curious part of this narrative of M. Bernard's--Tanguy was the only
person in Paris who bought and owned pictures by Cézanne. He had
dozens of his canvases stacked away in the rear of his
establishment--Cézanne often parted with a canvas for a few francs.
When Tanguy was hard up he would go to some discerning amateur and
sell for two hundred francs pictures that to-day bring twenty thousand
francs. Tanguy hated to sell, especially his Cézannes. Artists came to
see them. His shop was the scene of many a wordy critical battle.
Gauguin uttered the paradox, "Nothing so resembles a daub as a
masterpiece," and the novelist Elémir Bourges cried, "This is the
painting of a vintager!" Alfred Stevens roared in the presence of the
Cézannes, Anquetin admired; but, as Bernard adds, Jacques Blanche
bought. So did Durand-Ruel, who has informed me that a fine Cézanne
to-day is a difficult fish to hook. The great public won't have him,
and the amateurs who adore him jealously hold on to their prizes.

The socialism of Père Tanguy was of a mild order. He pitied with a
Tolstoyan pity the sufferings of the poor. He did not hate the rich,
nor did he stand at street corners preaching the beauties of torch and
bomb. A simple soul, uneducated, not critical, yet with an instinctive
_flair_ for the coming triumphs of his young men, he espoused the
cause of his clients because they were poverty-stricken, unknown, and
revolutionists--an æsthetic revolution was his wildest dream. He said
of Cézanne that "Papa Cézanne always quits a picture before he
finishes it. If he moves he lets his canvases lie in the vacated
studio." He no doubt benefited by this carelessness of the painter.
Cézanne worked slowly, but he never stopped working; he left nothing
to hazard, and, astonishing fact, he spent every morning at the
Louvre. There he practised his daily scales, optically speaking,
before taking up the brush for the day's work. Many of Vincent von