no lack of subjects. Life such as it runs about the streets, the life
of the rich and the poor, in the market places, on the race-courses,
on the boulevards, in the populous alleys; and every trade being
plied, and every passion portrayed in full daylight, and the peasants,
too, and the beasts of the fields and the landscapes--ah! you'll see
it all, unless I am a downright brute. My very hands are itching to do
it. Yes! the whole of modern life! Frescoes as high as the Pantheon! A
series of canvases big enough to burst the Louvre!'

Whenever they were thrown together the painter and the author
generally reached this state of excitement. They spurred each other
mutually, they went mad with dreams of glory; and there was such a
burst of youth, such a passion for work about their plans, that they
themselves often smiled afterwards at those great, proud dreams which
seemed to endow them with suppleness, strength, and spirit.

Claude, who had stepped back as far as the wall, remained leaning
against it, and gazing at his work. Seeing which, Sandoz, overcome by
fatigue, left the couch and joined him. Then both looked at the
picture without saying a word. The gentleman in the velveteen jacket
was entirely roughed in. His hand, more advanced than the rest,
furnished a pretty fresh patch of flesh colour amid the grass, and the
dark coat stood out so vigorously that the little silhouettes in the
background, the two little women wrestling in the sunlight, seemed to
have retreated further into the luminous quivering of the glade. The
principal figure, the recumbent woman, as yet scarcely more than
outlined, floated about like some aerial creature seen in dreams, some
eagerly desired Eve springing from the earth, with her features
vaguely smiling and her eyelids closed.