’Still, you might render us great service by defending our pictures before the committee,’ observed Claude.

’Oh, dear, no!  I should only make matters worse for you—­I don’t count; I’m nobody.’

There was a chorus of protestations; Fagerolles objected, in a shrill voice: 

‘Well, if the painter of “The Village Wedding” does not count—­’

But Bongrand was getting angry; he had risen, his cheeks afire.

’Eh?  Don’t pester me with “The Wedding”; I warn you I am getting sick of that picture.  It is becoming a perfect nightmare to me ever since it has been hung in the Luxembourg Museum.’

This ’Village Wedding’—­a party of wedding guests roaming through a corn-field, peasants studied from life, with an epic look of the heroes of Homer about them—­had so far remained his masterpiece.  The picture had brought about an evolution in art, for it had inaugurated a new formula.  Coming after Delacroix, and parallel with Courbet, it was a piece of romanticism tempered by logic, with more correctness of observation, more perfection in the handling.  And though it did not squarely tackle nature amidst the crudity of the open air, the new school claimed connection with it.

‘There can be nothing more beautiful,’ said Claude, ’than the two first groups, the fiddler, and then the bride with the old peasant.’

‘And the strapping peasant girl, too,’ added Mahoudeau; the one who is turning round and beckoning!  I had a great mind to take her for the model of a statue.’

‘And that gust of wind among the corn,’ added Gagniere, ’and the pretty bit of the boy and girl skylarking in the distance.’

Bongrand sat listening with an embarrassed air, and a smile of inward suffering; and when Fagerolles asked him what he was doing just then, he answered, with a shrug of his shoulders: 

’Well, nothing; some little things.  But I sha’n’t exhibit this time.  I should like to find a telling subject.  Ah, you fellows are happy at still being at the bottom of the hill.  A man has good legs then, he feels so plucky when it’s a question of getting up.  But when once he is a-top, the deuce take it! the worries begin.  A real torture, fisticuffs, efforts which must be constantly renewed, lest one should slip down too quickly.  Really now, one would prefer being below, for the pleasure of still having everything to do—­ Ah, you may laugh, but you’ll see it all for yourselves some day!’

They were indeed laughing, thinking it a paradox, or a little piece of affectation, which they excused.  To be hailed, like Bongrand, with the name of master—­was that not the height of bliss?  He, with his arms resting on the back of his chair, listened to them in silence, leisurely puffing his pipe, and renouncing the idea of trying to make them understand him.