Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

to draw chickens, hares, and what the cautious André Level terms “ruminants” in the dust. She wondered when he found time to work, and presently she found that it was in the quiet of the night, lit by an oil-lamp or sometimes by a candle.

      At this point Picasso was twenty-two and Fernande about the same (some say older, some say younger): and although she did notice his small feet and hands she did not see anything particularly attractive about him at first—rien de très séduisant. She was not alone in this: a friend of Gertrude Stein’s described him as a “good-looking bootblack.” Nor could she place him socially; his days of purple and fine linen were over (there was no Soler in Paris and in any case Picasso’s dandyism had only been for the fun, a kind of dressing-up) and now he usually wore a boilersuit or the French workingman’s blue cotton jacket, with the red Catalan sash, the faixa, under it. But like everybody else Fernande was struck by his extraordinary eyes—huge, dark, and piercing, generally kind, always compelling; and by the immense vitality that flowed from him. She did not think him particularly young at the time; but she does observe that he stayed the same fairly mature twenty-two for all the twelve years they lived together. For that matter, photographs taken when he was well past fifty still show an absurdly boyish face, with the same black forelock drooping over his forehead; and even in 1952, when I first met him and when by the calendar he was over seventy, there was nothing at all of the old man about him: he was trim, compact, well made, his round head burned brown in the sun—age was irrelevant.