each a
finished picture! chouette, Koxnoff, chocnosoff! His future, his dreams
of happiness, the superlative of his hopes--do you know what it was?
To enter the Institute and obtain the grade of officer of the Legion
of honor; to side down beside Schinner and Leon de Lora, to reach the
Academy before Bridau, to wear a rosette in his buttonhole! What a
dream! It is only commonplace men who think of everything.

Hearing the sound of several steps on the staircase, Fougeres rubbed up
his hair, buttoned his jacket of bottle-green velveteen, and was not a
little amazed to see, entering his doorway, a simpleton face vulgarly
called in studio slang a "melon." This fruit surmounted a pumpkin,
clothed in blue cloth adorned with a bunch of tintinnabulating baubles.
The melon puffed like a walrus; the pumpkin advanced on turnips,
improperly called legs. A true painter would have turned the little
bottle-vendor off at once, assuring him that he didn't paint vegetables.
This painter looked at his client without a smile, for Monsieur Vervelle
wore a three-thousand-franc diamond in the bosom of his shirt.

Fougeres glanced at Magus and said: "There's fat in it!" using a slang
term then much in vogue in the studios.

Hearing those words Monsieur Vervelle frowned. The worthy bourgeois drew
after him another complication of vegetables in the persons of his wife
and daughter. The wife had a fine veneer of mahogany on her face, and
in figure she resembled a cocoa-nut, surmounted by a head and tied in
around the waist. She pivoted on her legs, which were tap-rooted,
and her gown was yellow with black stripes. She proudly exhibited
unutterable mittens on a puffy pair of hands; the plumes of a
first-class funeral floated on an over-flowing bonnet; laces adorned
her shoulders, as round behind as they were before; consequently, the
spherical form of the cocoa-nut was perfect. Her feet, of a kind that
painters call abatis, rose above the varnished leather of the shoes in a
swelling that was some inches high. How the feet were ever got into the
shoes, no one knows.

Following these vegetable parents was a young asparagus, who presented
a tiny head with smoothly banded hair of the yellow-carroty tone that a
Roman adores, long, stringy arms, a fairly white skin with reddish spots
upon it, large innocent eyes, and white lashes, scarcely any brows, a
leghorn bonnet bound with white satin and adorned with two honest bows
of the same satin, hands v