Two or three days later CÆsar met the Spaniard CortÉs in the Piazza Colonna. They bowed. The thin, sour-looking painter was walking with a beardless young German, red and snub-nosed. This young man was a painter too, CortÉs said; he wore a green hat with a cock’s feather, a blue cape, thick eyeglasses, big boots, and had a certain air of being a blond Chinaman.

“Would you like to come to the Doria gallery with us?” asked CortÉs.

“What is there to see there?”

“A stupendous portrait by VelÁzquez.”

“I warn you that I know nothing about pictures.”

“Nobody does,” CortÉs declared roundly. “Everybody says what he thinks.”

“Is the gallery near here?”

“Yes, just a step.”

In company with CortÉs and the German with the green hat with the cock’s feather, CÆsar went to the Piazza del Collegio Romano, where the Doria palace is. They saw a lot of pictures which didn’t seem any better to CÆsar than those in the antique shops and the pawnbrokers’, but which drew learned commentaries from the German. Then CortÉs took them to a cabinet hung in green and lighted by a skylight. There was nothing to be seen in the cabinet except the portrait of the Pope. In order that people might look at it comfortably, a sofa had been installed facing it.

“Is this the VelÁzquez portrait?” asked CÆsar.

“This is it.”

CÆsar looked at it carefully. “That man had eaten and drunk well before his portrait was painted,” said CÆsar; “his face is congested.”

“It is extraordinary!” exclaimed CortÉs. “It is something to see, the way this is done. What boldness! Everything is red, the cape, the cap, the curtains in the background.... What a man!”

The German aired his opinions in his own language, and took out a notebook and pencil and wrote some notes.

“What sort of man was this?” asked CÆsar, whom the technical side of painting did not preoccupy, as it did CortÉs.

“They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman’s domination.”

“The great thing is,” murmured CÆsar, “how the painter has left him here alive. It seems as if we had come in here to salute him, and he was waiting for us to speak. Those clear eyes are questioning us. It is curious.”

“Not curious,” exclaimed CortÉs, “but admirable.”

“For me it is more curious than admirable. There is something brutal in this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it’s the same as in water, only corks float.”

LEGEND AND HISTORY

CÆsar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and CortÉs seated on the sofa, absorbed in the picture; he looked at various paintings in the gallery, went back, and sat down, beside the artists.

“This portrait,” he said presently, “is like history by the side of legend. All the other paintings in the gallery are legend, ‘folk-lore,’ as I believe one calls it. This one is history.”

“That’s what it is. It is truth,” agreed CortÉs.

“Yes, but there are people who do not like the truth, my friend. I tell you: this is a man of flesh, somewhat enigmatic, like nature herself, and with arteries in which blood flows; this is a man who breathes and digests, and not merely a pleasant abstraction; you, who understand such things, will tell me that the drawing is perfect, and the colour such as it was in reality; but how about the person who doesn’t ask for reality?”

“Stendhal, the writer, was affected that way by this picture,” said CortÉs; “he was shocked at its being hung among masterpieces.”

“He found it bad, no doubt.”

“Very bad?”

“Was this Stendhal English?”

“No, French.”

“Ah, then, you needn’t be surprised. A Frenchman has no obligation to understand anything that’s not French.”

“Nevertheless he was an intelligent man.”

“Did he perhaps have a good deal of veneration?”

“No, he boasted of not having any.”

“Doubtless he did have without suspecting it. With a man who had no veneration, what difference would it make whether there was one bad thing among a lot of good ones?”

The German with the green hat, who understood something of the conversation, was indignant at CÆsar’s irreverent ideas. He asked him if he understood Latin, and CÆsar told him no, and then, in a strange gibberish, half Latin and half Italian, he let loose a series of facts, dates, and numbers. Then he asserted that all artistic things of great merit were German: Greece. Rome, Gothic architecture, the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, VelÁzquez, all German.

The snub-nosed young person, with his cape and his green hat with its cock-feather, did not let a mouse escape from his German mouse-trap.

The data of the befeathered German were too much for CÆsar, and he took his leave of the painters.