She had perpetually before her eyes, as well as before her life, the gray wall of that high house opposite the painter’s studio, pierced with its many eyes, and whether on summer’s stifling evenings, the shutters closed—­the whole street being deserted, the neighbors having gone into the country—­or in winter, with its gray sky, the roofs covered with the snow that was stained all too soon, when the brilliant lights behind the curtains looked like red spots on the varnished paper, Marianne ever felt in her inmost being the bitter void of Parisian melancholy, the overwhelming sadness of black loneliness, of hollow dreams, gnawing like incurable sorrows.

She grew up thus, her mind and body poisoned by this dwelling which she never left except to drag her feet wearily through the galleries of the Louvre, leaning on the arm of her uncle, who invariably repeated before the same pictures, in the loud and bombastic tone of a comediante, the same opinions, and grew enthusiastic and excited according as the pictures of the masters agreed with his style, his system, his creed.  One should hear him run the gamut of all his great phrases:  My sys-tem! Marianne knew when the expression was coming.  All these Flemish painters!  Painters of snuff-boxes, without any ideal, without grasp!  “And the Titian, look at this Titian!  Where is thought expressed in this Titian?  And mo-ral-i-ty? Titian!  A vendor of pink flesh!  Art should have a majesty, a dignity, a purity, an ideality very different.”

Ah! these words in ty, solemn, bombastic, pedantic, with a false ring, they entered Marianne’s ears like burning injections.

These visits to the museum impressed her with a gloom such as a ramble in a cemetery would create, she returned to the house with depressing headaches and muttering wrathful imprecations against destiny.  She even preferred that studio with its worn-out divans and its worm-eaten tapestries that were slowly shredding away.

There, at least, she was all alone, face to face with herself, consumed by a cowardly fear—­the fear of the future—­this young girl who had read everything, learned everything, understood everything, knew everything, sullied by all the jokes of the Kayser studio, which, in spite of the exalted, sacrosanct, aesthetic discussions which took place therein, sometimes shockingly resembled a smoking-room—­this physical virgin without any virginity of mind, could there take refuge in herself, and there in the solitude to which she was condemned, she questioned herself as to the end to which her present life would lead her.

Of dowry she had none.  Her father had left her nothing.  Kayser was poor and in debt.  She had no occupation.  To run about giving private lessons on the piano, seemed to Marianne to degrade her almost to the level of domestic service.  Those who wished to pose for the Montyon prize might do so!  She never would!