seeing his health really suffer
from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor's frame and arms and
hands--Hortense thought the result admirable. Her father, who knew
nothing of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a
triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by
them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a
favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.

Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon
took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were
indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried
to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a
newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy. Stidmann, the best of
good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was
contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works
in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be the
test.

"In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble," wrote Claude Vignon, "a
masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful. The plaster
is the manuscript, the marble is the book."

So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son.
The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.

The clock for the Prince and the price of the statue paid off the young
couple's debts. Steinbock had acquired fashionable habits; he went to
the play, to the opera; he talked admirably about art; and in the eyes
of the world he maintained his reputation as a great artist by his
powers of conversation and criticism. There are many clever men in Paris
who spend their lives in talking themselves out, and are content with a
sort of drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating these emasculated
but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard work. As soon as
he began a thing, he was conscious of all its difficulties, and the
discouragement that came over him enervated his will. Inspiration, the
frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew swiftly away at the sight of
this effete lover.

Sculpture--like dramatic art--is at once the most difficult and the
easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is
done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or
a woman--this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals
of sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among
men