“It is extraordinary!” exclaimed Cortés. “It is something to see, the way this is done. What boldness! Everything is red, the cape, the cap, the curtains in the background.... What a man!”
The German aired his opinions in his own language, and took out a notebook and pencil and wrote some notes.
“What sort of man was this?” asked Cæsar, whom the technical side of painting did not preoccupy, as it did Cortés.
“They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman’s domination.”
“The great thing is,” murmured Cæsar, “how the painter has left him here alive. It seems as if we had come in here to salute him, and he was waiting for us to speak. Those clear eyes are questioning us. It is curious.”
“Not curious,” exclaimed Cortés, “but admirable.”
“For me it is more curious than admirable. There is something brutal in this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it’s the same as in water, only corks float.”
LEGEND AND HISTORY
Cæsar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and Cortés seated on the sofa, absorbed in the picture; he looked at various paintings in the gallery, went back, and sat down, beside the artists.
“This portrait,” he said presently, “is like history by the side of legend. All the other paintings in the gallery are legend, ‘folk-lore,’ as I believe one calls it. This one is history.”