the skies with yellow and the earth with blue
shadow,--is another piece of painting that will one day find a place in one
of the public galleries; and the same can be said of the portrait of the
woman on a background of chintz flowers.

We could but utter coarse gibes and exclaim, "What could have induced him
to paint such things? surely he must have seen that it was absurd. I wonder
if the Impressionists are in earnest or if it is only _une blague qu'on
nous fait?_" Then we stood and screamed at Monet, that most exquisite
painter of blonde light. We stood before the "Turkeys," and seriously we
wondered if "it was serious work,"--that _chef d'oeuvre!_ the high
grass that the turkeys are gobbling is flooded with sunlight so swift and
intense that for a moment the illusion is complete. "Just look at the
house! why, the turkeys couldn't walk in at the door. The perspective is
all wrong." Then followed other remarks of an educational kind; and when we
came to those piercingly personal visions of railway stations by the same
painter,--those rapid sensations of steel and vapour,--our laughter knew no
bounds. "I say, Marshall, just look at this wheel; he dipped his brush into
cadmium yellow and whisked it round, that's all." Nor did we understand any
more Renoir's rich sensualities of tone; nor did the mastery with which he
achieves an absence of shadow appeal to us. You see colour and light in his
pictures as you do in nature, and the child's criticism of a portrait--"Why
is one side of the face black?" is answered. There was a half length nude
figure of a girl. How the round fresh breasts palpitate in the light! such
a glorious glow of whiteness was attained never before. But we saw nothing
except that the eyes were out of drawing.

For art was not for us then as it is now,--a mere emotion, right or wrong
only in proportion to its intensity; we believed then in the grammar of
art, perspective, anatomy, and _la jambe qui porte_; and we found all
this in Julien's studio.

A year passed; a year of art and dissipation--one part art, two parts
dissipation. We mounted and descended at pleasure the rounds of society's
ladder. One evening we would spend at Constant's, Rue de la Gaiete, in the
company of thieves and housebreakers; on the following evening we were
dining with a duchess or a princess in the Champs Elysees. And we prided
ourselves vastly on our versatility in using with equal facility the
language of the "fence's" parl