"I am a painter, sir."
"A painter?" the colonel exclaimed, dumbfounded. "A painter? Why, damn it all!"
And after thinking it over for a minute he added, with the kindly wink of an accomplice in crime, "Well, let's put down nil, eh? It won't look quite so silly."
Captain Beltara and Aurelle soon became inseparable companions. They had the same tastes and different professions,
which is the ideal recipe for friendship. Aurelle admired the sketches in which the painter recorded the flexible lines of the Flemish landscape; Beltara was a kindly critic of the young man's rather feeble verses.
"You would perhaps be a poet," he said to him, "if you were not burdened with a certain degree of culture. An artist must be an idiot. The only perfect ones are the sculptors; then come the landscape painters; then painters in general; after them the writers. The critics are not at all stupid; and the really intelligent men never do anything."
"Why shouldn't intelligence have an art of its own, as sensibility has?"
"No, my friend, no. Art is a game; intelligence is a profession. Look at me, for instance; now that I no longer touch my brushes, I sometimes actually catch myself thinking; it's quite alarming."
"You ought to paint some portraits