"Oh! no, he did not love the people!"
Then the conversation came down to contemporary events: the Spanish marriages, the dilapidations of Rochefort, the new chapter-house of Saint-Denis, which had led to the taxes being doubled. Nevertheless, according to Sénécal, they were not high enough!
"And why are they paid? My God! to erect the palace for apes at the Museum, to make showy staff-officers parade along our squares, or to maintain a Gothic etiquette amongst the flunkeys of the Château!"
"I have read in the Mode," said Cisy, "that at the Tuileries ball on the feast of Saint-Ferdinand, everyone was disguised as a miser."
"How pitiable!" said the Socialist, with a shrug of his shoulders, as if to indicate his disgust.
"And the Museum of Versailles!" exclaimed Pellerin. "Let us talk about it! These idiots have foreshortened a Delacroix and lengthened a Gros! At the Louvre they have so well restored, scratched, and made a jumble of all the canvases, that in ten years probably not one will be left. As for the errors in the catalogue, a German has written a whole volume on the subject. Upon my word, the foreigners are laughing at us."
"Yes, we are the laughing-stock of Europe," said Sénécal.
"'Tis because Art is conveyed in fee-simple to the Crown."
"As long as you haven't universal suffrage——"
"Allow me!"—for the artist, having been rejected at every salon for the last twenty years, was filled with rage against Power.