"Reading Delacroix's "Journal

To someone reading Delacroix's Journal, whether for the first time or returning to it after twenty years, as I have just done, I suggest the following experiment: read it not by dipping into it casually, but as it should be read, from start to finish (perhaps this pertains even more to second reading, as we shall see). Allow the text to unfold, page by page, not seeking out the high points, even though this may mean that, accustomed as we may think we are nowadays to compact labyrinths of analytical language and its literary equivalents, Proustian or otherwise, you will occasionally find yourself marking time along the thin thread of memory the author was trying to stretch throughout his days. (But is this not, after all, the law of the genre, the essence of any so-called intimate no matter what kind of intimacy it makes public?) Then, having progressed fairly far beyond the early journal, interrupt the reading to contemplate some of the photographs of Delacroix that are available to us. I emphasize photographs, not portraits painted or drawn by friends, nor one of his self-portraits. Photographs, with all the reality that process implies. And to begin with, the famous 1842 daguerreotype, which, compared to the later, carefully posed portrait by Nadar, looks like picture for an identity card (owing perhaps to the somewhat raffish appearance the painter has assumed, down to the striped shawl-or rather, scarf-he sports with bit too much distinction. Thbophile Gautier spoke more nobly of a physiognomy of shy, strange, exotic, almost disturbing beauty: one might say an Indian maharajah who had received polished education in Calcutta). Photographs, then-and there are others: for example, the seemingly candid one taken by Lige and Bergeron, or the more posed one taken by Pierre Petit, both of which date from 1862, year before the painter's death-as if the occasion had been seized upon because of that proximity. For my part, the experience causes some distress, even kind of discomfort, not to say uneasiness, if I am to trust resistance that repetition of the experiment has not managed to dispel. I should like to know if this reaction is peculiar to me, having to do with the very special and contradictory, if not conflicting, relationship I have always had, for as long as I have been interested in painting, with

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