Formerly knowing as little of art as any other Austrian Uhlan officer, he now daily found greater pleasure in the pictures.
His natural taste for glaring coloring, décolleté cigarette beauties, humorous or sentimental genre pictures disappeared. The soft harmonies of the old masterpieces had a strangely soothing effect upon his sick nerves.
With slow, dragging steps, his eyes dreamily wandering from one picture to another, he sauntered through the long rooms.
The gallery officials soon knew him, and with French talkativeness often spoke to him of the weather or politics.
He never became a critic, but he had his favorites. For instance, he felt a quite inexplicable preference for Greuze, the Guido Reni of the eighteenth century, of whom one might think that he had mixed his colors of tears, moonbeams, and the dust of withered flowers, and instead of Beatrice Cenci had painted a "Cruche Cassé." Every day he stood for a while before the "Cruche Cassé" and murmured "Poor child!"
In one of the galleries there was the gloomy portrait of a woman from the hand of the Jansenist, Philippe von Champaigne, pale with dark, mournful eyes; in the carriage of the emaciated frame the weary rigidity of vanquished pain. Everything in the appearance was so dead and ethereal that one almost fancied one could see the flesh dying around the soul. Felix stood before this picture every day.
He loved the Samaritan and the Christ on the road to Emmaus--masterpieces in which the sublime mystery of the Rembrandt colors glorifies the harsh reality. He could not gaze often enough at the mysterious eyes of the Christ, the eyes in which compassion is as large as the world, the eyes which pardon all, and yet ever sad, despairing, seek the means of salvation for sinful creation.
But the picture which beyond all attracted and repelled him, which he loved and which yet terrified him, was Watteau's Pierot, pale, ghost-like, with glassy eyes in a rigid face; it looks down from the wall of the Salle Lacaze. To-day he has gone to a mask-ball to distract himself, and his weary eyes ask in disappointment, "Is that all?" To-morrow he lies perhaps in the morgue, and his glassy eyes gaze with the same look at the solved riddle of eternity, as yesterday, at the hollow show--the same gaze which asks, "Is that all?"
Felix almost daily passed a couple of hours in the Louvre. "Bonjour!" a diligent little artist cried to him here and there, some little person whom perhaps he had given some small assistance, and who greeted him as an habitué. Except for this all was silence. No one speaks in the Louvre; one only whispers.
A hollow mutter and murmur woven of a thousand soft echoes pervade the old rooms in their vast monotony like the faint echo of the great tumult of the world, or like the murmur of the eternal stream of time.