the voices had risen to a high pitch again. Fagerolles was telling a story.
‘Yes, old fellow; at the School they even correct Nature herself. The other day Mazel comes up to me and says: “Those two arms don’t correspond”; whereupon I reply: “Look for yourself, monsieur—the model’s are like that.” It was little Flore Beauchamp, you know. “Well,” Mazel furiously replies, “if she has them like that, it’s very wrong of her.” ’
They almost all shrieked, especially Claude, to whom Fagerolles told the story by way of paying court. For some time previously the younger artist had yielded to the elder’s influence; and although he continued to paint with purely tricky skill, he no longer talked of anything but substantial, thickly-painted work, of bits of nature thrown on to canvas, palpitating with life, such as they really were. This did not prevent him, though, from elsewhere chaffing the adepts of the open-air school, whom he accused of impasting with a kitchen ladle.
Dubuche, who had not laughed, his sense of rectitude being offended, made so bold as to reply:
‘Why do you stop at the School if you think you are being brutified there? It’s simple enough, one goes away—Oh, I know you are all against me, because I defend the School. But, you see, my idea is that, when a fellow wants to carry on a trade, it is not a bad thing for him to begin by learning it.’
Ferocious shouts arose at this, and Claude had need of all his authority to secure a hearing.
‘He is right. One must learn one’s trade. But it won’t do to learn it under the ferule of professors who want to cram their own views forcibly into your nut. That Mazel is a perfect idiot!’
He flung himself backward on the bed, on which he had been sitting, and with his eyes raised to the ceiling, he went on, in an excited tone:
‘Ah! life! life! to feel it and portray it in its reality, to love it for itself, to behold in it the only real, lasting, and changing beauty, without any idiotic idea of ennobling it by mutilation. To understand that all so-called ugliness is nothing but the mark of individual character, to create real men and endow them with life—yes, that’s the only way to become a god!’
His faith was coming back to him, the march across Paris had spurred him on once more; he was again seized by his passion for living flesh. They listened to him in silence. He made a wild gesture, then calmed down.
‘No doubt every one has his own ideas; but the annoyance is that at the Institute they are even more intolerant than we are. The hanging committee of the Salon is in their hands. I am sure that that idiot Mazel will refuse my picture.’
Thereupon they all broke out into imprecations, for this question of the hanging committee was the everlasting subject of their wrath. They demanded reforms; every one had a solution of the problem ready—from universal suffrage, applied to the election of a hanging committee, liberal in the widest sense of the word, down to unrestricted liberty, a Salon open to all exhibitors.*
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