_Monsignor._ Aye, aye, ugh, ugh--nothing but disappointments here below! I remark a considerable payment made to yourself on this Third of December. Talk of disappointments! There was a young fellow here, 35 Jules, a foreign sculptor I did my utmost to advance, that the Church might be a gainer by us both; he was going on hopefully enough, and of a sudden he notifies to me some marvelous change that has happened in his notions of Art. Here's his letter: "He never had a clearly conceived 40 Ideal within his brain till today. Yet since his hand could manage a chisel, he has practiced expressing other men's Ideals; and, in the very perfection he has attained to, he foresees an ultimate failure: his unconscious hand will pursue its prescribed course of old years, and will 45 reproduce with a fatal expertness the ancient types, let the novel one appear never so palpably to his spirit. There is but one method of escape: confiding the virgin type to as chaste a hand, he will turn painter instead of sculptor, and paint, not carve, its characteristics"--strike out, I 50 dare say, a school like Correggio: how think you, Ugo? _Intendant._ Is Correggio a painter? _Monsignor._ Foolish Jules! and yet, after all, why foolish? He may--probably will--fail egregiously; but if there should arise a new painter, will it not be in some 55 such way, by a poet now, or a musician (spirits who have conceived and perfected an Ideal through some other channel), transferring it to this, and escaping our conventional roads by pure ignorance of them; eh, Ugo? If you have no appetite, talk at least, Ugo! 60 _Intendant._ Sir, I can submit no longer to this course of yours. First, you select the group of which I formed one--next you thin it gradually--always retaining me with your smile--and so do you proceed till you have fairly got me alone with you between four stone walls. 65 And now then? Let this farce, this chatter, end now; what is it you want with me? _Monsignor._ Ugo! _Intendant._ From the instant you arrived, I felt your smile on me as you questioned me about this and the 70 other article in those papers--why your brother should have given me this villa, that _podere_--and your nod at the end meant--what? _Monsignor._ Possibly that I wished for no loud talk here. If once you set me coughing, Ugo!-- 75 _Intendant._ I have your brother's hand and seal to all I possess: now ask me what for! what service I did him--ask me!