earily through the galleries of the
Louvre, leaning on the arm of her uncle, who invariably repeated before
the same pictures, in the loud and bombastic tone of a _comediante_, the
same opinions, and grew enthusiastic and excited according as the
pictures of the masters agreed with his _style_, his _system_, his
_creed_. One should hear him run the gamut of all his great phrases: My
_sys-tem!_ Marianne knew when the expression was coming. All these
Flemish painters! Painters of snuff-boxes, without any ideal, without
grasp! "And the Titian, look at this Titian! Where is _thought_
expressed in this Titian? And _mo-ral-i-ty?_ Titian! A vendor of pink
flesh! Art should have a majesty, a dignity, a purity, an ideality very
different."

Ah! these words in _ty_, solemn, bombastic, pedantic, with a false ring,
they entered Marianne's ears like burning injections.

These visits to the museum impressed her with a gloom such as a ramble
in a cemetery would create, she returned to the house with depressing
headaches and muttering wrathful imprecations against destiny. She even
preferred that studio with its worn-out divans and its worm-eaten
tapestries that were slowly shredding away.

There, at least, she was all alone, face to face with herself, consumed
by a cowardly fear--the fear of the future--this young girl who had read
everything, learned everything, understood everything, knew everything,
sullied by all the jokes of the Kayser studio, which, in spite of the
exalted, sacrosanct, aesthetic discussions which took place therein,
sometimes shockingly resembled a smoking-room--this physical virgin
without any virginity of mind, could there take refuge in herself, and
there in the solitude to which she was condemned, she questioned herself
as to the end to which her present life would lead her.

Of dowry she had none. Her father had left her nothing. Kayser was poor
and in debt. She had no occupation. To run about giving private lessons
on the piano, seemed to Marianne to degrade her almost to the level of
domestic service. Those who wished to pose for the Montyon prize might
do so! She never would!

Ah! what sufferings! what would be the end of such a life? Marriage? But
who desired her? One of those talentless painters, who ventilated at
Kayser's house, not merely their contemptuous theories, but also their
down-at-the-heel shoes? To fall from one Bohemian condition to another,
from exigency to want, to be the wife of on