“But you think this is fine?”
“Very, very.”
“Why do you like it?”
“It seems like life.”
“Like death too?”
“Yes, messire.”
“How far did you come this morning?” asked the merchant, fancying his companion’s shrewdness had overshot the mark this time.
“Forty-three miles. I started before midnight from Stundsen.”
“I think,” said the merchant to his brother-critic, “we shall make nothing of this man. He must be one of my brother-in-law’s men at Stundsen. He is quite genuine in his stupidity.”
And the pair moved nearer the picture, while others came up and stopped, till there was soon a little knot of admirers talking in whispers. The crowd grew as the day went on. In the side street leading into the Place the doors of Notre Dame opened to let out the flood of worshippers that had flowed in since dawn from the country, and who now rushed from their devotions to their business. Noise was uppermost, trade was brisk; the sun got hot and men got thirsty. It was soon a riotous as well as a picturesque scene, and a spectator on that balcony of the curiously-carved corner window on the same side of the Place as the Guildhall could scarcely have told which stalls the hurrying masses most besieged, so tangled was the web of human beings jostling and jolting each other along the uneven pavement. A good many had stared and gazed at the picture. It was the subject of many comments and disputes that day; men quarrelled over its merits as they drank their sour wine, and women talked of it in whispers over their bargains. Some children had screamed and kicked at first sight of it; altogether it had not failed to be known, seen, and talked about. Our two friends of early morning had hung about it all day and overheard most of the remarks of the crowd. Some people had been disappointed in finding that it was not the sign of a play representing the slaying of Holofernes, but only a picture; a Venetian and a Greek, daintily dressed and speaking some soft, foreign tongue—a wonder to the sturdy Flemish peasants from the dykes and canals by the sea—lounged near the unpainted railing that protected the picture from the crowd. No one could see behind the picture, but many thought the artist was hidden within the closely sewn curtains, that never flapped in the breeze like the rest of the market awnings. These two and the first critics listened in eager silence to the judgment of the crowd, put forth in short sentences at long intervals. On coming up one woman said to her companion: