y battle waged by audacity and youth.

'Ah! your lot is a fine one, all the same, old fellow!' continued
Sandoz. 'The art of to-morrow will be yours; you have made them all.'

Claude thereupon opened his mouth, and, with an air of gloomy brutality,
said in a low voice:

'What do I care if I _have_ made them all, when I haven't made myself?
See here, it's too big an affair for me, and that's what stifles me.'

He made a gesture to finish expressing his thought, his consciousness
of his inability to prove the genius of the formula he had brought with
him, the torture he felt at being merely a precursor, the one who
sows the idea without reaping the glory, his grief at seeing himself
pillaged, devoured by men who turned out hasty work, by a whole flight
of fellows who scattered their efforts and lowered the new form of
art, before he or another had found strength enough to produce the
masterpiece which would make the end of the century a date in art.

But Sandoz protested, the future lay open. Then, to divert Claude, he
stopped him while crossing the Gallery of Honour and said:

'Just look at that lady in blue before that portrait! What a slap Nature
does give to painting! You remember when we used to look at the dresses
and the animation of the galleries in former times? Not a painting
then withstood the shock. And yet now there are some which don't suffer
overmuch. I even noticed over there a landscape, the general yellowish
tinge of which completely eclipsed all the women who approached it.'

Claude was quivering with unutterable suffering.

'Pray, let's go,' he said. 'Take me away--I can't stand it any longer.'

They had all the trouble in the world to find a free table in the
refreshment room. People were pressed together in that big, shady
retreat, girt round with brown serge drapery under the girders of the
lofty iron flooring of the upstairs galleries. In the background, and
but partially visible in the darkness, stood three dressers displaying
dishes of preserved fruit symmetrically ranged on shelves; while, nearer
at hand, at counters placed on the right and left, two ladies, a dark
one and a fair one, watched the crowd with a military air; and from the
dim depths of this seeming cavern rose a sea of little marble tables, a
tide of chairs, serried, entangled, surging, swelling, overflowing and
spreading into the garden, under the broad, pallid light which fell from
the glass roof.

At last Sandoz saw so