For M. David would cry to him, “In a Republic of Truth every unit must be content to contribute itself unaffectedly to the full design.” Yet (as Ned came to know) was no man more greedy than this Academician for vulgar notoriety--none more sensitive to criticism or more resentful of a personal slight. So he (M. David) would preach, not plausibly but whole-mindedly, a religion of purity and cleanliness--a religion of beauty, material and intellectual, whose very ritual should be Gregorian in its sweet austerity. Such were his professions; and nevertheless in the height of his revolutionary popularity he did not scruple to introduce into his pictures details that pandered to the most sordid lusts for the grotesque and the horrible--to generally, indeed, stultify his own declarations of belief by acts that no ethics but those of brutality could justify. Finally, it was in the disgust engendered of a flagrant illustration of such inconsistency that the young Englishman, after some months of gradual disenchantment, “cut” the king’s painter; fled, for solace of a haunting experience, eastwards again, and, snuffing with some new emotion of relish the frankincense of green woods, hugged himself over a thought of his seasonable escape from that national sphinx of caprice, to symbolise whom in a word one must draw upon modern times for the “cussedness” of Wall Street. Yet even then, had he but foreseen it, he was backing, while dodging Scylla, into the very deadly attraction of Charybdis. In the meanwhile autumn stole footsore, like a loveless wife, in the track of summer. She was swart and powdered, not _à la mode de Versailles_; drouthy too, yet with a cry to shrill piercingly in every street of every town of France. The dust of her going rose and penetrated through chinks and doorways. It overlay the pavements so thickly that one might have thought it the accumulation of that that age-long ministers had thrown in the eyes of the people, the very precipitate of tyranny. It clung, hot and acrid, to the walls of all living palaces, of all princely monuments to the dead, as if it were the expression of that proletariat censorship that would obliterate the very records of a hateful past. It was the condensed breath of destruction settling in a stringent dew, and it might have been exhaled from the ten thousand brassy throats that made clamour in the highways ten thousandfold great because they were the resonant throats of starved and empty vessels. For the elections were on; and what if bread were dearer than money if his chosen representative was in every man’s mouth? So, through broil and famine the city of Paris echoed to its blazing roofs with jangle jubilant and acclamatory, inasmuch as the no-property qualification gave every honest man a chance of being governed by a rogue. And what prospect in a nation of contrarieties could be more humorously enticing?