This old madman confounds them all together. Cimabue is a
corrupt Byzantine, Giotto gives hints of powerful genius, but his
modelling is bad, and, like children, he gives all his characters the
same face. The early Italians have grace and joy, because they are
Italians. The Venetians have an instinct for fine colour. But when all
is said and done these exquisite craftsmen enamel and gild rather than
paint. There is far too much softness about the heart and the colouring
of your saintly Angelico for me. As for the Flemish school, that's quite
another pair of shoes. They can use their hands, and in glory of
workmanship they are on a level with the Chinese lacquer-workers. The
technique of the brothers Van Eyck is a marvel, but I cannot discover in
their Adoration of the Lamb the charm and mystery that some have
vaunted. Everything in it is treated with a pitiless perfection; it is
vulgar in feeling and cruelly ugly. Memling may touch one perhaps; but
he creates nothing but sick wretches and cripples; under the heavy,
rich, and ungraceful robing of his virgins and saints one divines some
very lamentable anatomy. I did not wait for Rogier van der Wyden to call
himself Roger de la Pasture and turn Frenchman in order to prefer him to
Memling. This Rogier or Roger is less of a ninny; but then he is more
lugubrious, and the rigidity of his lines bears eloquent testimony to
his poverty-stricken figures. It is a strange perversion to take
pleasure in these carnivalesque figures when one can have the paintings
of Leonardo, Titian, Correggio, Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin,
or Prud'hon. Really it is a perverted instinct."

Meanwhile the Abbe Patouille and Maurice d'Esparvieu were strolling
leisurely along in the wake of the esthete and the librarian. As a
general rule the Abbe Patouille was little inclined to talk theology
with laymen, or, for that matter, with clerics either. Carried away,
however, by the attractiveness of the subject, he was telling the
youthful Maurice all about the sacred mission of those guardian angels
which Monsieur Delacroix had so inopportunely excluded from his picture.
And in order to give more adequate expression to his thoughts on such
lofty themes, the Abbe Patouille borrowed whole phrases and sentences
from Bossuet. He had got them up by heart to put in his sermons, for he
adhered strongly to tradition.

"Yes, my son," he was saying, "God has appointed tutelary spirits to be
near us. They com