The jury, which on that very day had polished its spectacles on the lining of its illustrious coat, was not in any way taken in by this new ruse.  It recognized perfectly well the persistent painting, above all by a big brute of a horse of many colors, which was rearing out of one of the waves of the Red Sea.  The coat of that horse had served Marcel for all his experiments in color, and in private conversation he called it his synoptic table of fine tones, because he had reproduced, in their play of light and shade, all possible combinations of color.  But once again, insensible to this detail, the jury seemed scarcely able to find blackballs enough to emphasize their refusal of the “Passage of the Beresina.”

“Very well,” said Marcel; “no more than I expected.  Next year I shall send it back under the title of ‘Passage des Panoramas.’”

“That will be one on them—­on them—­on them, them, them,” sang the musician, Schaunard, fitting the words to a new air he had been composing—­a terrible air, noisy as a gamut of thunderclaps, and the accompaniment to which was a terror to every piano in the neighborhood.

“How could they refuse that picture without having every drop of the vermilion in my Red Sea rise up in their faces and cover them with shame?” murmured Marcel, as he gazed at the painting.  “When one thinks that it contains a good hundred crowns’ worth of paint, and a million of genius, not to speak of the fair days of my youth, fast growing bald as my hat!  But they shall never have the last word; until my dying breath I shall keep on sending them my painting.  I want to have it engraved upon their memory.”

“That is certainly the surest way of ever getting it engraved,” said Gustave Colline, in a plaintive voice, adding to himself:  “That was a good one, that was—­really a good one; I must get that off the next time I am asked out.”

Marcel continued his imprecations, which Schaunard continued to set to music.

“Oh, they won’t accept me,” said Marcel.  “Ah! the government pays them, boards them, gives them the Cross, solely for the one purpose of refusing me once a year, on the 1st of March.  I see their idea clearly now—­I see it perfectly clearly; they are trying to drive me to break my brushes.  They hope, perhaps, by refusing my Red Sea, to make me throw myself out of the window in despair.  But they know very little of the human heart if they expect to catch me with such a clumsy trick.  I shall no longer wait for the time of the annual Salon.  Beginning with to-day, my work becomes the canvas of Damocles, eternally suspended over their existence.  From now on, I am going to send it once a week to each one of them, at their homes, in the bosom of their families, in the full heart of their private life.  It shall trouble their domestic joy, it shall make them think that their wine is sour, their dinner burned, their wives bad-tempered.  They will very soon become insane, and will have to be put in strait-jackets when they go to the Institute, on the days when there are meetings.  That idea pleases me.”