hands with a dramatic expression, as though he would die at a
refusal. Good for the Chianti! They would lunch together, and while
Tekli was giving a few touches to his work, he would wait for him,
wandering through the Museo, renewing old memories.

When he returned to the Hall of Velasquez, the assemblage had
diminished; only the copyists remained bending over their canvases. The
painter felt anew the influence of the great master. He admired his
wonderful art, feeling at the same time the intense, historical sadness
that seemed to emanate from all of his work. Poor Don Diego! He was born
in the most melancholy period of Spanish history. His sane realism was
fitted to immortalize the human form in all its naked beauty and fate
had provided him a period when women looked like turtles, with their
heads and shoulders peeping out between the double shell of their
inflated gowns, and when men had a sacerdotal stiffness, raising their
dark, ill-washed heads above their gloomy garb. He had painted what he
saw; fear and hypocrisy were reflected in the eyes of that world. In the
jesters, fools and humpbacks immortalized by Don Diego was revealed the
forced merriment of a dying nation that must needs find distraction in
the monstrous and absurd. The hypochondriac temper of a monarchy weak
in body and fettered in spirit by the terrors of hell, lived in all
those masterpieces, that inspired at once admiration and sadness. Alas
for the artistic treasures wasted in immortalizing a period which
without Velasquez would have fallen into utter oblivion!

Renovales thought, too, of the man, comparing with a feeling of remorse
the great painter's life with the princely existence of the modern
masters. Ah, the munificence of kings, their protection of artists, that
people talked about in their enthusiasm for the past! He thought of the
peaceful Don Diego and his salary of three _pesetas_ as court painter,
which he received only at rare intervals; of his glorious name figuring
among those of jesters and barbers in the list of members of the king's
household, forced to accept the office of appraiser of masonry to
improve his situation, of the shame and humiliation of his last years in
order to gain the Cross of Santiago, denying as a crime before the
tribunal of the Orders that he had received money for his pictures,
declaring with servile pride his position as servant of the king, as
though this title were superior to the glory of an artist