of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a
favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.

Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon
took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were
indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried
to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a
newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy. Stidmann, the best of
good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was
contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works
in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be
the test.

"In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble," wrote Claude Vignon, "a
masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful. The plaster
is the manuscript, the marble is the book."

So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son.
The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.

The clock for the Prince and the price of the statue paid off the
young couple's debts. Steinbock had acquired fashionable habits; he
went to the play, to the opera; he talked admirably about art; and in
the eyes of the world he maintained his reputation as a great artist
by his powers of conversation and criticism. There are many clever men
in Paris who spend their lives in talking themselves out, and are
content with a sort of drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating
these emasculated but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard
work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its
difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his
will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew
swiftly away at the sight of this effete lover.

Sculpture--like dramatic art--is at once the most difficult and the
easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is
done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a
woman--this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of
sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men.
Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles,
Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton,
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an
achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a
man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have