yawning with satisfaction.  Some old gentlemen opened their eyes wide with a knowing air.  A husband explained the subject to his young wife, who jogged her chin with a pretty motion of the neck.  There was every kind of marvelling, beatifical, astonished, profound, gay, austere, amidst unconscious smiles and languid postures of the head.  The men threw back their black silk hats, the flowers in the women’s bonnets glided to the napes of their necks.  And all the faces, after remaining motionless for a moment, were then drawn aside and replaced by others exactly like them.

Then Claude, stupefied by that triumph, virtually forgot everything else.  The gallery was becoming too small, fresh bands of people constantly accumulated inside it.  There were no more vacant spaces, as there had been early in the morning; no more cool whiffs rose from the garden amid the ambient smell of varnish; the atmosphere was now becoming hot and bitter with the perfumes scattered by the women’s dresses.  Before long the predominant odour suggested that of a wet dog.  It must have been raining outside; one of those sudden spring showers had no doubt fallen, for the last arrivals brought moisture with them—­their clothes hung about them heavily and seemed to steam as soon as they encountered the heat of the gallery.  And, indeed, patches of darkness had for a moment been passing above the awning of the roof.  Claude, who raised his eyes, guessed that large clouds were galloping onward lashed by the north wind, that driving rain was beating upon the glass panes.  Moire-like shadows darted along the walls, all the paintings became dim, the spectators themselves were blended in obscurity until the cloud was carried away, whereupon the painter saw the heads again emerge from the twilight, ever agape with idiotic rapture.

But there was another cup of bitterness in reserve for Claude.  On the left-hand panel, facing Fagerolles’, he perceived Bongrand’s picture.  And in front of that painting there was no crush whatever; the visitors walked by with an air of indifference.  Yet it was Bongrand’s supreme effort, the thrust he had been trying to give for years, a last work conceived in his obstinate craving to prove the virility of his decline.  The hatred he harboured against the ‘Village Wedding,’ that first masterpiece which had weighed upon all his toilsome after-life, had impelled him to select a contrasting but corresponding subject:  the ’Village Funeral’—­the funeral of a young girl, with relatives and friends straggling among fields of rye and oats.  Bongrand had wrestled with himself, saying that people should see if he were done for, if the experience of his sixty years were not worth all the lucky dash of his youth; and now experience was defeated, the picture was destined to be a mournful failure, like the silent fall of an old man, which does not even stay passers-by in their onward course.  There were still some masterly bits, the choirboy holding the cross, the