He returned to his preceding revery and the circle was closed; decidedly he must not reflect, he must act.
He found himself in excellent humor and quite ready, this time, to count without boredom the quarter hours on the clocks of the streets. He would even have willingly laughed with some chance companion, or considered the toddling of women, or strolled past diverting pictures. The Louvre, which he perceived from the other side of the stream, tempted him: he went to see once more the striking Clytemnestra so drolly illuminated with a torch and he was soon amusing himself in this room which, in previous days, he would have called a corner of shame. It did not equal, for comic intensity, the terrible Hogarths and the distressing Daumiers, but David and his school, nevertheless, had ridiculed antiquity successfully. The sober Flaxman had never succeeded in delineating personages so completely stupefied at having been cut out by a punch.
Entragues had once said that to make place for this foreign exhibition the paintings of the masters of an immoral nudity had been hidden in closets: it was the secret cabinet of the guards of the People's paintings. There remained to determine if bad paintings has not its own immorality and if the _Serment des Horaces_ should not be put under key as well as the _Atalante et Méléagre_, the Parrhasius, perhaps a little exciting, in which Tiberius delighted?
From the arbitrary stupidity of the Neo-Romans Entragues went to the powdered heads of those enemies of the Nation and Humanity which David had designed, finally stripped of their paint, but so scornful that, one might say, he had lowered their eyes. The Pierrot gallery was charming and made you understand the Revolution, the envy of the People and its hate for graces so high and remote.
While leaving, and under the portices of the rue de Rivoli, he began to follow a woman whose restless gait, from the Cour du Louvre, excited his curiosity. She was not at all bad; she wore a rather original dress with black lace that fell in waves; but nothing striking. A brown pigment covered her eyes and served as a background, but there was no magical attraction: she was somewhat tall, slender, dark, very pale and the two sides of her face seemed unequal, because of the unequal droop of the corners of her mouth, the unequal lifting of her brows above heavy eye-lashes, one quite distended, the other in little contracted waves.