then I saw the fat Provençal. But just as if he had seen me yesterday he
said, "_Tiens! c'est vous; une deme tasse? oui ... garçon, une deme
tasse._" Presently the conversation turned on Marshall; they had not
seen much of him lately. "_Il parait qu'il est plus amoureux que
jamais,_" Julien replied sardonically.

I found my friend in large furnished apartments on the ground floor in the
Rue Duphot. The walls were stretched with blue silk, there were large
mirrors and great gilt cornices. Passing into the bedroom I found the young
god wallowing in the finest of fine linen--in a great Louis XV. bed, and
there were cupids above him. "Holloa! what, you back again, Dayne? we
thought we weren't going to see you again."

"It's nearly one o'clock: get up. What's the news?"

"To-day is the opening of the exposition of the Impressionists. We'll have
a bit of breakfast round the corner, at Durant's, and we'll go on there. I
hear that Bedlam is nothing to it; there is a canvas there twenty feet
square and in three tints: pale yellow for the sunlight, brown for the
shadows, and all the rest is sky-blue. There is, I am told, a lady walking
in the foreground with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is said to be
three yards long."

And so we went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that willingly forfeit all
delights of the world in the hope of realising a new aestheticism; we went
insolent with patent leather shoes and bright kid gloves and armed with all
the jargon of the school. "_Cette jambe ne porte pas;_" "_la nature
ne se fait pas comme ça;_" "_on dessine par les masses; combien de
têtes?_" "_Sept et demi._" "_Si j'avais un morceau de craie je
mettrais celle-là dans un bocal, c'est un foetus,_" etc.; in a word, all