flings up its fires, it comes to him from outside, inspired by
circumstances, by love, or rivalry, often by hatred, and more often
still by the imperious need of glory to be lived up to.

This group by Wenceslas was to his later works what the _Marriage of
the Virgin_ is to the great mass of Raphael's, the first step of a
gifted artist taken with the inimitable grace, the eagerness, and
delightful overflowingness of a child, whose strength is concealed
under the pink-and-white flesh full of dimples which seem to echo to a
mother's laughter. Prince Eugene is said to have paid four hundred
thousand francs for this picture, which would be worth a million to
any nation that owned no picture by Raphael, but no one would give
that sum for the finest of the frescoes, though their value is far
greater as works of art.

Hortense restrained her admiration, for she reflected on the amount of
her girlish savings; she assumed an air of indifference, and said to
the dealer:

"What is the price of that?"

"Fifteen hundred francs," replied the man, sending a glance of
intelligence to a young man seated on a stool in the corner.

The young man himself gazed in a stupefaction at Monsieur Hulot's
living masterpiece. Hortense, forewarned, at once identified him as
the artist, from the color that flushed a face pale with endurance;
she saw the spark lighted up in his gray eyes by her question; she
looked on the thin, drawn features, like those of a monk consumed by
asceticism; she loved the red, well-formed mouth, the delicate chin,