ted out with exclamations and mimicry of a connoisseur's
energy. All types of artists were to be seen--tall men with long hair,
wearing hats of mouse-gray or black and of indescribable shapes,
large and round like roofs, with their turned-down brims shadowing
the wearer's whole chest. Others were short, active, slight or stocky,
wearing foulard cravats and round jackets, or the sack-like garment of
the singular costume peculiar to this class of painters.

There was the clan of the fashionables, of the curious, and of artists
of the boulevard; the clan of Academicians, correct, and decorated
with red rosettes, enormous or microscopic, according to individual
conception of elegance and good form; the clan of bourgeois painters,
assisted by the family surrounding the father like a triumphal chorus.

On the four great walls the canvases admitted to the honor of the
square salon dazzled one at the very entrance by their brilliant tones,
glittering frames, the crudity of new color, vivified by fresh varnish,
blinding under the pitiless light poured from above.

The portrait of the President of the Republic faced the entrance; while
on another wall a general bedizened with gold lace, sporting a hat
decorated with ostrich plumes, and wearing red cloth breeches, hung in
pleasant proximity to some naked nymphs under a willow-tree, and near
by was a vessel in distress almost engulfed by a great wave. A bishop
of the early Church excommunicating a barbarian king, an Oriental street
full of dead victims of the plague, and the Shade of Dante in Hell,
seized and captivated the eye with irresistible fascination.

Other paintings in the immense room were a charge of cavalry;
sharpshooters in a wood; cows in a pasture; two noblemen of the
eighteenth century fighting a duel on a street corner; a madwoman
sitting on a wall; a priest administering the last rites to a dying man;
harvesters, rivers, a sunset, a moonlight effect--in short, samples of
everything that artists paint, have painted, and will paint until the
end of the world.

Olivier, in the midst of a group of celebrated brother painters, members
of the Institute and of the jury, exchanged opinions with them. He
was oppressed by a certain uneasiness, a dissatisfaction with his own
exhibited work, of the success of which he was very doubtful, in spite
of the warm congratulations he had received.

Suddenly he sprang forward; the Duchesse de Mortemain had appeared at
the main e