with the opinion that since his ‘Village Wedding’ the painter had produced nothing equal to that famous picture.  Indeed, after maintaining something of that standard of excellence in a few works, he was now gliding into a more scientific, drier manner.  Brightness of colour was vanishing; each work seemed to show a decline.  However, these were things not to be said; so Claude, when he had recovered his composure, exclaimed: 

‘You never painted anything so powerful!’

Bongrand looked at him again, straight in the eyes.  Then he turned to his work, in which he became absorbed, making a movement with his herculean arms, as if he were breaking every bone of them to lift that little canvas which was so very light.  And he muttered to himself:  ’Confound it! how heavy it is!  Never mind, I’ll die at it rather than show a falling-off.’

He took up his palette and grew calm at the first stroke of the brush, while bending his manly shoulders and broad neck, about which one noticed traces of peasant build remaining amid the bourgeois refinement contributed by the crossing of classes of which he was the outcome.

Silence had ensued, but Jory, his eyes still fixed on the picture, asked: 

‘Is it sold?’

Bongrand replied leisurely, like the artist who works when he likes without care of profit: 

‘No; I feel paralysed when I’ve a dealer at my back.’  And, without pausing in his work, he went on talking, growing waggish.

’Ah! people are beginning to make a trade of painting now.  Really and truly I have never seen such a thing before, old as I am getting.  For instance, you, Mr. Amiable Journalist, what a quantity of flowers you fling to the young ones in that article in which you mentioned me!  There were two or three youngsters spoken of who were simply geniuses, nothing less.’

Jory burst out laughing.

’Well, when a fellow has a paper, he must make use of it.  Besides, the public likes to have great men discovered for it.’

’No doubt, public stupidity is boundless, and I am quite willing that you should trade on it.  Only I remember the first starts that we old fellows had.  Dash it!  We were not spoiled like that, I can tell you.  We had ten years’ labour and struggle before us ere we could impose on people a picture the size of your hand; whereas nowadays the first hobbledehoy who can stick a figure on its legs makes all the trumpets of publicity blare.  And what kind of publicity is it?  A hullabaloo from one end of France to the other, sudden reputations that shoot up of a night, and burst upon one like thunderbolts, amid the gaping of the throng.  And I say nothing of the works themselves, those works announced with salvoes of artillery, awaited amid a delirium of impatience, maddening Paris for a week, and then falling into everlasting oblivion!’

‘This is an indictment against journalism,’ said Jory, who had stretched himself on the couch and lighted another cigar.  ’There is a great deal to be said for and against it, but devil a bit, a man must keep pace with the times.’