’I have told you a score of times that one was for ever beginning one’s career afresh, that joy did not consist in having reached the summit, but in the climbing, in the gaiety of scaling the heights.  Only, you don’t understand, you cannot understand; a man must have passed through it.  Just remember!  You hope for everything, you dream of everything; it is the hour of boundless illusions, and your legs are so strong that the most fatiguing roads seem short; you are consumed with such an appetite for glory, that the first petty successes fill your mouth with a delicious taste.  What a feast it will be when you are able to gratify ambition to satiety!  You have nearly reached that point, and you look right cheerfully on your scratches!  Well, the thing is accomplished; the summit has been gained; it is now a question of remaining there.  Then a life of abomination begins; you have exhausted intoxication, and you have discovered that it does not last long enough, that it is not worth the struggle it has cost, and that the dregs of the cup taste bitter.  There is nothing left to be learnt, no new sensation to be felt; pride has had its allowance of fame; you know that you have produced your greatest works; and you are surprised that they did not bring keener enjoyment with them.  From that moment the horizon becomes void; no fresh hope inflames you; there is nothing left but to die.  And yet you still cling on, you won’t admit that it’s all up with you, you obstinately persist in trying to produce—­just as old men cling to love with painful, ignoble efforts.  Ah! a man ought to have the courage and the pride to strangle himself before his last masterpiece!’

While he spoke he seemed to have increased in stature, reaching to the elevated ceiling of the studio, and shaken by such keen emotion that the tears started to his eyes.  And he dropped into a chair before his picture, asking with the anxious look of a beginner who has need of encouragement: 

’Then this really seems to you all right?  I myself no longer dare to believe anything.  My unhappiness springs from the possession of both too much and not enough critical acumen.  The moment I begin a sketch I exalt it, then, if it’s not successful, I torture myself.  It would be better not to know anything at all about it, like that brute Chambouvard, or else to see very clearly into the business and then give up painting. . . .  Really now, you like this little canvas?’

Claude and Jory remained motionless, astonished and embarrassed by those tokens of the intense anguish of art in its travail.  Had they come at a moment of crisis, that this master thus groaned with pain, and consulted them like comrades?  The worst was that they had been unable to disguise some hesitation when they found themselves under the gaze of the ardent, dilated eyes with which he implored them—­eyes in which one could read the hidden fear of decline.  They knew current rumours well enough; they agreed