heavy for my strength. But, never you fear, I'll take the subject up
again some day, when I know better, and I'll take up others, machines
which will knock them all cock-a-hoop with surprise.'

* In familiar conversation, French artists, playwrights, and
novelists invariably call their productions by the slang
term 'machines.'--ED.

He made a magnificent gesture, as if to sweep a whole crowd away;
emptied a tube of cobalt on his palette; and then began to jeer,
asking what his first master would say to a picture like this? His
first master indeed, Papa Belloque, a retired infantry captain, with
one arm, who for a quarter of a century had taught drawing to the
youth of Plassans in one of the galleries of the Museum! Then, in
Paris, hadn't the celebrated Berthou, the painter of 'Nero in the
Circus'--Berthou, whose lessons he had attended for six long months
--told him a score of times that he would never be able to do
anything? How he now regretted those six months wasted in idiotic
efforts, absurd 'studies,' under the iron rule of a man whose ideas
differed so much from his own. He at last began to hold forth against
working at the Louvre. He would, he said, sooner chop his hand off
than return there to spoil his perception of nature by undertaking one
of those copies which for ever dim the vision of the world in which
one lives.

Was there aught else in art than the rendering of what one felt within
oneself? Was not the whole of art reduced to placing a woman in front
of one--and then portraying her according to the feelings that she
inspired? Was not a bunch of carrots--yes, a bunch of carrots--studied
from nature, and painted unaffectedly, in a personal style, worth all