The Forge
By DEREK VERSCHOYLE., , _A FTERNOON held the studio in a vice of silent intensity. From the Porte de Montrouge, quarter of a mile away, the trams, creaking armadillos; gridded slowly down the Avenue d'Orleans. Intoxicated with summer, a furious bee stumbled between the window panes, noisily a prisoner. To M. Dantin, lolling at his easel, its fumblings were invested with a personal and philosophical significance. With the unreal detachment of one who, in the endeavour to dramatize the least conscious emotions, clutches at any manifestation of the outside world which can be linked, however fancifully, with the fabric of his own reflections, he contemplated its struggles as, a tawny helicopter, it rose and fell, raging at its captivity. "Trapped like a bee between the window panes of married life " : the metaphor, slightly surrealist and imprecise, would, when he had polished it, be a new one on Jeanne when he returned to her that evening. In front of him a partially completed canvas claimed his more professional attentions. From a foreground of low shrubs an expanse- of yellow fields stretched placidly away. Ripe corn swayed into the distance, like permanent waves from the forehead of a Normande cocotte. M. Dantin began to tend'it-hedge which swept down from the side of an unfinished hill to meet the shrubs in the fore- ground. The name Qiinard was already scrawled in large uneven letters in the 'corner, . .
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