f Raphael
down to the present day, nothing is worth recording, nothing remains or
will remain, that is not _de l'ecole_. _La grande ecole_, my child, _le
style, la ligne, voila le salut_, believe me."

I winced, for I loved, above all the colourists, the Spaniards, the
Dutch; but he was so sincere, so convincing, that for the time being I
felt as if I could have sold my birthright for a line of beauty.

"He is quite right," Claude would afterwards say to me, "but he puts his
finger in his eye, if he thinks he can flatten your bump of colour.
Every man is born with his own bumps, and they are bound to grow with
him just as his hair does."

And with that we would plunge headlong into the famous discussion _sur
la forme et la couleur_, each doing battle for his god with the energy
of youthful fanaticism, and feeling all the while that we would have
given anything to be able to exchange bumps with one another. How much
further his bump would lead him, I thought, and how admirably he was
organised to use it in the service of high art! And he, on the other
hand, would say--

"What am I, my dear fellow, as compared to you, born in the purple of
art as you are? You hold the trump cards, and will," &c. &c.

Then there was an uncle of Claude's, _l'oncle Auguste_, whose views
clashed fearfully with the artistic aspirations of my friend and of his
father. He was a tanner, at the head of a large establishment which he
had founded--a self-made man, with a lot of cleverly-grabbed money. In
his social intercourse he had so carefully surrounded himself with
inferior intellects, that he could not but shine as a bright light
amongst them--a circumstance which led him to form a most exaggerated
estimate of his own wisdom and mental powers.

"My dear Jean," he would say to his brother, "I should really have
thought your own experiences with those blessed paints would have made a
wiser man of you. Surely one victim to the mania in the family should
have been enough, without dragging that poor boy into it; a splendid
fellow, sane and sound, if it weren't for the rubbish you put into his
head. He was cut out for the business; never happier than when he was
pottering about at the works. Why, when he was a mere child, he very
nearly got drowned in the tan vat." And turning to Claude: "What have
you to say to it, you young rascal? Ah well, I know you are hopelessly
lost, since you got out of those plaster casts and those bones and
muscles