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Hackett, feeling it was likely to be about money.
    ‘Well, that he’s coming – Bonvin, I mean. As is my custom every summer, I am touring the coasts – it’s a kind of informal inspection, you see. – Expect me, then, on the 27th for dinner at the Hôtel du Port.’
    ‘It’s impossible.’ Parsons suggested that, since Dubois had brought his banjo with him, they might get up some kind of impromptu entertainment. But he had to agree that one couldn’t associate old Bonvin with entertainment.
    He couldn’t, surely, be expected from Paris before six. But when they arrived, all of them except Hackett carrying their portfolios, at the hotel’s front door, they recognized, from the moment it opened, the voice of Bonvin. Hackett looked round, and felt his head swim. The bar, dark, faded, pickled in its own long-standing odours, crowded with stools and barrels, with the air of being older than Palourde, as though Palourde had been built round it without daring to disturb it, was swept and emptied now except for a central table and chairs such as Hackett had never seen in the hotel. At the head of the table sat old Bonvin. ‘Sit down, gentlemen! I am your host!’ The everyday malicious dry voice, but a different Bonvin, in splendid seaside dress, a yellow waistcoat, a cravat. Palourde was indifferent to artists, but Bonvin had imposed himself as a professor.
    ‘They are used to me here. They keep a room for me which I think is not available to other guests and they are always ready to take a little trouble for me when I come.’
    The artists sat meekly down, while the patronne herself served them with a small glass of greenish-white muscadet.
    ‘I am your host,’ repeated Bonvin. ‘I can only say that I am delighted to see pupils, for the first time, in Palourde, but I assure you I have others as far away as Corsica. Once a teacher, always a teacher! I sometimes think it is a passion which outlasts even art itself.’
    They had all assured each other, in Paris, that old Bonvin was incapable of teaching anything. Time spent in his atelier was squandered. But here, in the strangely transformed bar of the Hôtel du Port, with a quite inadequate drink in front of them, they felt overtaken by destiny. The patronne shut and locked the front door to keep out the world who might disturb the professor. Bonvin, not, after all, looking so old, called upon them to show their portfolios.
    Hackett had to excuse himself to go up to his room and fetch the four drawings which he had made so far. He felt it an injustice that he had to show his things last.
    Bonvin asked him to hold them up one by one, then to lay them out on the table. To Hackett he spoke magniloquently, in French.
    ‘Yes, they are bad,’ he said, ‘but, M. Hackett, they arebad for two distinct reasons. In the first place, you should not draw the view from the top of a street if you cannot manage the perspective, which even a child, following simple mechanical rules, can do. The relationship in scale of the main figure to those lower down is quite, quite wrong. But there is something else amiss.
    ‘You are an admirer, I know, of Bastien-Lepage, who has said, “There is nothing really lasting, nothing that will endure, except the sincere expression of the actual conditions of life.” Conditions in the potato patch, in the hayfield, at the washtub, in the open street! That is pernicious nonsense. Look at this girl of yours. Evidently she is not a professional model, for she doesn’t know how to hold herself. I see you have made a note that the colour of the hair is red, but that is the only thing I know about her. She’s standing against the door like a beast waiting to be put back in its stall. It’s your intention, I am sure, to do the finished version in the same way, in the dust of the street. Well, your picture will say nothing and it will be nothing. It is only in the studio that you can bring out the heart of the subject, and that is what we are sent into