I found my friend in large furnished apartments on the ground floor in the Rue Duphot.  The walls were stretched with blue silk, there were large mirrors and great gilt cornices.  Passing into the bedroom I found the young god wallowing in the finest of fine linen—­in a great Louis XV. bed, and there were cupids above him.  “Holloa! what, you back again, Dayne? we thought we weren’t going to see you again.”

“It’s nearly one o’clock:  get up.  What’s the news?”

“To-day is the opening of the exposition of the Impressionists.  We’ll have a bit of breakfast round the corner, at Durant’s, and we’ll go on there.  I hear that Bedlam is nothing to it; there is a canvas there twenty feet square and in three tints:  pale yellow for the sunlight, brown for the shadows, and all the rest is sky-blue.  There is, I am told, a lady walking in the foreground with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is said to be three yards long.”

And so we went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that willingly forfeit all delights of the world in the hope of realising a new aestheticism; we went insolent with patent leather shoes and bright kid gloves and armed with all the jargon of the school. “Cette jambe ne porte pas;” “la nature ne se fait pas comme ca;” “on dessine par les masses; combien de tetes?” “Sept et demi.” “Si j’avais un morceau de craie je mettrais celle-la dans un bocal, c’est un foetus,” etc.; in a word, all that the journals of culture are pleased to term an artistic education.  And then the boisterous laughter, exaggerated in the hope of giving as much pain as possible.

The history of Impressionist art is simple.  In the beginning of this century the tradition of French art—­the tradition of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau—­had been completely lost; having produced genius, their art died.  Ingres is the sublime flower of the classic art which succeeded the art of the palace and the boudoir:  further than Ingres it was impossible to go, and his art died.  Then the Turners and Constables came to France, and they begot Troyon, and Troyon begot Millet, Courbet, Corot, and Rousseau, and these in turn begot Degas, Pissarro, Madame Morizot, and Guillaumin.  Degas is a pupil of Ingres, but he applies the marvellous acuteness of drawing he learned from his master to delineating the humblest aspects of modern life.  Degas draws not by the masses, but by the character;—­his subjects are shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the qualities that endow them with immortality are precisely those which eternalise the virgins and saints of Leonardo da Vinci in the minds of men.  You see the fat, vulgar woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the pier-glass.  So marvellously well are the lines of her face observed and rendered that you can tell exactly what her position in life is; you know what the furniture of her rooms is like; you know what she would say to you if she were to