CROSSING PARIS
571
He pointed to an urban scene painted in oils, resting on an easel.
It might have been inspired by the view which they had contem–
plated together that afternoon, as they looked through the window
of the cafe in the Boulevard of the Bastille. Martin could see in it
nothing but an aggregate of confusions. Still the drawing was clear.
A black line, heavy as the lead of a window sash, outlined the prin–
cipal masses; but the colors overflowed the contours without restraint,
and formed a harmony of their own foreign to that of the drawing,
with which it hardly coincided except by accident. The canvas was
signed GiIouin.
"That," replied GrandgiI, "that's my real work, my pleasure
and my headache. My canvasses are beginning to sell, but I do them
for my own satisfaction and for nothing else. I don't give a damn
for the critics or the dealers. Whether they like it or not, it's my own
guts that I put into that picture, my heart, and the truth as I see it."
Grandgil spoke with a passion which Martin had never found
in him. His little eyes were now diffusing over his ram's face a light
which was no longer irony, but exaltation and ,an austere and fervent
joy. He went to get the framed portrait of a woman and placed it
on the easel. The intentions of the painter were more evident here
than in the landscape with its gray tones. The woman was seated
in front of a window. Circled with a heavy line, the figure had a
solid poise. A streak of red light streaming from a bouquet of tulips
covered one half of her face, while a sheet of tender sky blue spread
over her forehead, and seemed to take its source in the blue of her
eyes. The colors which properly belonged, so to speak, to the face,
overflowed into the squares of the windows, where they formed
iridescences.
"You like that?"
"I don't give a damn for it," replied Martin with an accent
of gloomy ferocity.
Grangil's face changed its expression. The flame of enthusiasm
went out of the little porcine eyes, whose glance darkened with
melancholy. But almost at once the ram's face lightened with a
gleam of that slightly detached irony in which the painter seemed
to find
his
securest equilibrium.
"Perhaps you prefer Grandgil to Gilouin. I'll not press the
question. You would end by saying the hell with Grandgil and Gilouin
