y powers into no commonplace
guilt.

The charm is concluded, the circle closed round; the self-guided seeker
after knowledge has gained the fiend for the familiar.

CHAPTER X. THE RECONCILIATION BETWEEN FATHER AND SON.

We pass over an interval of some months.

A painter stood at work at the easel, his human model before him. He
was employed on a nymph,--the Nymph Galatea. The subject had been taken
before by Salvator, whose genius found all its elements in the
wild rocks, gnarled, fantastic trees, and gushing waterfalls of the
landscape; in the huge ugliness of Polyphemus the lover; in the grace
and suavity and unconscious abandonment of the nymph, sleeking her
tresses dripping from the bath. The painter, on a larger canvas (for
Salvator's picture, at least the one we have seen, is among the small
sketches of the great artistic creator of the romantic and grotesque),
had transferred the subject of the master; but he had left subordinate
the landscape and the giant, to concentrate all his art on the person of
the nymph. Middle-aged was the painter, in truth; but he looked old.
His hair, though long, was gray and thin; his face was bloated by
intemperance; and his hand trembled much, though, from habit, no trace
of the tremor was visible in his work.

A boy, near at hand, was also employed on the same subject, with a rough
chalk and a bold freedom of touch. He was sketching his design of a
Galatea and Polyphemus on the wall; for the wall was only whitewashed,
and covered already with the multiform vagaries whether of master or
pupils,--caricatures and demigods, hands and feet, torsos and monsters,
and Venuses. The rude creations, all mutilated, jarring, and mingled,
gave a cynical, mocking, devil-may-care kind of aspect to the sanctum of
art. It was like the dissection-room of the anatomist. The boy's sketch
was more in harmony with the walls of the studio than the canvas of the
master. His nymph, accurately drawn, from the undressed proportions of
the model, down to the waist, terminated in the scales of a fish. The
forked branches of the trees stretched weird and imp-like as the hands
of skeletons. Polyphemus, peering over the rocks, had the leer of a
demon; and in his gross features there was a certain distorted, hideous
likeness of the grave and symmetrical lineaments of Olivier Dalibard.

All around was slovenly, squalid, and poverty-stricken,--rickety,
worn-out, rush-bottom chairs; unsold, unfinished pi