"Listen to me! Painting is humbug, my little Mintié."
He grew animated, moved about the room briskly, waving his arms.
"Giotto! Mantegna! Velasques! Rembrandt! Well, Rembrandt! Watteau! Delacroix! Ingres! Yes and then who? No, that is not true? Painting depicts nothing, expresses nothing, it's all humbug! It's all right for the art critics, bankers, and generals who have their portraits on horseback with a howitzer shell exploding in the foreground. But to render a glimpse of the sky, the shade of a flower, the ripple of the water, the air,—you understand? The air—all this impalpable and invisible nature, with a paste of paint colors! With a paste of paint colors?"
Lirat shrugged his shoulders.
"With a paste of paint colors coming out of tubes, with a paste of paint colors made by the dirty hands of chemists, with a paste of paint colors, heavy, opaque and which sticks to the fingers like jelly! Tell me ... painting ... what humbug! No, but you will admit, my little Mintié, that it is humbug! A drawing, an engraving, a two-tone piece ... that's the thing! That does not deceive, it's honest ... the amateurs sneer at that kind of work and don't presume to bother you about it ... it evokes no empty enthusiasm in their 'salons'! But real art, majestic art, artistic art is there. Sculpture ... yes ... when it is beautiful, it shakes you.... But next to it is the art of drawing, drawing ... my little Mintié, without Prussian blue, just plain drawing! Will you come to my studio tomorrow?"
"Certainly."
He continued to chop his phrases, fumble his words, excited by their very sound.
"I am beginning a series of etchings. You'll see! A nude woman, coming out of a deep shadow, carried upward on the wings of a beast. Scattered about, in unnatural positions, are parts of human corpses with dirty folds and swellings of decaying flesh ... a belly cut open and losing its viscera, a belly of terrible outline, hideous and true! A dead head, but a living dead head, you understand? Greedy, gluttonous, all lips. She is rising in front of a crowd of old men in tall hats, silk coats and white cravats. She is rising and the old men bend toward her panting, with hanging jaws, watering mouths, contracted eyes ... all have lewd faces!"
Stopping before me with an air of defiance, he continued:
"And do you know what I am going to call it? Do you know? I am going to call it Love, my little Mintié. What do you think of it?..."