one to move about
there. Being unable to advance, he looked around, and recognised a
number of painters, that nation of painters which was at home there
that day, and was therefore doing the honours of its abode. Claude
particularly remarked an old friend of the Boutin Studio--a young fellow
consumed with the desire to advertise himself, who had been working for
a medal, and who was now pouncing upon all the visitors possessed of any
influence and forcibly taking them to see his pictures. Then there was a
celebrated and wealthy painter who received his visitors in front of his
work with a smile of triumph on his lips, showing himself compromisingly
gallant with the ladies, who formed quite a court around him. And there
were all the others: the rivals who execrated one another, although they
shouted words of praise in full voices; the savage fellows who covertly
watched their comrades' success from the corner of a doorway; the timid
ones whom one could not for an empire induce to pass through the
gallery where their pictures were hung; the jokers who hid the bitter
mortification of their defeat under an amusing witticism; the sincere
ones who were absorbed in contemplation, trying to understand the
various works, and already in fancy distributing the medals. And
the painters' families were also there. One charming young woman was
accompanied by a coquettishly bedecked child; a sour-looking, skinny
matron of middle-class birth was flanked by two ugly urchins in black;
a fat mother had foundered on a bench amid quite a tribe of dirty brats;
and a lady of mature charms, still very good-looking, stood beside her
grown-up daughter, quietly watching a hussy pass--this hussy being the
father's mistress. And then there were also the models--women who pulled
one another by the sleeve, who showed one another their own forms in the
various pictorial nudities, talking very loudly the while and dressed
without taste, spoiling their superb figures by such wretched gowns
that they seemed to be hump-backed beside the well-dressed dolls--those
Parisiennes who owed their figures entirely to their dressmakers.

When Claude got free of the crowd, he enfiladed the line of doorways
on the right hand. His letter was on that side; but he searched the
galleries marked with an L without finding anything. Perhaps his canvas
had gone astray and served to fill up a vacancy elsewhere. So when he
had reached the large eastern gallery, he set off along