"That was the process adopted by Raphael," said the old man, removing his black velvet cap to express the respect inspired by the king of art; "his great superiority comes from the secret perception which, in him, seems determined to shatter form. In his figures form is what it really is in us, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, a vast poetic conception. Every figure is a world, a portrait, whose model has appeared in a sublime vision, tinged with light, indicated by an inward voice, disrobed by a divine figure, which points out the sources of expression in the past of a whole life. You give your women lovely robes of flesh, lovely draperies of hair; but where is the blood which engenders tranquillity or passion, and which causes special effects? Your saint is a dark woman, but this one, my poor Porbus, is a blonde! Your figures are pale, coloured spectres which you parade before our eyes, and you call that painting and art! "Because you have made something which looks more like a woman than like a house, you think that you have attained your end; and, overjoyed because you no longer have to write beside your figures, _currus venustus_, or _pulcher homo_, like the first painters, you fancy that you are marvellous artists! Ah, no! you are not that yet, my good fellows; you will have to use up more pencils and cover many canvases before you reach that point! To be sure, a woman carries her head like that, she wears her skirts as this one does, her eyes languish and melt with that air of mild resignation, the quivering shadow of the eyelashes trembles thus upon her cheek! That is accurate and it is not accurate. What does it lack? A mere nothing, but that nothing is everything. You produce the appearance of life, but you do not express its overflow, that indefinable something which perhaps is the soul, and which floats cloud-like upon the outer envelope; in a word, that flower of life which Titian and Raphael discovered. "Starting from the farthest point that you have reached, an excellent painting might perhaps be executed; but you grow weary too soon. The common herd admires, but the connoisseur smiles. O Mabuse, O my master," added this extraordinary individual, "you are a thief; you carried life away with you!--However," he continued, "this canvas is worth more than the painting of that mountebank of a Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh powdered with vermillion, his waves of red hair, and his wilderness of colours. At all events, you have here colouring, drawing, and sentiment, the three essential parts of art." "But that saint is sublime, my good man!" cried the young man, in a loud voice, emerging from a profound reverie. "Those two figures, of the saint and the boatman, have a delicacy of expression utterly unknown to the Italian painters; I don't know a single one of them who could have achieved the hesitation of the boatman." "Does this little knave belong to you?" Porbus asked the old man.