Both Merinos and Gallus had lived long in Paris, in the mysterious Montmartre quarter, of which both spoke as of the promised land. Merinos was a portrait painter, but he had given up painting, a fact for which he gave convincing reasons. “You understand: now-a-days people make such ridiculous demands. They insist upon a likeness. As if the likeness ever mattered to an artist!” “That’s sure enough,” the chorus assented. My mind at once reverted to the collection of ancestors that covered the walls of the drawing room and that were bad paintings. Assuredly they must be likenesses. Thus defrauded of glory by the stupidity of the bourgeois, Merinos none the less continued to give evidence of genius. He always carried about with him a piece of coloured paper and a stick of charcoal. While talking and smoking he would carelessly rub his charcoal on the paper, and draw a few lines below the spots thus obtained. It was curious, but when one studied these masterpieces patiently and with good will, one could get a notion of distorted faces, barely indicated, but which the admiring group recognised as faces in torment, ill disposed folk, disturbers of society. Certain art-lovers in the town--there were some all the same, it seemed--would buy these at a high price, declaring them to be wonderful; and there was an enthusiastic and slender witted lady, who, as every one knew, used regularly to visit Merinos’s studio, which, it appeared, was a perfect dog-hole, humbly to gather up his slightest sketches, even going down upon her knees on the floor to hunt them under the furniture. I too admired him, on trust. One day when grandfather at our house was praising this underrated genius, he brought upon himself this remark from my father: “Yes, that’s the great fad--unfinished works! For my part, I care neither for scaffoldings nor for ruins.” What did he mean by that? I concluded simply that he was incapable of appreciating, as we did, the art of the Café des Navigateurs. It was the proper thing to maintain a certain distance between these two misunderstood beings and Galurin, who was only a decayed photographer. The latter was no more a stranger to me than Casenave had been. People used to employ him in their houses for this and that supplementary duty, and especially as an extra man at table. As he was once deploring this sort of servitude in our presence grandfather reminded him that Jean-Jacques had endured the same. The example of Jean-Jacques appeared to soothe his recalcitrant pride. Who in the world was this Jean-Jacques, I wondered.