him to accept all risks, seeking perfection always, although his work
may be lost in the pursuit.

My readers, who are all Balzacians, are already thinking of Porbus
and Poussin standing before _le chef d'oeuvre Inconnu_ in the studio
of Mabuse's famous pupil--Frenhofer. Nobody has seen this picture
for ten years; Frenhofer has been working on it in some distant
studio, and it is now all but finished. But the old man thinks that
some Eastern woman might furnish him with some further hint, and is
about to start on his quest when his pupil Porbus persuades him that
the model he is seeking is Poussin's mistress. Frenhofer agrees to
reveal his mistress (_i.e._, his picture) on condition that Poussin
persuades his mistress to sit to him for an hour, for he would
compare her loveliness with his art. These conditions having been
complied with, he draws aside the curtain; but the two painters see
only confused colour and incoherent form, and in one corner "a
delicious foot, a living foot escaped by a miracle from a slow and
progressive destruction."

In the first edition of "Evelyn Innes" (I think the passage has been
dropped out of the second) Ulick Dean says that one should be
careful what one writes, for what one writes will happen. Well,
perhaps what Balzac wrote has happened, and I may have done no more
than to realise one of his most famous characters.

G.M.



SISTER TERESA