“You shall soon see a marvel, Monsieur Dechartre.  I have found the queen of small bells.  I found it at Rimini, in an old building in ruins, which is used as a warehouse.  I bought it and packed it myself.  I am waiting for it.  You shall see.  It bears a Christ on a cross, between the Virgin and Saint John, the date of 1400, and the arms of Malatesta—­Monsieur Dechartre, you are not listening enough.  Listen to me attentively.  In 1400 Lorenzo Ghiberti, fleeing from war and the plague, took refuge at Rimini, at Paola Malatesta’s house.  It was he that modelled the figures of my bell.  And you shall see here, next week, Ghiberti’s work.”

The servant announced that dinner was served.

Miss Bell apologized for serving to them Italian dishes.  Her cook was a poet of Fiesole.

At table, before the fiascani enveloped with corn straw, they talked of the fifteenth century, which they loved.  Prince Albertinelli praised the artists of that epoch for their universality, for the fervent love they gave to their art, and for the genius that devoured them.  He talked with emphasis, in a caressing voice.

Dechartre admired them.  But he admired them in another way.

“To praise in a becoming manner,” he said, “those men, who worked so heartily, the praise should be modest and just.  They should be placed in their workshops, in the shops where they worked as artisans.  It is there that one may admire their simplicity and their genius.  They were ignorant and rude.  They had read little and seen little.  The hills that surround Florence were the boundary of their horizon.  They knew only their city, the Holy Scriptures, and some fragments of antique sculptures, studied and caressed lovingly.”

“You are right,” said Professor Arrighi.  “They had no other care than to use the best processes.  Their minds bent only on preparing varnish and mixing colors.  The one who first thought of pasting a canvas on a panel, in order that the painting should not be broken when the wood was split, passed for a marvellous man.  Every master had his secret formulae.”

“Happy time,” said Dechartre, “when nobody troubled himself about that originality for which we are so avidly seeking to-day.  The apprentice tried to work like the master.  He had no other ambition than to resemble him, and it was without trying to be that he was different from the others.  They worked not for glory, but to live.”

“They were right,” said Choulette.  “Nothing is better than to work for a living.”

“The desire to attain fame,” continued Dechartre, “did not trouble them.  As they did not know the past, they did not conceive the future; and their dream did not go beyond their lives.  They exercised a powerful will in working well.  Being simple, they made few mistakes, and saw the truth which our intelligence conceals from us.”

Choulette began to relate to Madame Marmet the incidents of a call he had made during the day on the Princess of the House of France to whom the Marquise de Rieu had given him a letter of introduction.  He liked to impress upon people the fact that he, the Bohemian and vagabond, had been received by that royal Princess, at whose house neither Miss Bell nor the Countess Martin would have been admitted, and whom Prince Albertinelli prided himself on having met one day at some ceremony.