artistic creator of the romantic and grotesque), had transferred the
subject of the master; but he had left subordinate the landscape and the
giant, to concentrate all his art on the person of the nymph. Middle-
aged was the painter, in truth; but he looked old. His hair, though
long, was gray and thin; his face was bloated by intemperance; and his
hand trembled much, though, from habit, no trace of the tremor was
visible in his work.

A boy, near at hand, was also employed on the same subject, with a rough
chalk and a bold freedom of touch. He was sketching his design of a
Galatea and Polyphemus on the wall; for the wall was only whitewashed,
and covered already with the multiform vagaries whether of master or
pupils,--caricatures and demigods, hands and feet, torsos and monsters,
and Venuses. The rude creations, all mutilated, jarring, and mingled,
gave a cynical, mocking, devil-may-care kind of aspect to the sanctum of
art. It was like the dissection-room of the anatomist. The boy's sketch
was more in harmony with the walls of the studio than the canvas of the
master. His nymph, accurately drawn, from the undressed proportions of
the model, down to the waist, terminated in the scales of a fish. The
forked branches of the trees stretched weird and imp-like as the hands of
skeletons. Polyphemus, peering over the rocks, had the leer of a demon;
and in his gross features there was a certain distorted, hideous likeness
of the grave and symmetrical lineaments of Olivier Dalibard.

All around was slovenly, squalid, and poverty-stricken,--rickety, worn-
out, rush-bottom chairs; unsold, unfinished pictures, pell-mell in the
corner, covered with dust; broken casts of plaster; a lay-figure battered
in its basket-work arms, with its doll-like face all smudged and
besmeared. A pot of porter and a noggin of gin on a stained deal table,
accompanied by two or three broken, smoke-blackened pipes, some tattered