"How could I help it? I wasn't there," replied Lora.
"You bring the Academy into disrepute," continued the painter. "To
choose such a man as that! I don't wish to say ill of him, but he
works at a trade. Where are you dragging the first of arts,--the art
those works are the most lasting; bringing nations to light of which
the world has long lost even the memory; an art which crowns and
consecrates great men? Yes, sculpture is priesthood; it preserves the
ideas of an epoch, and you give its chair to a maker of toys and
mantelpieces, an ornamentationist, a seller of bric-a-brac! Ah! as
Chamfort said, one has to swallow a viper every morning to endure the
life of Paris. Well, at any rate, Art remains to a few of us; they
can't prevent us from cultivating it--"
"And besides, my dear fellow, you have a consolation which few artists
possess; the future is yours," said Bixiou. "When the world is
converted to our doctrine, you will be at the head of your art; for
you are putting into it ideas which people will understand--WHEN they
are generalized! In fifty years from now you'll be to all the world
what you are to a few of us at this moment,--a great man. The only
question is how to get along till then."
"I have just finished," resumed the great artist, his face expanding
like that of a man whose hobby is stroked, "an allegorical figure of
Harmony; and if you will come and see it, you will understand why it
should have taken me two years to paint it.
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