Presently the room rose en bloc, and there was a move towards the staircase.
'The manager, M. Edmond, has come,' explained Alphonse; 'they are going upstairs to the concert-room. They will have a recitation perhaps,—ombres chinoises,—music. Come and look at the drawings before we go.'
And he took his charge round the walls, which were papered with drawings and sketches, laughing and explaining. The drawings were done, in the main, according to him, by the artists on the staffs of two illustrated papers which had their headquarters at the 'Trois Rats.' David was especially seized by the innumerable sheets of animal sketches—series in which some episode of animal life was carried through from its beginning to a close, sometimes humorous, but more often tragic. In a certain number of them there was a free imagination, an irony, a pity, which linked them together, marked them as the conceptions of one brain. Alphonse pointed to them as the work of a clever fellow, lately dead, who had been launched and supported by the 'Trois Rats' and its frequenters. One series in particular, representing a robin overcome by the seduction of a glass of absinthe and passing through all the stages of delirium tremens, had a grim inventiveness, a fecundity of half humorous, half pathetic fancy, which held David's eye riveted.
As for the ballet-girl, she was everywhere, with her sisters, the model and the grisette. And the artistic ability shown in the treatment of her had nowhere been hampered by any Philistine scruple in behalf of decency.
Upstairs there was the same mixed experience. David found himself in a corner with his two acquaintances, and four or five others, a couple of journalists, a musician and a sculptor. The conversation ranged from art to religion, from religion to style, from style to women, and all with a perpetual recurrence either to the pictures and successes of the Salon, or to the liaisons of well-known artists.
'Why do none of us fellows in the press pluck up courage and tell H. what we really think about those Homeric machines of his which he turns out year after year?' said a journalist, who was smoking beside him, an older man than the rest of them. 'I have a hundred things I want to say—but H. is popular—I like him himself—and I haven't the nerve. But what the devil do we want with the Greeks—they painted their world—let us paint ours! Besides, it is an absurdity. I thought as I was looking at H. 's things this morning of what Preault used to say of Pradier: "Il partait tous les matins pour la Grèce et arrivait tous les soirs Rue de Breda." "Pose your goddesses as you please—they are grisettes all the same."'
'All very well for you critics,' growled a man smoking a long pipe beside him; 'but the artist must live, and the bourgeois will have subjects. He won't have anything to do with your "notes"—and "impressions"—and "arrangements." When you present him with the view, served hot, from your four-pair back—he buttons up his pockets and abuses you. He wants his stories and his sentiment. And where the deuce is the sentiment to be got? I should be greatly obliged to anyone who would point me to a little of the commodity. The Greeks are already ridiculous,—and as for religion—'
The speaker threw back his head and laughed silently.
'Ah! I agree with you,' said the other emphatically; 'the religious pictures this year are really too bad. Christianity is going too fast—for the artist.'
'And the sceptics are becoming bores,' cried the painter; 'they take themselves too seriously. It is, after all, only another dogmatism. One should believe in nothing—not even in one's doubts.'