ting one
after the other that he had always refused to learn his art. Idle! good
heavens! why, I have seen him faint with fatigue after sittings ten
hours long; he gave his whole life to his work, and killed himself in
his passion for toil! And they call him ignorant--how idiotic! They
will never understand that the individual gift which a man brings in
his nature is superior to all acquired knowledge. Delacroix also was
ignorant of his profession in their eyes, simply because he could not
confine himself to hard and fast rules! Ah! the ninnies, the slavish
pupils who are incapable of painting anything incorrectly!'

He took a few steps in silence, and then he added:

'A heroic worker, too--a passionate observer whose brain was crammed
with science--the temperament of a great artist endowed with admirable
gifts. And to think that he leaves nothing, nothing!'

'Absolutely nothing, not a canvas,' declared Bongrand. 'I know nothing
of his but rough drafts, sketches, notes carelessly jotted down, as it
were, all that artistic paraphernalia which can't be submitted to the
public. Yes, indeed, it is really a dead man, dead completely, who is
about to be lowered into the grave.'

However, the painter and the novelist now had to hasten their steps, for
they had got far behind the others while talking; and the hearse, after
rolling past taverns and shops full of tombstones and crosses, was
turning to the right into the short avenue leading to the cemetery. They
overtook it, and passed through the gateway with the little procession.
The priest in his surplice and the choirboy carrying the holy water
receiver, who had both alighted from the mourning coach, walked on
ahead.

It was a large flat cemetery, still in its youth, laid out by rule
and line in the suburban waste land, and divided into squares by broad
symmetrical paths. A few raised tombs bordered the principal avenues,
but most of the graves, already very numerous, were on a level with the
soil. They were hastily arranged temporary sepulchres, for five-year
grants were the only ones to be obtained, and families hesitated to go
to any serious expense. Thus, the stones sinking into the ground for
lack of foundations, the scrubby evergreens which had not yet had time
to grow, all the provisional slop kind of mourning that one saw there,
imparted to that vast field of repose a look of poverty and cold, clean,
dismal bareness like that of a barracks or a hospital. There w