ming once
more toward the supposed picture. "I can see nothing there but confused
masses of color and a multitude of fantastical lines that go to make a
dead wall of paint."

"We are mistaken, look!" said Porbus.

In a corner of the canvas, as they came nearer, they distinguished a
bare foot emerging from the chaos of color, half-tints and vague shadows
that made up a dim, formless fog. Its living delicate beauty held them
spellbound. This fragment that had escaped an incomprehensible, slow,
and gradual destruction seemed to them like the Parian marble torso of
some Venus emerging from the ashes of a ruined town.

"There is a woman beneath," exclaimed Porbus, calling Poussin's
attention to the coats of paint with which the old artist had overlaid
and concealed his work in the quest of perfection.

Both artists turned involuntarily to Frenhofer. They began to have some
understanding, vague though it was, of the ecstasy in which he lived.

"He believes it in all good faith," said Porbus.

"Yes, my friend," said the old man, rousing himself from his dreams, "it
needs faith, faith in art, and you must live for long with your work to
produce such a creation. What toil some of those shadows have cost me.
Look! there is a faint shadow there upon the cheek beneath the eyes--if
you saw that on a human face, it would seem to you that you could never
render it with paint. Do you think that that effect has not cost unheard
of toil?

"But not only so, dear Porbus. Look closely at my work, and you will
understand more clearly what I was saying as to methods of modeling and
outline. Look at the high lights on the bosom, and see how by touch on
touch, thickly laid on, I have raised the surface so that it catches
the light itself and blends it with the lustrous whiteness of the high
lights, and how by an opposite process, by flattening the surface of
the paint, and leaving no trace of the passage of the brush, I have
succeeded in softening the contours of my figures and enveloping them
in half-tints until the very idea of drawing, of the means by which the
effect is produced, fades away, and the picture has the roundness
and relief of nature. Come closer. You will see the manner of working
better; at a little distance it can not be seen. There I Just there, it
is, I think, very plainly to be seen," and with the tip of his brush he
pointed out a patch of transparent color to the two painters.

Porbus, laying a hand on the old ar