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"One of my friends, Marquis de Montfanon, met him this morning." A fresh silence ensued between the two, during which Julien felt that the arm upon which he rested trembled. Then they joined the party, while Florent said aloud: "It is an excellent piece of painting, which has, unfortunately, been revarnished too much." "May I have done right!" thought Julien. "He understood me."
"One of my friends, Marquis de Montfanon, met him this morning." A fresh silence ensued between the two, during which Julien felt that the arm upon which he rested trembled. Then they joined the party, while Florent said aloud: "It is an excellent piece of painting, which has, unfortunately, been revarnished too much." "May I have done right!" thought Julien. "He understood me."
It is an irritating and seductive curiosity, a dreamy desire for knowledge, such as one feels regarding the past life of a mistress.... But they are deaf to the questions our eyes put to them, they remain dumb and motionless in their wooden frames, and we pass on. The moths attack their canvases, but the latter are revarnished; and the pictures will smile on when we are buried and forgotten.
The lower masts, bowsprit, mastheads, and yards were next repainted, the bright spars thoroughly scraped and revarnished, the standing rigging tarred down; and, last of all, the sails were rebent, and the old Mercury was once more ready to go to sea at practically a moment's notice. All this work, with the small gang of men at my disposal, occupied the best part of six months in the doing.
On one occasion he added to the shrug these few words, murmured in a low voice, "I pity those who believe such things." Charles II., good man! despised him. The happiness of England under Charles II. was more than happiness, it was enchantment. A restoration is like an old oil painting, blackened by time, and revarnished.
The king resumed his agitated walk about his chamber, and consulted, as he walked, several papers drawn from a casket of which he alone had the key. A third time the nurse returned. M. de Mazarin had just uttered a joke, and had ordered his "Flora," by Titian, to be revarnished.
"There's your little cabinet-maker, John, will look over the things, and furbish them up; there's that broken arm of the chair must be mended, and everything revarnished; then I have found such a lovely rep, of just the richest shade of maroon, inclining to crimson, and when we come to cover the lounges and arm-chairs and sofas and ottomans all alike, you know they will be quite another thing."
Also this stretcher and all the other stretchers had been so sagged by the weight of bodies that they threatened to rip from the frames, and so stained by that which had stained them that the canvas was as stiff as though it had been varnished and revarnished with many coats of brown shellac. But it wasn't shellac.
Dining one night at a house where there were a number of his pictures about the room, he could give attention to nothing but his own work. When he left he begged that one painting be sent to his studio to be revarnished. The unsuspecting hostess complied. Once delivered, she could not get it back.
Madam Magloire has cleaned it all off; this summer she is going to have some small injuries repaired, and the whole revarnished, and my chamber will be a regular museum. She has also found in a corner of the attic two wooden pier-tables of ancient fashion.
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