ving to prove the virility of his decline.
The hatred he harboured against the 'Village Wedding,' that first
masterpiece which had weighed upon all his toilsome after-life, had
impelled him to select a contrasting but corresponding subject: the
'Village Funeral'--the funeral of a young girl, with relatives and
friends straggling among fields of rye and oats. Bongrand had wrestled
with himself, saying that people should see if he were done for, if the
experience of his sixty years were not worth all the lucky dash of his
youth; and now experience was defeated, the picture was destined to be
a mournful failure, like the silent fall of an old man, which does
not even stay passers-by in their onward course. There were still some
masterly bits, the choirboy holding the cross, the group of daughters
of the Virgin carrying the bier, whose white dresses and ruddy flesh
furnished a pretty contrast with the black Sunday toggery of the rustic
mourners, among all the green stuff; only the priest in his alb, the
girl carrying the Virgin's banner, the family following the body, were
drily handled; the whole picture, in fact, was displeasing in its very
science and the obstinate stiffness of its treatment. One found in it a
fatal, unconscious return to the troubled romanticism which had been the
starting-point of the painter's career. And the worst of the business
was that there was justification for the indifference with which the
public treated that art of another period, that cooked and somewhat dull
style of painting, which no longer stopped one on one's way, since great
blazes of light had come into vogue.

It precisely happened that Bongrand entered the gallery with the
hesitating step of a timid beginner, and Claude felt a pang at his heart
as he saw him give a glance at his neglected picture and then another
at Fagerolles', which was bringing on a riot. At that moment the old
painter must have been acutely conscious of his fall. If he had so
far been devoured by the fear of slow decline, it was because he still
doubted; and now he obtained sudden certainty; he was surviving his
reputation, his talent was dead, he would never more give birth to
living, palpitating works. He became very pale, and was about to turn
and flee, when Chambouvard, the sculptor, entering the gallery by the
other door, followed by his customary train of disciples, called to him
without caring a fig for the people present:

'Ah! you humbug, I catch you