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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: of giving life to form. Mabuse had but one pupil, and I am he. I never
took a pupil, and I am an old man now. You are intelligent enough to
guess at what should follow from the little that I shall show you
to-day."
While he was speaking, the extraordinary old man was giving touches
here and there to all parts of the picture. Here two strokes of the
brush, there one, but each so telling that together they brought out a
new painting,--a painting steeped, as it were, in light. He worked
with such passionate ardor that the sweat rolled in great drops from
his bald brow; and his motions seemed to be jerked out of him with
such rapidity and impatience that the young Poussin fancied a demon,
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