"Modern painting," he proclaimed, "is too brutal."
"Good heavens," said Aurelle, "a great artist cannot paint with a powder-puff; you must be able to feel that the fellow with the pencil was not a eunuch."
"Really," he went on, when the doctor had left in rather a bad temper, "he's as ridiculous as the others. I think his portrait is very vigorous, and not in the least a skit, whatever he may say."
"Just sit down there a minute, old man," said the painter. "I shall be jolly glad to work from an intelligent model for once. They all want to look like tailors' fashion-plates. Now, I can't change my style; I don't paint in beauty paste, I render what I see—it's like Diderot's old story about the amateur who asked a floral painter to portray a lion. 'With pleasure,' said the artist, 'but you may expect a lion that will be as like a rose as I can make him.'"
The conversation lasted a long time; it was friendly and technical. Aurelle
praised Beltara's painting; Beltara expressed his joy at having found so penetrating and artistic a critic in the midst of so many Philistines.
"I prefer your opinion to a painter's; it's certainly sincerer. Would you mind turning your profile a bit more towards me? Some months before the war I had two friends in my studio to whom I wished to show a little picture I intended for the Salon. 'Yes,' said the younger of them, 'it's all right, but there ought to be a light spot in that corner; your lights are not well balanced.' 'Shut up, you fool,' the other whispered to him, 'that'll make it really good!' Come on, old man, come and look; I think that sketch can be left as it is."
Aurelle walked up to the painter, and, cocking his head on one side, looked at the drawing.
"It's charming," he said at last with
some reluctance. "It's charming. There are some delightful touches—all that still life on the table, it might be a Chardin—and I like the background very much indeed."