ry. Indeed, from its constant journeying back and forth, from the
artist's studio to the Musee, and from the Musee to the studio, the
painting knew the road so well that one needed only to set it on rollers
and it would have been quite capable of reaching the Louvre alone. Marcel,
who had repainted the picture ten times, and minutely gone over it from
top to bottom, vowed that only a personal hostility on the part of the
members of the jury could account for the ostracism which annually turned
him away from the Salon, and in his idle moments he had composed, in honor
of those watch-dogs of the Institute, a little dictionary of insults, with
illustrations of a savage irony. This collection gained celebrity and
enjoyed, among the studios and in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the same sort
of popular success as that achieved by the immortal complaint of Giovanni
Bellini, painter by appointment to the Grand Sultan of the Turks; every
dauber in Paris had a copy stored away in his memory.

For a long time Marcel had not allowed himself to be discouraged by the
emphatic refusal which greeted him at each exposition. He was comfortably
settled in his opinion that his picture was, in a modest way, the
companion piece long awaited by the "Wedding of Cana," that gigantic
masterpiece whose dazzling splendor the dust of three centuries has not
dimmed. Accordingly, each year, at the time of the Salon, Marcel sent his
picture to be examined by the jury. Only, in order to throw the examiners
off the track and if possible to make them abandon the policy of exclusion
which they seemed to have adopted toward the "Passage of the Red Sea,"
Marcel, without in any way disturbing the general scheme of his picture,
modified certain details and changed its title.

For instance, on one occasion it arrived before the jury under the name of
the "Passage of the Rubicon!" but Pharaoh, poorly disguised under Caesar's
mantle, was recognized and repulsed with all the honors that were his due.

The following year, Marcel spread over the level plane of his picture a
layer of white representing snow, planted a pine-tree in one corner, and
clothing an Egyptian as a grenadier of the Imperial Guard, rechristened
the painting the "Passage of the Beresina."

The jury, which on that very day had polished its spectacles on the lining
of its illustrious coat, was not in any way taken in by this new ruse. It
recognized perfectly well the persistent painting, above all b