Meanwhile the conversation of Messieurs Droz and Lepany had taken a fresh turn, and attracted a little circle of listeners, among whom I observed an eccentric-looking young man with a club-foot, an enormously long neck, and a head of short, stiff, dusty hair, like the bristles of a blacking-brush.

“Queroulet!” said Lepany, with a contemptuous flourish of his pipe.  “Who spoke of Queroulet?  Bah!—­a miserable plodder, destitute of ideality—­a fellow who paints only what he sees, and sees only what is commonplace—­a dull, narrow-souled, unimaginative handicraftsman, to whom a tree is just a tree; and a man, a man; and a straw, a straw, and nothing more!”

“That’s a very low-souled view to take of art, no doubt,” croaked in a grating treble voice the youth with the club-foot; “but if trees and men and straws are not exactly trees and men and straws, and are not to be represented as trees and men and straws, may I inquire what else they are, and how they are to be pictorially treated?”

“They must be ideally treated, Monsieur Valentin,” replied Lepany, majestically.

“No doubt; but what will they be like when they are ideally treated?  Will they still, to the vulgar eye, be recognisable for trees and men and straws?”

“I should scarcely have supposed that Monsieur Valentin would jest upon such a subject as a canon of the art he professes,” said Lepany, becoming more and more dignified.

“I am not jesting,” croaked Monsieur Valentin; “but when I hear men of your school talk so much about the Ideal, I (as a realist) always want to know what they themselves understand by the phrase.”

“Are you asking me for my definition of the Ideal, Monsieur Valentin?”

“Well, if it’s not giving you too much trouble—­yes.”

Lepany, who evidently relished every chance of showing off, fell into a picturesque attitude and prepared to hold forth.  Valentin winked at one or two of his own clique, and lit a cigar.

“You ask me,” began Lepany, “to define the Ideal—­in other words, to define the indefinite, which alas! whether from a metaphysical, a philosophical, or an aesthetic point of view, is a task transcending immeasurably my circumscribed powers of expression.”

“Gracious heavens!” whispered Mueller in my ear.  “He must have been reared from infancy on words of five syllables!”

“What shall I say?” pursued Lepany.  “Shall I say that the Ideal is, as it were, the Real distilled and sublimated in the alembic of the imagination?  Shall I say that the Ideal is an image projected by the soul of genius upon the background of the universe?  That it is that dazzling, that unimaginable, that incommunicable goal towards which the suns in their orbits, the stars in their courses, the spheres with all their harmonies, have been chaotically tending since time began!  Ideal, say you?  Call it ideal, soul, mind, matter, art, eternity,... what are they all but words?  What are words but the weak strivings of the fettered soul that fain would soar to those empyrean heights where Truth, and Art, and Beauty are one and indivisible?  Shall I say all this...”