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intended for seats, but their real office was to hold all the artistic rubbish--smashed color-tubes, broken stretchers, ragged canvases, discarded palettes, disreputable paint-rags and oil-tubes--the _auberge_ possessed. But every sunset, as the stream of artists set in from forest and field, the boards came into other service. All the work of the day was ranged upon them along the wall, and while the painters sat at meat comment and criticism grew rampant, every canvas coming in for its share. That many good lessons were given and taken in this wise _va sans dire_. That also artistic progress was punctuated not unseldom with "_betise_," "_imbecile_," "_nom du chien_," "you're a goose," and "you're another," goes equally without saying to all who know the unrestraint of artistic Bohemia and the usual attitude of the human mind under criticism. The walls of this _salle-a-manger_ were--and are--arranged with panels, in which _messieurs les artistes_ exercised their skill. It is a marked peculiarity of these artistic communities that no branch of art is so popular as caricature. Sometimes these caricatures are amiable, sometimes the reverse. Thus, when a certain blithe widow was represented colossally upon the wall with a little man in her eye, the likenesses were so good and the truth of the caricature so palpable that the widow herself was moved to as quick laughter as the others. But when American Palmer worked all day upon a panel to create a sunny sea laughing radiantly back at a sunny sky, while fantastic lateen-sailed craft floated like bits of jewelled color between, it was mean, to say the least, of Scotch Willie to take advantage of the American's departure and paint out those fairy boats, filling their places with horrible bloated corpses, floating upon the bright water like a nightmare upon innocent sleep. It was in this same _auberge_ that our landlady made this piteous supplication: "Caricature each other on the walls, _messieurs et mesdames, si vous voulez_; make portrait busts of the bread and figurines of the potatoes, and decorate the plates in whatever style of art you please; but don't, _je vous en supplie_, don't blacken the table-cloths before they are three days old." Alas! this was eloquence lost; for, at that very dinner, conversation chancing to turn upon the subtile malignity of Fanny Matilda's smiles, Fanny Matilda being there present, in less time than it takes to tell it twenty crayon sm
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