"Why, ride alongside the prince's carriage, giving himself airs and posing for son Altesse's aide-de-camp. And, following him as fast as they could get along, a band of asses on donkeys, braying like imbéciles. Well, bon jour, Messieurs; after all, it's no business of mine. I only thought you might care to know."
On the arrival of the band, I learnt afterwards, they were confronted by four sergents de ville, the two original ones having been reinforced. Gobelot, the man with the brown felt hat, was asked for his passport, and, not being able to produce it, was looked upon with suspicion and closely cross-questioned. Dupont rather entered into my joke and let things go wrong, till it was high time to set them right. Then I was denounced, and it was not without some difficulty made clear to the authorities that the informer was the real culprit. So Gobelot the innocent was only warned to be more careful another time, and my name is probably inscribed on some black list at the Préfecture.
* * * * * *
Claude was a most indefatigable worker; as an artist ever severe and uncompromising, studying on the lines of Ingres and Flandrin, loving a bird, a stone, a woman for the sake of the outline they imprinted on his mind, and ever seeking an ideal contour, whether he held the pencil or the brush. His enthusiasm was quite catching; so under his influence I soon began to love drawing for its own sake, and we spent many an evening together studying Dante's stern features from the cast or working from the living model.
He had inherited his classical predilections from his father, who himself had started life as an artist, but had found that large historical landscapes à la Poussin were not easily convertible into bread and butter, and had therefore wisely abandoned art as a profession, and had embraced the administrative career, in which he rose and prospered. His leisure hours he still spent at the easel, but his canvases were not as large as formerly; in his productions he always gave me the impression that he could use more emerald and olive greens, to the exclusion of other colours, on a given space, than any man I had ever known.
He was quite touching in his love for Claude.
"What I have dreamed of and struggled for in vain," he would say, "that boy is going to realise. He is born with du style. Believe me, my child, outside le style there is no art. From the time of Raphael down to the present day, nothing is worth recording, nothing remains or will remain, that is not de l'école. La grande école, my child, le style, la ligne, voilà le salut, believe me."
I winced, for I loved, above all the colourists, the Spaniards, the Dutch; but he was so sincere, so convincing, that for the time being I felt as if I could have sold my birthright for a line of beauty.
"He is quite right," Claude would afterwards say to me, "but he puts his finger in his eye, if he thinks he can flatten your bump of colour. Every man is born with his own bumps, and they are bound to grow with him just as his hair does."
And with that we would plunge headlong into the famous discussion sur la forme et la couleur, each doing battle for his god with the energy of youthful fanaticism, and feeling all the while that we would have given anything to be able to exchange bumps with one another. How much further his bump would lead him, I thought, and how admirably he was organised to use it in the service of high art! And he, on the other hand, would say—