* The reader will bear in mind that all these complaints made by Claude and his friends apply to the old Salons, as organized under Government control, at the time of the Second Empire.—ED.
While the others went on discussing the subject, Gagnière drew Mahoudeau to the open window, where, in a low voice, his eyes the while staring into space, he murmured:
‘Oh, it’s nothing at all, only four bars; a simple impression jotted down there and then. But what a deal there is in it! To me it’s first of all a landscape, dwindling away in the distance; a bit of melancholy road, with the shadow of a tree that one cannot see; and then a woman passes along, scarcely a silhouette; on she goes and you never meet her again, no, never more again.’
Just at that moment, however, Fagerolles exclaimed, ‘I say, Gagnière, what are you going to send to the Salon this year?’
Gagnière did not hear, but continued talking, enraptured, as it were.
‘In Schumann one finds everything—the infinite. And Wagner, too, whom they hissed again last Sunday!’
But a fresh call from Fagerolles made him start.
‘Eh! what? What am I going to send to the Salon? A small landscape, perhaps; a little bit of the Seine. It is so difficult to decide; first of all I must feel pleased with it myself.’
He had suddenly become timid and anxious again. His artistic scruples, his conscientiousness, kept him working for months on a canvas the size of one’s hand. Following the track of the French landscape painters, those masters who were the first to conquer nature, he worried about correctness of tone, pondering and pondering over the precise value of tints, till theoretical scruples ended by making his touch heavy. And he often did not dare to chance a bright dash of colour, but painted in a greyish gloomy key which was astonishing, when one remembered his revolutionary passions.
‘For my part,’ said Mahoudeau, ‘I feel delighted at the prospect of making them squint with my woman.’