“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 of art, wished to burn them all.

“There were at Florence, in the time of the superb Manfred, who was half a Mussulman, men who were said to be of the sect of Epicurus, and who sought for arguments against the existence of God.  Guido Cavalcanti disdained the ignorant folk who believed in the immortality of the soul.  The following phrase by him was quoted:  ’The death of man is exactly similar to that of brutes.’  Later, when antique beauty was excavated from ruins, the Christian style of art seemed sad.  The painters that worked in the churches and cloisters were neither devout nor chaste.  Perugino was an atheist, and did not conceal it.”