If asked, I could not recollect the precise day on which we met. It is funny how, when prompted, one is not able to recall the day that changed the rest of their life. How strange that I should remember minute details of that day, yet the date slips past me.

I do remember setting myself down across from you at the studio of Monsieur Gleyre. He was always so intent on silencing us. From the very first, he was dead set on compromising our friendship for fear that we would influence each other for the worst. And we did, didn’t we? No matter how many times his shrill voice interrupted our amusing observations of our model, we always found ourselves affected by each other, even in silence.

“What classic position is your model taking this afternoon, Bazille?” he would shout. He was always so offensive, even if we were sketching quietly.

I would look up to the girl standing in front of me. Her long dark hair poured over her slender shoulder, curling around her breast, down, down, down to where she held it over her most secretive of places. She stared over my head, her cheeks flushed though it was often cold in the studio. It was obvious; the position was Botticelli.

Glancing across to you, I would smirk. To answer this question incorrectly would give you the opportunity to boast. I never missed an opportunity to watch you gloat. Never. I turned to our teacher. His eyebrows were knitted above his beady black eyes. When I shook my head and spoke, he sighed, obviously upset, raising his hand to cradle his forehead. “I do not know, Monsieur Gleyre.”

“It is Botticelli,” you interrupted, quite proud of yourself. “It is Venus. How could you not know such a thing, Bazille? Some artist you are!”

We shared a smile as Gleyre moved across the room, his back to us, cursing my lack of knowledge and your blatant, compromising arrogance.

In 1864, when I failed my medical exams, you were there to drink with me. Of course, we were not alone. We were never alone after meeting Claude at Gleyre’s. We had been a trio from that day on. He ended up being the corrupting influence upon us, giving us reason to quit Gleyre’s and pursue our own horizons – both figuratively and literally.

He had been so inconspicuous at first, keeping to the rules, just as we always had. But then, after an argument with Gleyre, he left the studio in a huff, bellowing out that he would never return. There had been something in his tone that had made it clear that he was speaking the truth. He would honestly never return. We had followed him, much to the chagrin of our teacher.

I’d wandered into the café with news of my failure, and you’d swept me in the direction of our usual table, where Manet, Sisley, and Monet sat. There were women enough for a regiment there, all equally eager to ease the pain of my intellectual miscarriages. However, I did not want to take part in their voluptuous comforts. I had since grown weary of the female sex, but, being only 23, you passed this off as nothing.

“Was it Antoinette?” you asked over the brim of your wineglass as a curvy barmaid slipped her tiny white hand beneath the collar of your shirt.

“Lord, no,” I laughed, having forgotten about the woman since I’d sketched her last. “It is not a woman. I just have no taste for them anymore. They are beautiful, of course.” At that, I looked up at the woman that was leaning against the back of my chair. She stared down at me with empty gray eyes, her pinched pink cheeks puffy from drink. Well, most of them were beautiful, the ones that had not yet been ruined by Paris. Country girls, or at least the girls back home in Montpellier.

I hardly knew what it was, but then I could not be surer of it.

It was in the certain stirring when I heard your voice, even if it was loud and occasionally obnoxious. It was in the tremors even the friendliest embrace of yours gave me. I had always been attached to you, always. There was not a day after hearing the name of Pierre-Auguste Renoir that I was not attached. The extent of the attachment was not revealed to me until much later.

When you ran into financial trouble, I opened my studio on Furstenberg to you. I did not have much, but I had more than was readily available to you and I could not deny you charity. I would have never called it that in front of you, but that was what it was, in a way.

I gave you my bedroom while I slept near the fire with my chin rested upon the arm of the chair, staring into the orange flames as they licked their blackened brick frame. I shared my paint with you. I purchased canvas for both of us. I cooked, and I found someone to wash our clothes. Then, Monet came along, having nowhere to go as well.

Once again and not for the last time, we were not alone.

I was so proud of you when you were finally exhibited in the Salon. Such recognition had been a long time coming, and I could only imagine the state of bliss you must have been in. While this caused a sufficient increase in those interested in buying your paintings, you continued to board with me until late in 1866.

Those two years were the happiest of my life. We spent our days with Monet or alone, out in the country, painting. Every day we spent in some forest with our canvases and our paints felt like the very first. Even now I remember painting in the Fontainebleau forest. Such an experience belongs only to the most lucky, and if I am anything, it is blessed.

I submitted two works to the Salon that year – “Girl at the piano” and “Still life with a fish.” The latter was accepted and the former denied, which you reminded me of constantly. You found it quite amusing that my fish was more aesthetically pleasing than my girl was. But, the truth of it was that I knew you were proud, just as I had been of you.

The following year, I painted your portrait. You’d laughed and inquired as to why I would want to do such a thing. “To remember you by,” I teased, “In case you get ugly.”

You’d looked at me with a confused expression, as if to say, ‘Me? Ugly?’

“Yes, Renoir,” I laughed, “In case you get ugly.”

You sat so still for the hours that I kept you there. We hardly even spoke, having said quite enough up until that moment. Later you told me that you had kept quiet so as not to disturb me, fearing that I would do something horrible to your face and that you would be immortalized as such.

After that, we moved studios once more. This time, the district of Batignolles called to us, but perhaps that was only to keep close to the Café Guerbois. We met with our other friends there occasionally. Degas had begun to join us by then, having been introduced into the rowdy band by Manet, and we argued constantly. Not out of spite, surely not. We merely argued out of boredom and a need to keep our minds spinning as we ingested more wine and attempted to drown out the scent of the women that the others seemed so interested in.

I watched you on those nights. You were so happy when surrounded by women, beautiful or not. But, to you, my friend, all women were beautiful. They captured your wild heart in the palms of their hands. The barmaids and laundresses caressed you with their palms that had been washed soft over time. The rouged prostitutes rubbed their scratchy fingerless gloves over your suntanned cheeks. They were all unsavory, and you loved them.

On some nights, you would bring them home to our studio on the street de la Condamine. Your lips burned their white necks. Their breasts heaved against the walls of their corsets. I tried my best to ignore the cries that emanated from your room. I studied the clusters of flowers on the wallpaper that had been hung on my own walls. I shut my eyes and attempted to fill my head with Wagner, when all I could really hear was Renoir.

The morning after, all was forgotten. I would once again begin to paint beside you. I would assist you in hanging one of your newly framed works on the wall. I would disregard the gooseflesh that rose on my arms when your fingers haphazardly grazed mine or when you turned your smile upon me, pouring its light onto my face.

“Bazille's Studio, rue de la Condamine” was finished in early 1870. On that canvas, I painted our friends. I presented a new work to Manet and Monet, as Maître played the piano and you discussed something with Zola. I captured our life. I captured what I would soon lose.

The night that I told you about my enlistment into the Zouaves regiment, you cursed my name in ways that I had never imagined. I had never heard such words from your lips.

“How can you do such a thing?” you raved, “What if you die?”

I denied that such a thing was possible, but it was really as likely as anything was. “I will not,” I replied, reaching out to touch your arm, to comfort you if you needed it.

You tore yourself away from me, crossing the granite floor of our studio, staring out of the large window and out into the street. “And you’ll give all of this up?” you asked. “You’ll give up your future, and for what?”

“It will be over in weeks, Renoir. I am not going to be gone for years.”

“If you are killed, you will be gone forever, Bazille!” Your entire body went tight, as did your voice. I stood from my chair and went to you, placing both of my hands on your shoulders. The stress was eased slightly, but you did not turn around and look at me.

“That would worry me if I thought such a thing would happen,” I murmured.

You did not believe me. How could you? It would be war. Any man could be killed. The opposition would not look at me and say, ‘That is Frédéric Bazille. He is a painter. Do not kill him.’ No one in Paris knew me by face. I would not expect such a thing from one of my fellow Frenchmen, much less a foreigner.

You turned around finally and I found that there were tears in your eyes. I did not say another word to you. We merely stood there for a long time, affecting each other in silence as we always had. Oh, how my lips had ached at that moment. It was then that my desires had been revealed to me.

Friendship had faded unassumingly into love.

You, Renoir, my closest friend and companion, had claimed my heart as your own. Had I known this before then, I would not have enlisted. I would have told you and then I would have waited. I would have lingered in our studio, waiting for a reply, anxious to hear if such fondness was returned.

I knew that you did not feel for me the things that I felt for you. Your eyes were drawn to the dips and curves of the female body, not the wiry muscle and straight frame of a man’s. Forever after you would be known as a champion of breasts and hips, perfecting the nude, philandering as you caused every silly Parisian girl to fall hopelessly in love with you.

We said our goodbye in August of 1870.

I wrote to you constantly during the two months that followed. You told me that Degas and Manet had enlisted in the National Guard, as you had, though you had succumbed to dysentery soon after. I reminisced more than I should have, recollecting our days with Gleyre and then Monet, followed by our nights with the others, including the ever-strange Paul Cezanne. You told me that Monet had fled to London with his wife and child. I envied him.

The final letter I received from you was signed differently from the others. Instead of ‘your friend,’ you scrawled ‘your dearest friend’ above your nearly illegible signature. This in itself was not strange. It was how you ended it, as well. You had wished me luck, having heard about the German advancement, and you had said something that you had never mentioned once before.

You told me that you loved me.

This profession was innocent, yes, but it filled me with such hope. You would never understand the hope that it filled me with. I received that letter on November 25th.

Four days later, at the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande, my officer was injured. In a surge of thoughtlessness, I took command myself. As you may know by now, the attack failed, and I was shot twice.

I died on that battlefield.

My father came to collect my body soon after and he took me back to Montpellier, my home. I was buried before you were able to get there, to see me one last time.

In my pack, a letter was found. I had not sent it, having written it in a fervor after reading your last message. The words did not make much sense, but the meaning was there and as clear as day. I told you everything. I told you about the first day of our meeting. I told you about your smile, as if the many women you kept had not told you of how contagious it was. I told you about my sudden, nearly uncontrollable urge to kiss you that night at the window. I told you about you, and I told you about myself. Most importantly, I told you of my love and the measure of it.

Is measuring my love for you even possible? I did try, though, and I was oddly poetic, despite the chill that had seeped into my boots, all the way to my bones.

But, does any of this matter now? I am long dead, and you are now married. You have a handful of little boys, all running about and as eager to please as their father. She is beautiful, by the way. I never expected you to be faithful to anything but a Venus. I can tell in the way that you look at her that you love her dearly.

Your work has flourished since we shared that little studio. You work somewhere much larger now and you can’t paint a single canvas without all of France being in an uproar. You are in love and you are content. I do wonder sometimes if you miss me, but such thoughts are ridiculous and burdensome.

I am very proud of you, Renoir, very proud.

I cannot wait to see you again.