Whenever they were thrown together the painter and the author generally
reached this state of excitement. They spurred each other mutually, they
went mad with dreams of glory; and there was such a burst of youth, such
a passion for work about their plans, that they themselves often smiled
afterwards at those great, proud dreams which seemed to endow them with
suppleness, strength, and spirit.

Claude, who had stepped back as far as the wall, remained leaning
against it, and gazing at his work. Seeing which, Sandoz, overcome by
fatigue, left the couch and joined him. Then both looked at the picture
without saying a word. The gentleman in the velveteen jacket was
entirely roughed in. His hand, more advanced than the rest, furnished
a pretty fresh patch of flesh colour amid the grass, and the dark coat
stood out so vigorously that the little silhouettes in the background,
the two little women wrestling in the sunlight, seemed to have retreated
further into the luminous quivering of the glade. The principal figure,
the recumbent woman, as yet scarcely more than outlined, floated about
like some aerial creature seen in dreams, some eagerly desired Eve
springing from the earth, with her features vaguely smiling and her
eyelids closed.

'Well, now, what are you going to call it?' asked Sandoz.

'_The Open Air_,' replied Claude, somewhat curtly.

The title sounded rather technical to the writer, who, in spite of
himself, was sometimes tempted to introduce literature into pictorial
art.

'_The Open Air_! that doesn't suggest anything.'

'There is no occasion for it to suggest anything. Some women and a man
are reposing in a forest in the sunlight. Does not that suffice? Don't
fret, there's enough in it to make a masterpiece.'

He threw back his head and muttered between his teeth: 'Dash it all!
it's very black still. I can't get Delacroix out of my eye, do what I
will. And then the hand, that's Courbet's manner. Everyone of us dabs
his brush into the romantic sauce now and then. We had too much of it
in our youth, we floundered in it up to our very chins. We need a jolly
good wash to get clear of it.'

Sandoz shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of despair. He also
bewailed the fact that he had been born at what he called the confluence
of Hugo and Balzac. Nevertheless, Claude remained satisfied, full of the
happy excitement of a successful sitting. If his friend could give him
two or three more Sundays the man in th