Camille sad! That was title of the second period which began almost immediately and lasted much longer. The scene which sums up the period in my memory is one quite unlike that of the roses, the scent of which she inhaled with such confident ecstasy, and that of the kiss she gave Jacques with such charming shamelessness. This time it was about the eleventh or twelfth sitting. I had noticed for some days that my model’s expression had changed. I had not dared to question her, for I was just as much afraid to learn that Jacques treated her well as that he treated her badly. That morning she was to come at half-past ten, and it was not ten yet. I was engaged in looking through a portfolio of drawings after the old Florentine masters, without succeeding in engrossing myself in their study. That is what takes the place of opium with me in my bad moments. Usually merely looking at these sketches recalls to me the frescoes of Ghirlandajo, of Benozzo, of Fra Filippo Lippi, of Signorelli, and many others; I find intact in me that fervour for the ideal which made me almost mad in my youth, when I went from little town to little town, from church to church, and from cloister to cloister. In those days a half-effaced silhouette of the Madonna, hardly visible upon a bit of wall eaten up by the sun, was enough to make me happy for an afternoon. The profiles of virgins dreamed by the old Tuscans, the bent figures of their young lords in their puffy doublets, the minute horizons in their vast landscapes, with battlements and campaniles upon the eminences, roads bordered by cypress trees and valleys glistening with running water—all this charm of primitive art was there imprisoned in this portfolio of sketches and ready to emerge from it to charm my fantasy. But my imagination was elsewhere, occupied with this problem in æsthetics very far distant from the frescoes and convents of Pisa or Sienne. “Camille was very sad again yesterday. Has the absurd Jacques resumed with the absurd Madam de Bonnivet?” That was what I was asking myself, instead of by the help of my sketches revisiting Italy, dear divine Italy, the land of beauty.