She had grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and, as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes.  A little creature, she served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten.  Moreover, the child lighted his stove and filled his pipe.

The studio was littered with books.  As chance offered, she read them all eagerly and examined with curiosity the pictures drawn by an Eisen or a Moreau, depicting passionate kisses exchanged under arbors, where behind curtains, short silk skirts appeared in a rumpled state.  She had rapidly reached womanhood without Kayser’s perceiving that she could comprehend and judge for herself.

This falsely inspired man, entirely devoted to mystical compositions, vaguely painted—­philosophical and critical, as he said—­this thinker, whose brush painted obscure subjects as it might have produced signs, did not dream that the girl growing up beside him was also in love with chimeras, and drawn toward the abyss, not however to learn the mysteries hidden by the clouds, but the mystery of life, the secret of the visions that haunted her, of the disquieting temptations that filled her with such feverish excitement.

If Uncle Kayser could for one moment have descended from the nebulous regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor in the depth of Marianne’s glance, and something feverish and restless in her movements.  But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, aesthetic dignity, and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission for it, an end, an idea—­art the educator, art the moralizer,—­and allowed this feverish, wearied, impulsive creature, moulded by vice, who bore his name, to wander around his studio like a stray dog.

Isolated, forgotten, the young girl sometimes passed whole days bending over a book, her lips dry, her face pale, but with a burning light in her gray eyes, while her fingers were thrust through her hair, or she rested upon a window-sill, following afar off, some imaginary picture in the depths of the clouds.

The studio overlooked a silent, gloomy street in which no sound was heard save the slow footfalls of weary and exhausted pedestrians.  It was stifling behind this window and Marianne’s gloomy horizon was this frame of stones against which her wandering thoughts bruised themselves as a bird might break its wings.

Ah! to fly away, to escape from the solemn egotism and the theories of Simon Kayser, and to live the passionate life of those who are free, loved, rich and happy!  Such was the dream upon which Marianne nourished herself.