had preserved
the likeness, and at the same time conferred more beauty on the
original. The last remark, of course, was prompted by a slight tinge of
envy. The artist was suddenly overwhelmed with work. It seemed as if the
whole city wanted to be painted by him. The door-bell rang incessantly.
From one point of view, this might be considered advantageous, as
presenting to him endless practice in variety and number of faces. But,
unfortunately, they were all people who were hard to get along with,
either busy, hurried people, or else belonging to the fashionable
world, and consequently more occupied than any one else, and therefore
impatient to the last degree. In all quarters, the demand was merely
that the likeness should be good and quickly executed. The artist
perceived that it was a simple impossibility to finish his work; that it
was necessary to exchange power of treatment for lightness and rapidity,
to catch only the general expression, and not waste labour on delicate
details.

Moreover, nearly all of his sitters made stipulations on various points.
The ladies required that mind and character should be represented in
their portraits; that all angles should be rounded, all unevenness
smoothed away, and even removed entirely if possible; in short, that
their faces should be such as to cause every one to stare at them with
admiration, if not fall in love with them outright. When they sat to
him, they sometimes assumed expressions which greatly amazed the artist;
one tried to express melancholy; another, meditation; a third wanted to
make her mouth appear small on any terms, and puckered it up to such an
extent that it finally looked like a spot about as big as a pinhead.
And in spite of all this, they demanded of him good likenesses and
unconstrained naturalness. The men were no better: one insisted on being
painted with an energetic, muscular turn to his head; another, with
upturned, inspired eyes; a lieutenant of the guard demanded that Mars
should be visible in his eyes; an official in the civil service drew
himself up to his full height in order to have his uprightness expressed
in his face, and that his hand might rest on a book bearing the words in
plain characters, "He always stood up for the right."

At first such demands threw the artist into a cold perspiration. Finally
he acquired the knack of it, and never troubled himself at all about
it. He understood at a word how each wanted himself portrayed. If a