Saracinesca, page 229 by F. Marion Crawford
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suggested Gouache.
"At your service, my friend," replied the Cardinal, blandly. "How shall I sit? The portrait must be taken in full face, I think."
"By all means. Here, I think--so; the light is very good at this hour, but a little later we shall have the sun. If your Eminence will look at me--a little more to the left--I think that will do. I will draw it in in charcoal and your Eminence can judge."
"Precisely," returned the Cardinal. "You will paint the devil even blacker than he is."
"The devil?" repeated Gouache, raising his eyebrows with a slight smile. "I was not aware--"
"And yet you have been in Rome four years!"
"I am very careful," returned Gouache. "I never by any chance hear any evil of those whom I am to paint."
"You have very well-bred ears, Monsieur Gouache. I fear that if I had attended some of the meetings in your studio while Donna Tullia was having her portrait painted, I should have heard strange things. Have they all escaped you?"
Gouache was silent for a moment. It did not surprise him to learn that the omniscient Cardinal was fully acquainted with the doings in his studio, but he looked curiously at the great man before he answered. The Cardinal's small gleaming eyes met his with the fearlessness of superiority.
"I remember nothing but good of your Eminence," the painter replied at last, with a laugh; and applying himself to his work, he began to draw in the outline of the Cardinal's head. The words he had just heard, implying as they did a thorough knowledge of the minutest details of social life, would have terrified Madame Mayer, and would perhaps have driven Del Ferice out of the Papal States in fear of his life. Even the good-natured and foolish Valdarno might reasonably have been startled; but Anastase was made of different stuff. His grandfather had helped to storm the Bastille, his father had been among the men of 1848; there was revolutionary blood in his veins, and he distinguished between real and i