Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg was obliged to be angry to get the clay model finished; he declared that he must put the work into other hands.  It was only by dint of endless complaints and much strong language that the committee of subscribers succeeded in seeing the plaster-cast.  Day after day Steinbock came home, evidently tired, complaining of this “hodman’s work” and his own physical weakness.  During that first year the household felt no pinch; the Countess Steinbock, desperately in love with her husband cursed the War Minister.  She went to see him; she told him that great works of art were not to be manufactured like cannon; and that the State—­like Louis XIV., Francis I., and Leo X.—­ought to be at the beck and call of genius.  Poor Hortense, believing she held a Phidias in her embrace, had the sort of motherly cowardice for her Wenceslas that is in every wife who carries her love to the pitch of idolatry.

“Do not be hurried,” said she to her husband, “our whole future life is bound up with that statue.  Take your time and produce a masterpiece.”

She would go to the studio, and then the enraptured Steinbock wasted five hours out of seven in describing the statue instead of working at it.  He thus spent eighteen months in finishing the design, which to him was all-important.

When the plaster was cast and the model complete, poor Hortense, who had looked on at her husband’s toil, seeing his health really suffer from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor’s frame and arms and hands —­Hortense thought the result admirable.  Her father, who knew nothing of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.

Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship.  Stidmann tried to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy.  Every article in a newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy.  Stidmann, the best of good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be the test.

“In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble,” wrote Claude Vignon, “a masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful.  The plaster is the manuscript, the marble is the book.”

So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son.  The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.