orded him a few hours' relief, dearly paid for by the
return of the attacks in an even more virulent form.

His ennui passed all bounds. His pleasure in the possession of his
wonderful flowers was exhausted. Their textures and nuances palled on
him. Besides, despite the care he lavished on them, most of his plants
drooped. He had them removed from his rooms, but in his state of
extreme excitability, their very absence exasperated him, for his eyes
were pained by the void.

To while away the interminable hours, he had recourse to his
portfolios of prints, and arranged his Goyas. The first impressions of
certain plates of the _Caprices_, recognizable as proofs by their
reddish hues, which he had bought at auction at a high price,
comforted him, and he lost himself in them, following the painter's
fantasies, distracted by his vertiginous scenes, his witches astride
on cats, his women striving to pluck out the teeth of a hanged man,
his bandits, his succubi, his demons and dwarfs.

Then he examined his other series of etchings and aquatints, his
_Proverbs_ with their macabre horror, his war subjects with their wild
rage, finally his plate of the Garot, of which he cherished a
marvelous trial proof, printed on heavy water-marked paper, unmounted.

Goya's savage verve and keenly fanciful talent delighted him, but the
universal admiration his works had won nevertheless estranged him
slightly. And for years he had refused to frame them for fear that the
first blundering fool who caught sight of them might deem it necessary
to fly into banal and facile raptures before them.

The same applied to his Rembrandts which he examined from time to
time, half secretly; and if it be true that the loveliest tune
imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public
begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own, the work of
art which does not remain indifferent to the spurious artists, which
is not contested by fools, and which is not satisfied with awakening
the enthusiasm of the few, by this very fact becomes profaned, trite,
almost repulsive to the initiate.

This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatest
sources of regret in his life. Incomprehensible successes had forever
spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear.
Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to
him, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions were
not growing b