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paused, then continued: “It’s ten years now, young man, that I’ve been struggling with this problem. But what are ten short years when you’re contending with nature? How long did Lord Pygmalion take to create the only statue that ever walked!”
    The old man sank into a profound reverie, his eyes fixed and his fingers toying mechanically with his knife.
    “Now he’s in conversation with his
genius
,” Porbus whispered.
    At this word, Nicolas Poussin was seized by an inexplicable curiosity—an artist’s curiosity. This old man with his blank stare, fixed and comatose, had become more than human in the youth’s eyes: a kind of fantastic genie inhabiting an unknown sphere, rousing a thousand vague ideas in his soul. The moral phenomenon of such fascination can no more be defined than we can translate into words the emotion produced by a song reminding an exile of his homeland. The scorn the old man affected for the noble endeavors of art, his wealth, his odd manners, Porbus’s deference toward him, his supreme work of art kept secret for so long—a work of patience, doubtless of genius, judging by the head of the Virgin which young Poussin had so candidly admired and which, still beautiful even beside Mabuse’s
Adam
, evidenced the imperial mastery of one of the princes of art: everything about this old man transcended the limits of human nature. What Nicolas Poussin’s fervent imagination could apprehend, what now became quite clear to him from his intercourse with this supernatural being, was a consummate image of the artist’s nature, that wild nature to which so many powers are entrusted, and which all too often abuses them, leading cold reason, the bourgeois public, and even some connoisseurs down a myriad barren paths, precisely where this capricious white-winged sprite discovers castles, epics, works of art! A nature sometimes mocking, sometimes kind, at once fertile and desolate! So for the enthusiastic Poussin, this old man had become, by a sudden transfiguration, Art itself, art with all its secrets, its passions, its reveries.
    “Yes, my dear Porbus,” Frenhofer continued, “till now, what I’ve failed to find is a flawless woman, a body whose contours are perfectly beautiful, and whose complexion—But where is she in the flesh?” he interrupted himself. “That matchless Venus of the ancients, so often sought and never found except in scattered elements, some fragmentary beauties here, some there! Oh! I would give all I possess if just once, for a single moment, I could gaze upon that complete, that divine nature; if I could meet that ideal heavenly beauty, I would search for her in limbo itself! Like Orpheus, I would descend into the Hades of art to bring her back to life!”
    “We might as well leave now,” Porbus murmured to Poussin. “He doesn’t hear us anymore, or see us either!”
    “Let’s go up to his studio,” the dazzled youth suggested.
    “Oh, the old monkey has made sure to keep it locked away from the likes of you and me. His treasures are too well protected for us to get at them. I didn’t wait for your suggestion and your imagination to lay siege to that mystery...”
    “Then there is a mystery?”
    “Yes,” Porbus replied. “Old Frenhofer is the only pupil Mabuse would take on. Becoming his friend, his savior, his father, Frenhofer sacrificed the greater part of his treasures to satisfy Mabuse’s passions; in exchange, Mabuse bequeathed him the secret of relief in painting, the power to give his figures an extraordinary life, that natural bloom which is our eternal despair but the technique of which he possessed so securely that one day, having drunk up the money for the brocaded damask he was to wear at the ceremonial reception of Charles V, he accompanied his patron wearing paper garments painted to look like damask. The special luster of the material Mabuse was wearing amazed the Emperor, who, in attempting to compliment the old drunkard’s companion,