You look all there in it.
Oh, the brutes, I'll just see whether they'll refuse me this time. I am
more severe for myself than they are for themselves, I'm sure of it; and
whenever I pass one of my own pictures, it's more serious than if it had
passed before all the hanging committees on earth. You know my picture
of the markets, with the two urchins tumbling about on a heap of
vegetables? Well, I've scratched it all out, it didn't come right. I
found that I had got hold of a beastly machine,* a deal too heavy for my
strength. But, never you fear, I'll take the subject up again some day,
when I know better, and I'll take up others, machines which will knock
them all cock-a-hoop with surprise.'

* In familiar conversation, French artists, playwrights, and
novelists invariably call their productions by the slang
term 'machines.'--ED.

He made a magnificent gesture, as if to sweep a whole crowd away;
emptied a tube of cobalt on his palette; and then began to jeer, asking
what his first master would say to a picture like this? His first master
indeed, Papa Belloque, a retired infantry captain, with one arm, who for
a quarter of a century had taught drawing to the youth of Plassans
in one of the galleries of the Museum! Then, in Paris, hadn't the
celebrated Berthou, the painter of 'Nero in the Circus'--Berthou, whose
lessons he had attended for six long months--told him a score of times
that he would never be able to do anything? How he now regretted those
six months wasted in idiotic efforts, absurd 'studies,' under the iron
rule of a man whose ideas differed so much from his own. He at last
began to hold forth against working at the Louvre. He would, he said,
sooner chop his hand off than return there to spoil his perception of
nature by undertaking one of those copies which for ever dim the vision
of the world in which one lives.

Was there aught else in art than the rendering of what one felt within
oneself? Was not the whole of art reduced to placing a woman in front
of one--and then portraying her according to the feelings that she
inspired? Was not a bunch of carrots--yes, a bunch of carrots--studied
from nature, and painted unaffectedly, in a personal style, worth all
the ever-lasting smudges of the School of Arts, all that tobacco-juice
painting, cooked up according to certain given recipes? The day would
come when one carrot, originally rendered, would lead to a revolution.
It was because of this that