roof, presented to the eye those vast proportions which surprise
inquirers when, after attaining sixty feet above the ground-floor,
they expect to find an artist squeezed into a gutter.

This gallery, so to speak, was profusely lighted from above, through
enormous panes of glass furnished with those green linen shades by
means of which all artists arrange the light. A quantity of
caricatures, heads drawn at a stroke, either in color or with the
point of a knife, on walls painted in a dark gray, proved that,
barring a difference in expression, the most distinguished young girls
have as much fun and folly in their minds as men. A small stove with a
large pipe, which described a fearful zigzag before it reached the
upper regions of the roof, was the necessary and infallible ornament
of the room. A shelf ran round the walls, on which were models in
plaster, heterogeneously placed, most of them covered with gray dust.
Here and there, above this shelf, a head of Niobe, hanging to a nail,
presented her pose of woe; a Venus smiled; a hand thrust itself
forward like that of a pauper asking alms; a few "ecorches," yellowed
by smoke, looked like limbs snatched over-night from a graveyard;
besides these objects, pictures, drawings, lay figures, frames without
paintings, and paintings without frames gave to this irregular
apartment that studio physiognomy which is distinguished for its
singular jumble of ornament and bareness, poverty and riches, care and
neglect. The vast receptacle of an "atelier," where all seems small,
even man, has something of the air of an Opera "coulisse"; here lie
ancient garments, gilded armor, fragments of stuffs, machinery. And
yet there is something mysteriously grand, like thought, in it; genius
and death are there; Diana and Apollo beside a skull or skeleton,
beauty and destruction, poesy and reality, colors glowing in the
shadows, often a whole drama, motionless and silent. Strange symbol of