"And that is not what you dreamed of, poor little puss!" said Lisbeth,
kissing Hortense on the brow. "You expected to find a gentleman, a
leader of Art, the chief of all living sculptors.--But that is poetry,
you see, a dream requiring fifty thousand francs a year, and you have
only two thousand four hundred--so long as I live. After my death
three thousand."

A few tears rose to Hortense's eyes, and Lisbeth drank them with her
eyes as a cat laps milk.

This is the story of their honeymoon--the tale will perhaps not be
lost on some artists.

Intellectual work, labor in the upper regions of mental effort, is one
of the grandest achievements of man. That which deserves real glory in
Art--for by Art we must understand every creation of the mind--is
courage above all things--a sort of courage of which the vulgar have
no conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.

Driven by the dreadful stress of poverty, goaded by Lisbeth, and kept
by her in blinders, as a horse is, to hinder it from seeing to the
right and left of its road, lashed on by that hard woman, the
personification of Necessity, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born
poet and dreamer, had gone on from conception to execution, and
overleaped, without sounding it, the gulf that divides these two
hemispheres of Art. To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a
delightful occupation. It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the
life of a courtesan who follows her own fancy. The work then floats in
all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the
fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juices of a fruit