Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/261

For five or six years Marcel had worked at the famous painting which (he said) represented the Passage of the Red Sea; and for five or six years, this master-piece of color had been obstinately refused by the jury. In fact, by dint of going and returning so many times from the artist’s study to the Exhibition, and from the Exhibition to his study, the picture knew the road to the Louvre well enough to have gone thither of itself, if it had been put on wheels. Marcel, who had repainted the canvas ten times over, from top to bottom, attributed to personal hostility on the part of the jury the ostracism which annually repulsed him from the large saloon; nevertheless, he was not totally discouraged by the obstinate rejection which greeted him at every exhibition. He was comfortably established in the persuasion that his picture was, on a somewhat smaller scale, the pendant required by “The Marriage of Cana,” that gigantic master-piece whose astonishing brilliancy the dust of three centuries has not been able to tarnish. Accordingly, every year at the epoch of the Exhibition, Marcel sent his great work to the jury of examiners; only, to deceive them, he would change some details of his picture, and the title of it, without disturbing the general composition.

Thus, it came before the jury once, under the name of “The Passage of the Rubicon;” but Pharaoh, badly dis-