y a big
brute of a horse of many colors, which was rearing out of one of the waves
of the Red Sea. The coat of that horse had served Marcel for all his
experiments in color, and in private conversation he called it his
synoptic table of fine tones, because he had reproduced, in their play of
light and shade, all possible combinations of color. But once again,
insensible to this detail, the jury seemed scarcely able to find
blackballs enough to emphasize their refusal of the "Passage of the
Beresina."

"Very well," said Marcel; "no more than I expected. Next year I shall send
it back under the title of 'Passage des Panoramas.'"

"That will be one on them--on them--on them, them, them," sang the
musician, Schaunard, fitting the words to a new air he had been
composing--a terrible air, noisy as a gamut of thunderclaps, and the
accompaniment to which was a terror to every piano in the neighborhood.

"How could they refuse that picture without having every drop of the
vermilion in my Red Sea rise up in their faces and cover them with shame?"
murmured Marcel, as he gazed at the painting. "When one thinks that it
contains a good hundred crowns' worth of paint, and a million of genius,
not to speak of the fair days of my youth, fast growing bald as my hat!
But they shall never have the last word; until my dying breath I shall
keep on sending them my painting. I want to have it engraved upon their
memory."

"That is certainly the surest way of ever getting it engraved," said
Gustave Colline, in a plaintive voice, adding to himself: "That was a good
one, that was--really a good one; I must get that off the next time I am
asked out."

Marcel continued his imprecations, which Schaunard continued to set to
music.

"Oh, they won't accept me," said Marcel. "Ah! the government pays them,
boards them, gives them the Cross, solely for the one purpose of refusing
me once a year, on the 1st of March. I see their idea clearly now--I see
it perfectly clearly; they are trying to drive me to break my brushes.
They hope, perhaps, by refusing my Red Sea, to make me throw myself out of
the window in despair. But they know very little of the human heart if
they expect to catch me with such a clumsy trick. I shall no longer wait
for the time of the annual Salon. Beginning with to-day, my work becomes
the canvas of Damocles, eternally suspended over their existence. From now
on, I am going to send it once a week to each one of them, at their