Lirat shrugged his shoulders. "With a paste of paint colors coming out of tubes, with a paste of paint colors made by the dirty hands of chemists, with a paste of paint colors, heavy, opaque and which sticks to the fingers like jelly! Tell me ... painting ... what humbug! No, but you will admit, my little Mintié, that it is humbug! A drawing, an engraving, a two-tone piece ... that's the thing! That does not deceive, it's honest ... the amateurs sneer at that kind of work and don't presume to bother you about it ... it evokes no empty enthusiasm in their 'salons'! But real art, majestic art, artistic art is there. Sculpture ... yes ... when it is beautiful, it shakes you.... But next to it is the art of drawing, drawing ... my little Mintié, without Prussian blue, just plain drawing! Will you come to my studio tomorrow?" "Certainly." He continued to chop his phrases, fumble his words, excited by their very sound. "I am beginning a series of etchings. You'll see! A nude woman, coming out of a deep shadow, carried upward on the wings of a beast. Scattered about, in unnatural positions, are parts of human corpses with dirty folds and swellings of decaying flesh ... a belly cut open and losing its viscera, a belly of terrible outline, hideous and true! A dead head, but a living dead head, you understand? Greedy, gluttonous, all lips. She is rising in front of a crowd of old men in tall hats, silk coats and white cravats. She is rising and the old men bend toward her panting, with hanging jaws, watering mouths, contracted eyes ... all have lewd faces!" Stopping before me with an air of defiance, he continued: "And do you know what I am going to call it? Do you know? I am going to call it Love, my little Mintié. What do you think of it?..." "That seems to me a little bit too symbolic," I ventured. "Symbolic!" interrupted Lirat. "You are talking nonsense, my little Mintié! Symbolic! Why that's life itself! Let's go out and eat." Our dinner was a very gay affair; Lirat displayed a charming disposition; he was full of original ideas, without extremes or paradoxes, on art. He had again found his normal self, as in the better days of his life. Several times I had a notion to tell him that I had seen Juliette. A kind of shame held me back; I had not the courage. "Work, work, my little Mintié," he said to me, when we were parting. "To create, always to create, to draw from one's sinews or from one's brains no matter what ... be it only a pair of rubbers. There is nothing outside of that!"