ed?"

Then, with a faint, devout quiver in his voice and the air of a priest
initiating another into the delightful but perturbing atmosphere of a
sanctuary, he went on repeating the praises of Botticelli's art; his
women with long, sensual, yet candid faces, supple bearing, and rounded
forms showing from under light drapery; his young men, his angels of
doubtful sex, blending stateliness of muscle with infinite delicacy of
outline; next the mouths he painted, fleshy, fruit-like mouths, at times
suggesting irony, at others pain, and often so enigmatical with their
sinuous curves that one knew not whether the words they left unuttered
were words of purity or filth; then, too, the eyes which he bestowed on
his figures, eyes of languor and passion, of carnal or mystical rapture,
their joy at times so instinct with grief as they peer into the nihility
of human things that no eyes in the world could be more impenetrable. And
finally there were Botticelli's hands, so carefully and delicately
painted, so full of life, wantoning so to say in a free atmosphere, now
joining, caressing, and even, as it were, speaking, the whole evincing
such intense solicitude for gracefulness that at times there seems to be
undue mannerism, though every hand has its particular expression, each
varying expression of the enjoyment or pain which the sense of touch can
bring. And yet there was nothing effeminate or false about the painter's
work: on all sides a sort of virile pride was apparent, an atmosphere of
superb passionate motion, absolute concern for truth, direct study from
life, conscientiousness, veritable realism, corrected and elevated by a
genial strangeness of feeling and character that imparted a
never-to-be-forgotten charm even to ugliness itself.

Pierre's stupefaction, however, increased as he listened to Narcisse,
whose somewhat studied elegance, whose curly hair cut in the Florentine
fashion, and whose blue, mauvish eyes paling with enthusiasm he now for
the first time remarked. "Botticelli," he at last said, "was no doubt a
marvellous artist, only it seems to me that here, at any rate, Michael
Angelo--"

But Narcisse interrupted him almost with violence. "No! no! Don't talk of
him! He spoilt everything, ruined everything! A man who harnessed himself
to his work like an ox, who laboured at his task like a navvy, at the
rate of so many square yards a day! And a man, too, with no sense of the
mysterious and the unknown, who saw e