Les Bergers à Bethléem

Overview

Les Bergers à Bethléem is a project, not a finished picture: a Nativity-night subject (the shepherds and the star) that Jules Bastien-Lepage was planning in the winter of 1883-84, and which Marie knew only through his brother Émile Bastien-Lepage, the architect. Bastien-Lepage died on 10 December 1884 without painting it; there is no work to illustrate, so this entry carries no image.

The subject was not new to him: in 1875 his Annonciation aux bergers (« Angels appearing to the Shepherds ») won him second place in the Prix de Rome competition. (Source: English and French Wikipedia, « Jules Bastien-Lepage ».) Whether the project of 1884 reworked that earlier picture is not stated in the diary or in the sources consulted.

Marie and the project

On 16 January 1884 Émile tells her that among Bastien-Lepage's many projects is Les Bergers à Bethléem (103.0039). Marie spends the evening on it: « Sujet sublime, et qu'il rendra plus sublime encore » (103.0040); she has a « vision très nette » of it, as an evening scene dominated by « la fameuse Étoile », tender, grand and mysterious, and she connects it with Jeanne d'Arc and Le Soir au village (103.0041). She compares its effect to that of her own Saintes femmes -- also an evening picture, but his will be « grand, fort, tendre, radieux » whereas hers is « désolé, terrible » (103.0042).

On 2 February 1884 she cannot sleep for thinking of it: « Rien sur la terre n'est comparable aux divins Bergers. Je n'ai été aussi folle que pour mes Saintes femmes » (103.0237), and she writes in bed that « ces maudits Bergers me troublent » (103.0253). Her private catalogue of feelings in that entry matches the project to the opera Hamlet (103.0249). She is excited about a picture « que je n'ai pas vus et qui n'existent pas encore » and knows that most people would find her absurd (103.0041).