The cart was slowly making its way up the incline.  At this early hour of the morning the avenue, with its double lines of iron chairs on either pathway, and its lawns, dotted with flowerbeds and clumps of shrubbery, stretching away under the blue shadows of the trees, was quite deserted; however, at the Rond-Point a lady and gentleman on horseback passed the cart at a gentle trot.  Florent, who had made himself a pillow with a bundle of cabbage-leaves, was still gazing at the sky, in which a far-stretching rosy glow was appearing.  Every now and then he would close his eyes, the better to enjoy the fresh breeze of the morning as it fanned his face.  He was so happy to escape from the markets, and travel on through the pure air, that he remained speechless, and did not even listen to what was being said around him.

“And then, too, what fine jokers are those fellows who imprison art in a toy-box!” resumed Claude, after a pause.  “They are always repeating the same idiotic words:  ‘You can’t create art out of science,’ says one; ‘Mechanical appliances kill poetry,’ says another; and a pack of fools wail over the fate of the flowers, as though anybody wished the flowers any harm!  I’m sick of all such twaddle; I should like to answer all that snivelling with some work of open defiance.  I should take a pleasure in shocking those good people.  Shall I tell you what was the finest thing I ever produced since I first began to work, and the one which I recall with the greatest pleasure?  It’s quite a story.  When I was at my Aunt Lisa’s on Christmas Eve last year that idiot of an Auguste, the assistant, was setting out the shop-window.  Well, he quite irritated me by the weak, spiritless way in which he arranged the display; and at last I requested him to take himself off, saying that I would group the things myself in a proper manner.  You see, I had plenty of bright colours to work with—­the red of the tongues, the yellow of the hams, the blue of the paper shavings, the rosy pink of the things that had been cut into, the green of the sprigs of heath, and the black of the black-puddings—­ah! a magnificent black, which I have never managed to produce on my palette.  And naturally, the crepine, the small sausages, the chitterlings, and the crumbed trotters provided me with delicate greys and browns.  I produced a perfect work of art.  I took the dishes, the plates, the pans, and the jars, and arranged the different colours; and I devised a wonderful picture of still life, with subtle scales of tints leading up to brilliant flashes of colour.  The red tongues seemed to thrust themselves out like greedy flames, and the black-puddings, surrounded by pale sausages, suggested a dark night fraught with terrible indigestion.  I had produced, you see, a picture symbolical of the gluttony of Christmas Eve, when people meet and sup—­the midnight feasting, the ravenous gorging of stomachs void and faint after all the singing of hymns.[*] At the top of everything a huge turkey exhibited its