The committee work was really a hard task, and even Bongrand’s strong legs grew tired of it.  It was cut out every day by the assistants.  An endless row of large pictures rested on the ground against the handrails, all along the first-floor galleries, right round the Palace; and every afternoon, at one o’clock precisely, the forty committee-men, headed by their president, who was equipped with a bell, started off on a promenade, until all the letters in the alphabet, serving as exhibitors’ initials, had been exhausted.  They gave their decisions standing, and the work was got through as fast as possible, the worst canvases being rejected without going to the vote.  At times, however, discussions delayed the party, there came a ten minutes’ quarrel, and some picture which caused a dispute was reserved for the evening revision.  Two men, holding a cord some thirty feet long, kept it stretched at a distance of four paces from the line of pictures, so as to restrain the committee-men, who kept on pushing each other in the heat of their dispute, and whose stomachs, despite everything, were ever pressing against the cord.  Behind the committee marched seventy museum-keepers in white blouses, executing evolutions under the orders of a brigadier.  At each decision communicated to them by the secretaries, they sorted the pictures, the accepted paintings being separated from the rejected ones, which were carried off like corpses after a battle.  And the round lasted during two long hours, without a moment’s respite, and without there being a single chair to sit upon.  The committee-men had to remain on their legs, tramping on in a tired way amid icy draughts, which compelled even the least chilly among them to bury their noses in the depths of their fur-lined overcoats.

Then the three o’clock snack proved very welcome:  there was half an hour’s rest at a buffet, where claret, chocolate, and sandwiches could be obtained.  It was there that the market of mutual concessions was held, that the bartering of influence and votes was carried on.  In order that nobody might be forgotten amid the hailstorm of applications which fell upon the committee-men, most of them carried little note-books, which they consulted; and they promised to vote for certain exhibitors whom a colleague protected on condition that this colleague voted for the ones in whom they were interested.  Others, however, taking no part in these intrigues, either from austerity or indifference, finished the interval in smoking a cigarette and gazing vacantly about them.

Then the work began again, but more agreeably, in a gallery where there were chairs, and even tables with pens and paper and ink.  All the pictures whose height did not reach four feet ten inches were judged there—­’passed on the easel,’ as the expression goes—­being ranged, ten or twelve together, on a kind of trestle covered with green baize.  A good many committee-men then grew absent-minded, several wrote their letters, and the president had to get angry to obtain presentable majorities.  Sometimes a gust of passion swept by; they all jostled each other; the votes, usually given by raising the hand, took place amid such feverish excitement that hats and walking-sticks were waved in the air above the tumultuous surging of heads.