ightforward stuff. I'll show you, among other things, a
tasty, spicy little Baudouin that would make your mouth water."

At this speech Gaetan made off. As he descended the church steps and
turned down the Rue Princesse, he found himself accompanied by old
Sariette, and fell to unburdening himself to him, as he would have done
to any human creature, or indeed to a tree, a lamp-post, a dog, or his
own shadow, of the indignation with which the aesthetic theories of the
old painter inspired him.

"Old Guinardon overdoes it with his Christian art and his Primitives!
Whatever the artist conceives of Heaven is borrowed from earth; God, the
Virgin, the Angels, men and women, saints, the light, the clouds. When
he was designing figures for the chapel windows at Dreux, old Ingres
drew from life a pure, fine study of a woman, which may be seen, among
many others, in the Musee Bonnat at Bayonne. Old Ingres had written at
the bottom of the page in case he should forget: 'Mademoiselle Cecile,
admirable legs and thighs'--and so as to make Mademoiselle Cecile into a
saint in Paradise, he gave her a robe, a cloak, a veil, inflicting thus
a shameful decline in her estate, for the tissues of Lyons and Genoa are
worthless compared with the youthful living tissue, rosy with pure
blood; the most beautiful draperies are despicable compared with the
lines of a beautiful body. In fact, clothing for flesh that is desirable
and ripe for wedlock is an unmerited shame, and the worst of
humiliations"; and Gaetan, walking carelessly in the gutter of the Rue
Garanciere, continued: "Old Guinardon is a pestilential idiot. He
blasphemes Antiquity, sacred Antiquity, the age when the gods were kind.
He exalts an epoch when the painter and the sculptor had all their
lessons to learn over again. In point of fact, Christianity has run
contrary to art in so much as it has not favoured the study of the nude.
Art is the representation of nature, and nature is pre-eminently the
human body; it is the nude."

"Pardon, pardon," purred old Sariette. "There is such a thing as
spiritual, or, as one might term it, inward beauty, which, since the
days of Fra Angelico down to those of Hippolyte Flandrin, Christian art
has--"

But Gaetan, never hearing a word of all this, went on hurling his
impetuous observations at the stones of the old street and the
snow-laden clouds overhead:

"The Primitives cannot be judged as a whole, for they are utterly unlike
each other.