The band resumed its march. The worst was that to make a short cut they had to go right through the official Salon, and they resigned themselves to doing so, notwithstanding the oath they had taken not to set foot in it, as a matter of protest. Cutting their way through the crowd, keeping rigidly erect, they followed the suite of galleries, casting indignant glances to right and left. There was none of the gay scandal of their Salon, full of fresh tones and an exaggeration of sunlight, here. One after the other came gilt frames full of shadows; black pretentious things, nude figures showing yellowish in a cellar-like light, the frippery of so-called classical art, historical, genre and landscape painting, all showing the same conventional black grease. The works reeked of uniform mediocrity, they were characterised by a muddy dinginess of tone, despite their primness--the primness of impoverished, degenerate blood. And the friends quickened their steps: they ran to escape from that reign of bitumen, condemning everything in one lump with their superb sectarian injustice, repeating that there was nothing in the place worth looking at--nothing, nothing at all! At last they emerged from the galleries, and were going down into the garden when they met Mahoudeau and Chaîne. The former threw himself into Claude’s arms. ‘Ah, my dear fellow, your picture; what artistic temperament it shows!’ The painter at once began to praise the ‘Vintaging Girl.’ ‘And you, I say, you have thrown a nice big lump at their heads!’ But the sight of Chaîne, to whom no one spoke about the ‘Woman taken in Adultery,’ and who went silently wandering around, awakened Claude’s compassion. He thought there was something very sad about that execrable painting, and the wasted life of that peasant who was a victim of middle-class admiration. He always gave him the delight of a little praise; so now he shook his hand cordially, exclaiming: ‘Your machine’s very good too. Ah, my fine fellow, draughtsmanship has no terrors for you!’ ‘No, indeed,’ declared Chaîne, who had grown purple with vanity under his black bushy beard. He and Mahoudeau joined the band, and the latter asked the others whether they had seen Chambouvard’s ‘Sower.’ It was marvellous; the only piece of statuary worth looking at in the Salon. Thereupon they all followed him into the garden, which the crowd was now invading. ‘There,’ said Mahoudeau, stopping in the middle of the central path: ‘Chambouvard is standing just in front of his “Sower.”’