‘Ah! his old canvases,’ resumed Bongrand, ’the things he had at the Quai de Bourbon, do you remember them?  There were some extraordinary bits among them.  The landscapes he brought back from the south and the academy studies he painted at Boutin’s—­a girl’s legs and a woman’s trunk, for instance.  Oh, that trunk!  Old Malgras must have it.  A magisterial study it was, which not one of our “young masters” could paint.  Yes, yes, the fellow was no fool—­simply a great painter.’

‘When I think,’ said Sandoz, ’that those little humbugs of the School and the press accused him of idleness and ignorance, repeating one after the other that he had always refused to learn his art.  Idle! good heavens! why, I have seen him faint with fatigue after sittings ten hours long; he gave his whole life to his work, and killed himself in his passion for toil!  And they call him ignorant—­how idiotic!  They will never understand that the individual gift which a man brings in his nature is superior to all acquired knowledge.  Delacroix also was ignorant of his profession in their eyes, simply because he could not confine himself to hard and fast rules!  Ah! the ninnies, the slavish pupils who are incapable of painting anything incorrectly!’

He took a few steps in silence, and then he added: 

’A heroic worker, too—­a passionate observer whose brain was crammed with science—­the temperament of a great artist endowed with admirable gifts.  And to think that he leaves nothing, nothing!’

‘Absolutely nothing, not a canvas,’ declared Bongrand.  ’I know nothing of his but rough drafts, sketches, notes carelessly jotted down, as it were, all that artistic paraphernalia which can’t be submitted to the public.  Yes, indeed, it is really a dead man, dead completely, who is about to be lowered into the grave.’

However, the painter and the novelist now had to hasten their steps, for they had got far behind the others while talking; and the hearse, after rolling past taverns and shops full of tombstones and crosses, was turning to the right into the short avenue leading to the cemetery.  They overtook it, and passed through the gateway with the little procession.  The priest in his surplice and the choirboy carrying the holy water receiver, who had both alighted from the mourning coach, walked on ahead.

It was a large flat cemetery, still in its youth, laid out by rule and line in the suburban waste land, and divided into squares by broad symmetrical paths.  A few raised tombs bordered the principal avenues, but most of the graves, already very numerous, were on a level with the soil.  They were hastily arranged temporary sepulchres, for five-year grants were the only ones to be obtained, and families hesitated to go to any serious expense.  Thus, the stones sinking into the ground for lack of foundations, the scrubby evergreens which had not yet had time to grow, all the provisional slop kind of mourning that one saw