I Stopped To Look At
One Of These Stalls, All Brilliant With Cheaply-Made, Showy Vases Of
Flowers, That Sell For One Or Two Sous.
We went also to the National Academy of Fine Arts, a government school
for the gratuitous instruction of artists, a Grecian building, with a
row of all the distinguished painters in front.
In the doorway, as we came in, was an antique, headless statue of
Minerva; literally it was Minerva's _gown_ standing up - a pillar
of drapery, nothing more, and drapery soiled, tattered, and battered;
but then it was an antique, and that is enough. Now, when antique
things are ugly, I do not like them any better for being antique, and
I should rather have a modern statue than Minerva's old gown. We went
through all the galleries in this school, in one of which the prize
pieces of scholars are placed. Whoever gets one of these prizes is
sent to study in Rome at the expense of the government. We passed
through the hall where the judges sit to decide upon pictures, and
through various others that I cannot remember. I was particularly
interested in the apartment devoted to the casts from the statuary in
the Louvre and in other palaces. These casts are taken with
mathematical exactness, and subjected to the inspection of a
committee, who order any that are defective to be broken. Proof casts
of all the best works, ancient and modern, are thus furnished at a
small price, and so brought within the reach of the most moderate
means.
This morning M. and Madame Belloc took me with them to call on
Beranger, the poet. He is a charming old man, very animated, with a
face full of feeling and benevolence, and with that agreeable
simplicity and vivacity of manner which is peculiarly French. It was
eleven o'clock, but he had not yet breakfasted; we entreated him to
waive ceremony, and so his maid brought in his chop and coffee, and we
all plunged into an animated conversation. Beranger went on conversing
with shrewdness mingled with childlike simplicity, a blending of the
comic, the earnest, and the complimentary. Conversation in a French
circle seems to me like the gambols of a thistle down, or the rainbow
changes in soap bubbles. One laughs with tears in one's eyes. One
moment confounded with the absolute childhood of the simplicity, in
the next one is a little afraid of the keen edge of the shrewdness.
This call gave me an insight into a French circle which both amused
and delighted me. Coming home, M. Belloc enlarged upon Beranger's
benevolence and kindness of heart. "No man," he said, "is more
universally popular with the common people. He has exerted himself
much for the families of the unfortunate deportes to Cayenne." Then he
added, laughing, "A mechanic, one of my model sitters, was dilating
upon his goodness - 'What a man! what sublime virtue! how is he
beloved! Could I live to see his funeral!
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