artificial blending of the colours on the palette--a tone that is the
exact equivalent of one of Nature's tones, for it has been obtained in
exactly the same way."

Truly a subject difficult to write about in English. Perhaps it is one
that should not be attempted anywhere except in a studio with closed
doors. But if I did not make some attempt to explain this matter, I
should leave my tale of the decline and fall of French art in the
nineteenth century incomplete.

Roughly speaking, these new schools--the symbolists, the decadents,
the dividers of tones, the professors of the rhythm of gesture--date
back about ten years. For ten years the division of the tones has been
the subject of discussion in the aesthetic circles of Montmartre. And
when we penetrate further into the matter--or, to be more exact, as we
ascend into the higher regions of _La Butte_--we find the elect, who
form so stout a phalanx against the Philistinism of the Louvre,
themselves subdivided into numerous sections, and distraught with
internecine feuds concerning the principle of the art which they
pursue with all the vehemence that Veronese green and cadmium yellow
are capable of. From ten at night till two in the morning the
_brasseries_ of the Butte are in session. Ah! the interminable bocks
and the reek of the cigars, until at last a hesitating exodus begins.
An exhausted proprietor at the head of his waiters, crazed with
sleepiness, eventually succeeds in driving these noctambulist apostles
into the streets.

Then the nervous lingering at the corner! The disputants, anxious and
yet loth to part, say goodbye, each regretting that he had not urged
some fresh argument--an argument which had just occurred to him, and