ness of the morning cleared his mind. The wide prospect from the
heights of the Exhibition Hall seemed to blot out instantly the memories
of the night.

A wind from the mountains was blowing on the plateau near the
Hippodrome. As he walked against the wind, he felt a buzz in his ears,
like the distant roar of the sea. In the background, beyond the slopes
with their little red houses and wintry poplars, bare as broomsticks,
the mountains of Guadarrama stood out, luminously clear against the blue
sky, with their snowy crests and their huge peaks which seemed made of
salt. In the opposite direction, sunk in a deep cut, appeared the
covering of Madrid; the black roofs, the pointed towers--all indistinct
in a haze that gave the buildings in the background the vague blue of
the mountains.

The plateau, covered with wretched, thin grass, its furrows stiffly
frozen, flashed here and there in the sunlight. The bits of tile on the
ground, broken pieces of china and tin cans reflected the light as if
they were precious metals.

Renovales looked for a long while at the back of the Exhibition Palace;
the yellow walls trimmed with red brick which hardly rose above the edge
of the clearing; the flat zinc roofs, shining like dead seas; the
central cupola, huge, swollen, cutting the sky with its black curves,
like a balloon on the point of rising. From one wing of the Palace came
the sound of bugles, prolonging their warlike notes to the accompaniment
of the hoofbeats amid clouds of dust. Beside one door swords were
flashing and the sun was reflected on patent-leather hats.

The painter smiled. That palace had been erected for them, and now the
rural police occupied it. Once every two years Art entered it, claiming
the place from the horses of the guardians of peace. Statues were set up
in rooms that smelt of oats and stout shoes. But this anomaly did not
last long; the intruder was driven out, as soon as the place was
beginning to have a semblance of European culture, and there remained in
the Exhibition Palace the true, the national, the privileged police, the
sorry jades of holy authority which galloped down to the streets of
Madrid when its slothful peace was at rare intervals disturbed.

As the master looked at the black cupola, he remembered the days of
exhibitions; he saw the long-haired, anxious youths, now gentle and
flattering, now angry and iconoclastic, coming from all the cities of
Spain with their pictures under their