I give that name. We do not loathe one another. At need they
would help me. But we seldom meet. What should they do here? Dreamers
make no confidences; they shrivel up into themselves and are caught away
on the four winds of heaven. Politics drive them mad; gossip fails to
interest them; the sorrows they create have no remedy save the joys that
they invent; they are natural only when alone, and talk well only to
themselves.

The only man who can put up with this moody contrariety of mine is
Sylvestre Lampron. He is nearly twenty years older than I. That explains
his forbearance. Besides, between an artist like him and a dreamer like
myself there is only the difference of handiwork. He translates his
dreams. I waste mine; but both dream. Dear old Lampron! Kindly, stalwart
heart! He has withstood that hardening of the moral and physical fibre
which comes over so many men as they near their fortieth year. He shows a
brave front to work and to life. He is cheerful, with the manly
cheerfulness of a noble heart resigned to life's disillusions.

When I enter his home, I nearly always find him sitting before a small
ground-glass window in the corner of his studio, bent over some
engraving. I have leave to enter at all hours. He is free not to stir
from his work. "Good-day," he calls out, without raising his head,
without knowing for certain who has come in, and goes on with the
engraving he has in hand. I settle down at the end of the room, on the
sofa with the faded cover, and, until Lampron deigns to grant me
audience, I am free to sleep, or smoke, or turn over the wonderful
drawings that lean against the walls. Among them are treasures beyond
price; for Lampron is a genius whose only mistake is to live and act with
modesty, so that as yet people only say that he has "immense talent." No
painter or engraver of repute--and he is both--has served a more
conscientious apprenticeship, or sets greater store on thoroughness in
his art. His drawing is correct beyond reproach--a little stiff, like the
early painters. You can guess from his works his partiality for the old
masters--Perugino, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Memling, Holbein--who,
though not the masters in fashion, will always be masters in vigor of
outline, directness, in simple grace, and genuine feeling. He has copied
in oils, water-colors, pen, or pencil, nearly all the pictures of these
masters in the Louvre, in Germany, in Holland, and especially in Italy,
where he li