Steinbock, desperately in love with her husband cursed the War
Minister. She went to see him; she told him that great works of art
were not to be manufactured like cannon; and that the State--like
Louis XIV., Francis I., and Leo X.--ought to be at the beck and call
of genius. Poor Hortense, believing she held a Phidias in her embrace,
had the sort of motherly cowardice for her Wenceslas that is in every
wife who carries her love to the pitch of idolatry.

"Do not be hurried," said she to her husband, "our whole future life
is bound up with that statue. Take your time and produce a
masterpiece."

She would go to the studio, and then the enraptured Steinbock wasted
five hours out of seven in describing the statue instead of working at
it. He thus spent eighteen months in finishing the design, which to
him was all-important.

When the plaster was cast and the model complete, poor Hortense, who
had looked on at her husband's toil, seeing his health really suffer
from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor's frame and arms and hands
--Hortense thought the result admirable. Her father, who knew nothing
of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a
triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by
them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a
favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.

Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon
took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were
indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried
to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a