The Red Lily, vol 2 | Page 6

the genius that devoured them. He talked with
emphasis, in a caressing voice.
Dechartre admired them. But he admired them in another way.
"To praise in a becoming manner," he said, "those men, who worked so
heartily, the praise should be modest and just. They should be placed in
their workshops, in the shops where they worked as artisans. It is there
that one may admire their simplicity and their genius. They were
ignorant and rude. They had read little and seen little. The hills that
surround Florence were the boundary of their horizon. They knew only
their city, the Holy Scriptures, and some fragments of antique
sculptures, studied and caressed lovingly."
"You are right," said Professor Arrighi. "They had no other care than to
use the best processes. Their minds bent only on preparing varnish and
mixing colors. The one who first thought of pasting a canvas on a panel,
in order that the painting should not be broken when the wood was split,
passed for a marvellous man. Every master had his secret formulae."
"Happy time," said Dechartre, "when nobody troubled himself about
that originality for which we are so avidly seeking to-day. The

apprentice tried to work like the master. He had no other ambition than
to resemble him, and it was without trying to be that he was different
from the others. They worked not for glory, but to live."
"They were right," said Choulette. "Nothing is better than to work for a
living."
"The desire to attain fame," continued Dechartre, "did not trouble them.
As they did not know the past, they did not conceive the future; and
their dream did not go beyond their lives. They exercised a powerful
will in working well. Being simple, they made few mistakes, and saw
the truth which our intelligence conceals from us."
Choulette began to relate to Madame Marmet the incidents of a call he
had made during the day on the Princess of the House of France to
whom the Marquise de Rieu had given him a letter of introduction. He
liked to impress upon people the fact that he, the Bohemian and
vagabond, had been received by that royal Princess, at whose house
neither Miss Bell nor the Countess Martin would have been admitted,
and whom Prince Albertinelli prided himself on having met one day at
some ceremony.
"She devotes herself," said the Prince, "to the practices of piety."
"She is admirable for her nobility, and her simplicity," said Choulette.
"In her house, surrounded by her gentlemen and her ladies, she causes
the most rigorous etiquette to be observed, so that her grandeur is
almost a penance, and every morning she scrubs the pavement of the
church. It is a village church, where the chickens roam, while the 'cure'
plays briscola with the sacristan."
And Choulette, bending over the table, imitated, with his napkin, a
servant scrubbing; then, raising his head, he said, gravely:
"After waiting in consecutive anterooms, I was at last permitted to kiss
her hand."
And he stopped.

Madame Martin asked, impatiently:
"What did she say to you, that Princess so admirable for her nobility
and her simplicity?"
"She said to me: 'Have you visited Florence? I am told that recently
new and handsome shops have been opened which are lighted at night.'
She said also 'We have a good chemist here. The Austrian chemists are
not better. He placed on my leg, six months ago, a porous plaster which
has not yet come off.' Such are the words that Maria Therese deigned to
address to me. O simple grandeur! O Christian virtue! O daughter of
Saint Louis! O marvellous echo of your voice, holy Elizabeth of
Hungary!"
Madame Martin smiled. She thought that Choulette was mocking. But
he denied the charge, indignantly, and Miss Bell said that Madame
Martin was wrong. It was a fault of the French, she said, to think that
people were always jesting.
Then they reverted to the subject of art, which in that country is inhaled
with the air.
"As for me," said the Countess Martin, "I am not learned enough to
admire Giotto and his school. What strikes me is the sensuality of that
art of the fifteenth century which is said to be Christian. I have seen
piety and purity only in the images of Fra Angelico, although they are
very pretty. The rest, those figures of Virgins and angels, are
voluptuous, caressing, and at times perversely ingenuous. What is there
religious in those young Magian kings, handsome as women; in that
Saint Sebastian, brilliant with youth, who seems merely the dolorous
Bacchus of Christianity?"
Dechartre replied that he thought as she did, and that they must be right,
she and he; since Savonarola was of the same opinion, and, finding no
piety in any work