and opinions of Bohemian life.

'The hanging committee? Well, I'd sooner hang myself than belong to
it!' said he, with sweeping gestures. 'Am I an executioner to kick poor
devils, who often have to earn their bread, out of doors?'

'Still, you might render us great service by defending our pictures
before the committee,' observed Claude.

'Oh, dear, no! I should only make matters worse for you--I don't count;
I'm nobody.'

There was a chorus of protestations; Fagerolles objected, in a shrill
voice:

'Well, if the painter of "The Village Wedding" does not count--'

But Bongrand was getting angry; he had risen, his cheeks afire.

'Eh? Don't pester me with "The Wedding"; I warn you I am getting sick of
that picture. It is becoming a perfect nightmare to me ever since it has
been hung in the Luxembourg Museum.'

This 'Village Wedding'--a party of wedding guests roaming through a
corn-field, peasants studied from life, with an epic look of the heroes
of Homer about them--had so far remained his masterpiece. The picture
had brought about an evolution in art, for it had inaugurated a new
formula. Coming after Delacroix, and parallel with Courbet, it was
a piece of romanticism tempered by logic, with more correctness of
observation, more perfection in the handling. And though it did not
squarely tackle nature amidst the crudity of the open air, the new
school claimed connection with it.

'There can be nothing more beautiful,' said Claude, 'than the two first
groups, the fiddler, and then the bride with the old peasant.'

'And the strapping peasant girl, too,' added Mahoudeau; the one who
is turning round and beckoning! I had a great mind to take her for the
model of a statue.'

'And that gust of wind among the corn,' added Gagniere, 'and the pretty
bit of the boy and girl skylarking in the distance.'

Bongrand sat listening with an embarrassed air, and a smile of inward
suffering; and when Fagerolles asked him what he was doing just then, he
answered, with a shrug of his shoulders:

'Well, nothing; some little things. But I sha'n't exhibit this time.
I should like to find a telling subject. Ah, you fellows are happy at
still being at the bottom of the hill. A man has good legs then, he
feels so plucky when it's a question of getting up. But when once he is
a-top, the deuce take it! the worries begin. A real torture, fisticuffs,
efforts which must be constantly renewed, lest one should slip down too
quickly. Real