Little Albertine

Little Albertine

The Géricault room, on the second level of the Sully Wing, is one of the most fascinating rooms in the Louvre, and also one of the most unsettling. All the paintings are disturbing, The Woman with a Gambling Mania, of course, with her addiction, or the Horse Race, an early representation of speed, or The Death of Géricault by Ary Scheffer. Géricault was much too young, and much too gifted, a painter to die. But the little girl with a large head, holding an enormous placid cat on her knees, is the one I look at the longest, because she herself looks at me intently—long before the little girls of Balthus, who are more slender but have the same mischievous air (Sully, room 941). This troubling little girl is Louise, daughter of Horace Vernet, later wife of Paul Delaroche: an entire life spent with painters. Her knee and shin jutting out between the dress and sock, without a scratch, retain our attention, in echo of the plump red cheek. The curled hair foreshadows that of Proust’s Young Girls in Flower. In a word, here is Albertine as a little girl.