She passed by the table at which they were sitting,
and he took her arm.
“Come and sit by my side, dear child, and let
us play the divine comedy of love.”
“Fichez-moi la paix,” she said, and pushing
him on one side continued her perambulation.
“Art,” he continued, with a wave of the
hand, “is merely the refuge which the ingenious
have invented, when they were supplied with food and
women, to escape the tediousness of life.”
Cronshaw filled his glass again, and began to talk
at length. He spoke with rotund delivery.
He chose his words carefully. He mingled wisdom
and nonsense in the most astounding manner, gravely
making fun of his hearers at one moment, and at the
next playfully giving them sound advice. He talked
of art, and literature, and life. He was by turns
devout and obscene, merry and lachrymose. He
grew remarkably drunk, and then he began to recite
poetry, his own and Milton’s, his own and Shelley’s,
his own and Kit Marlowe’s.
At last Lawson, exhausted, got up to go home.
“I shall go too,” said Philip.
Clutton, the most silent of them all, remained behind
listening, with a sardonic smile on his lips, to Cronshaw’s
maunderings. Lawson accompanied Philip to his
hotel and then bade him good-night. But when Philip
got to bed he could not sleep. All these new
ideas that had been flung before him carelessly seethed
in his brain. He was tremendously excited.
He felt in himself great powers. He had never
before been so self-confident.
“I know I shall be a great artist,” he
said to himself. “I feel it in me.”
A thrill passed through him as another thought came,
but even to himself he would not put it into words:
“By George, I believe I’ve got genius.”
He was in fact very drunk, but as he had not taken
more than one glass of beer, it could have been due
only to a more dangerous intoxicant than alcohol.
On Tuesdays and Fridays masters spent the morning
at Amitrano’s, criticising the work done.
In France the painter earns little unless he paints
portraits and is patronised by rich Americans; and
men of reputation are glad to increase their incomes
by spending two or three hours once a week at one
of the numerous studios where art is taught.
Tuesday was the day upon which Michel Rollin came to
Amitrano’s. He was an elderly man, with
a white beard and a florid complexion, who had painted
a number of decorations for the State, but these were
an object of derision to the students he instructed:
he was a disciple of Ingres, impervious to the progress
of art and angrily impatient with that tas de farceurs
whose names were Manet, Degas, Monet, and Sisley; but
he was an excellent teacher, helpful, polite, and
encouraging. Foinet, on the other hand, who visited
the studio on Fridays, was a difficult man to get on
with. He was a small, shrivelled person, with
bad teeth and a bilious air, an untidy gray beard,
and savage eyes; his voice was high and his tone sarcastic.
He had had pictures bought by the Luxembourg, and at
twenty-five looked forward to a great career; but his
talent was due to youth rather than to personality,
and for twenty years he had done nothing but repeat
the landscape which had brought him his early success.
When he was reproached with monotony, he answered:
