reverent admiration of a true believer for a particularly dirty dervish.

"Who, in Heaven's name, is this unclean individual who used to like his
vegetables underdone, and never washes?" whispered I in Mueller's ear.

"What--Lemonnier! You don't mean to say you never heard of Lemonnier?"

"Never, till now. Is he a cook?"

Mueller gave me a dig in the ribs that took my breath away.

"_Goguenard!_" said he. "Lemonnier's an artist--the foremost man of the
water-color school. But I wouldn't be too funny if I were you. Suppose
you were to burst your jocular vein--there'd be a catastrophe!"

Meanwhile the conversation of Messieurs Droz and Lepany had taken a
fresh turn, and attracted a little circle of listeners, among whom I
observed an eccentric-looking young man with a club-foot, an enormously
long neck, and a head of short, stiff, dusty hair, like the bristles of
a blacking-brush.

"Queroulet!" said Lepany, with a contemptuous flourish of his pipe. "Who
spoke of Queroulet? Bah!--a miserable plodder, destitute of ideality--a
fellow who paints only what he sees, and sees only what is
commonplace--a dull, narrow-souled, unimaginative handicraftsman, to
whom a tree is just a tree; and a man, a man; and a straw, a straw, and
nothing more!"

"That's a very low-souled view to take of art, no doubt," croaked in a
grating treble voice the youth with the club-foot; "but if trees and men
and straws are not exactly trees and men and straws, and are not to be
represented as trees and men and straws, may I inquire what else they
are, and how they are to be pictorially treated?"

"They must be ideally treated, Monsieur Valentin," replied Lepany,
majestically.

"No doubt; but what will they be like when they are ideally treated?
Will they still, to the vulgar eye, be recognisable for trees and men
and straws?"

"I should scarcely have supposed that Monsieur Valentin would jest upon
such a subject as a canon of the art he professes," said Lepany,
becoming more and more dignified.

"I am not jesting," croaked Monsieur Valentin; "but when I hear men of
your school talk so much about the Ideal, I (as a realist) always want
to know what they themselves understand by the phrase."

"Are you asking me for my definition of the Ideal, Monsieur Valentin?"

"Well, if it's not giving you too much trouble--yes."

Lepany, who evidently relished every chance of showing off, fell into a
picturesque attitude and prepared to hold forth. V