worthy man made his two hundred houses, his residence in the Place de Meir, and his chateau at Borsbeek out of the proceeds of a sewage collecting plant? Like Vanderzeepen, this Monsieur Marbol has found the philosopher's stone; with all due respect, he has made gold out of dung!"
Prejudice began to give way. The captains of high finance commenced to bow to this person whom they had formerly thought a mangy tatterdemalion; they even risked mentioning his name before their very prudish wives, a thing which, a few months before, would have seemed most unconventional. Not being decently able to extol his incendiary and anarchistic art, they pretended to praise Marbol's commercial genius and ability in raising cash with such facility upon his disagreeable daubs and scarecrows from rich Parisians, jocular Yankees, or Englishmen, who, as every one knows, are partial to monstrous and peculiar scenes.
The musician Rombaut de Vyveloy, Door Bergmans' other friend, brought to mind, because of his height, his robust build, his leonine head, and its abundant shock of hair, and his ruddy complexion, the figure of the chief of the gods in the Jordaens "Jupiter and Mercury at the house of Philemon and Baucis." This Brabantian was, if not a pagan, at least a man of the Renaissance. There was nothing about him, either physically or morally, that suggested the dull sanctity of the emaciated types to be found in the work of primitives like Memling or Van Eyck. He had transformed old Bach's Christian oratorio into one of pantheism.
The passionate and essentially plastic art of Vyveloy was bound to make a deeper impression upon Lau-
