Emilie gave a loud, shrill laugh:
"You see, you refuse to believe it! I should have done better not to tell you. You can't understand it. If you saw him as a clown, you would. He is splendid, he is unique. He is not a vulgar clown, not a dummer August. He is simply magnificent. He has turned the art of the clown into something really artistic, something all his own. He makes the audience laugh and cry as he pleases. He invents his own scenes, designs his own dresses, or else I design them for him. He has a way of making up. . . . He has discovered the melancholy side of the clown: he's sublime in that. . . . He has one turn in the circus with quite fifty butterflies flitting on wires all round him . . . he tries to catch them and can't . . . and, when he does that turn, the people begin by laughing and end by crying. You see, it's symbolical. . . . Really, you ought to go to Paris to see him. He's so good, so artistic. . . . He does a lot of exercises, to keep himself supple. He looks much better than when he was racketing about at Leiden. He's very good-looking and he knows it: he never makes up ugly. A modern sculptor wants to make a statue of him: very fanciful, you know; something art-nouveau; in that part, with the butterflies all round him. He is always being asked to sit to artists. . . . You would never have thought it of him, Auntie. Here, he was just the ordinary undergraduate, racketing about,
