly improvised his aquarelles; his colour, sober, delicate, was broadly washed in; his line, graceful and modulated, does not suggest the swiftness of his execution.  He could be rank and vulgar, and he was gentle as a refined child that sees the spectacle of life for the first time.  The bitterness of Baudelaire’s flowers of evil he escaped until he was in senile decadence.  In the press of active life he registered the shock of conflicting arms, the shallow pride of existence and the mere joy of living, all in a sane manner that will ever endear him to lovers of art.

George Moore tells the following anecdote of Degas:  Somebody was saying he did not like Daumier, and Degas preserved silence for a long while.  “If you were to show Raphael,” he said at last, “a Daumier, he would admire it; he would take off his hat; but if you were to show him a Cabanel, he would say with a sigh, ‘That is my fault.’”

If you could show Raphael a croquis by Constantin Guys he would probably look the other way, but Degas would certainly admire and buy the drawing.

XI.  IMPRESSIONISM

I — MONET