, not however to learn the mysteries
hidden by the clouds, but the mystery of life, the secret of the visions
that haunted her, of the disquieting temptations that filled her with
such feverish excitement.

If Uncle Kayser could for one moment have descended from the nebulous
regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor
in the depth of Marianne's glance, and something feverish and restless
in her movements. But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his
rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, aesthetic dignity,
and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission
for it, an end, an idea--_art the educator, art the moralizer_,--and
allowed this feverish, wearied, impulsive creature, moulded by vice, who
bore his name, to wander around his studio like a stray dog.

Isolated, forgotten, the young girl sometimes passed whole days bending
over a book, her lips dry, her face pale, but with a burning light in
her gray eyes, while her fingers were thrust through her hair, or she
rested upon a window-sill, following afar off, some imaginary picture in
the depths of the clouds.

The studio overlooked a silent, gloomy street in which no sound was
heard save the slow footfalls of weary and exhausted pedestrians. It was
stifling behind this window and Marianne's gloomy horizon was this frame
of stones against which her wandering thoughts bruised themselves as a
bird might break its wings.

Ah! to fly away, to escape from the solemn egotism and the theories of
Simon Kayser, and to live the passionate life of those who are free,
loved, rich and happy! Such was the dream upon which Marianne nourished
herself.

She had perpetually before her eyes, as well as before her life, the
gray wall of that high house opposite the painter's studio, pierced with
its many eyes, and whether on summer's stifling evenings, the shutters
closed--the whole street being deserted, the neighbors having gone into
the country--or in winter, with its gray sky, the roofs covered with the
snow that was stained all too soon, when the brilliant lights behind the
curtains looked like red spots on the varnished paper, Marianne ever
felt in her inmost being the bitter void of Parisian melancholy, the
overwhelming sadness of black loneliness, of hollow dreams, gnawing like
incurable sorrows.

She grew up thus, her mind and body poisoned by this dwelling which she
never left except to drag her feet w