"You answer me by pointing with pride to the founder of your race, the illustrious Michelangelo Lavoratori, who, from nothing at all, had become a great man, and whose memory will never perish. Then you tell me a fact at which I marvel greatly: that the sons and daughters of this Michel, overflowing with veneration for their father's memory, chose to be artists too. One was a musician, another an engraver, a third a painter. If they did not receive from heaven the same talents as their father, they did at all events retain in their hearts and transmit to their children respect and love for art. Their children, in their turn, did likewise, and all these talents, all these mottoes, all these biographies, which you exhibit to me and explain to me, present the spectacle of several generations of artists, eager to maintain the standard of their hereditary profession. Unquestionably only a few among all these seekers after glory were truly worthy of the name they bore. Genius is an exception, and it takes you but a short time to point out to me the small number of noteworthy artists who have upheld by their own labors the glory of your family. But that small number has been sufficient to replenish your generous blood, and to maintain in the ideas of the intermediate generations a certain fire, a certain pride, a certain thirst for grandeur which may still produce distinguished men. "But I, a foundling, isolated in the vast expanse of time--I continue my apologue,--a natural scorner of all hereditary celebrity, seek to lower your pride. I smile with an air of triumph when you admit that this or that ancestor, whose portrait impresses me by its air of innocence, was never anything more than a paltry genius, a narrow-minded creature; that a certain other, whose rakish dress and bristling moustache I do not like, was a black sheep, a fool or a fanatic; in short, I give you to understand that you are a degenerate artist, because you have not inherited the sacred fire, and that you have fallen asleep in a luxurious _far niente_, contemplating the fruitful life of your forefathers. "Thereupon you reply to me; and you will allow me to place in your mouth a few words which seem to me not devoid of sense: