Now they were walking a little closer together, even though they still took up the whole breadth of the street. In this way, they came unexpectedly to a square. Now it was the one on the right who alerted the other two. The moon had done nothing to disrupt this broader, more open scene; on the contrary, it was fairly well necessary for it to be there. It made the square look bigger and imbued the houses with a surprising, listening life; and the lit-up cobbled expanse of the square was rudely interrupted in the middle by a fountain and its heavy shadow, a bold stroke that impressed the painters extraordinarily. They stood closer together and, so to speak, sucked on the breasts of this mood. But they were unpleasantly interrupted. Hurried, light footsteps approached; from the darkness around the fountain emerged a male figure, who received those footsteps and whatever else went with them with the customary tenderness, and all at once the beautiful square was turned into a low-grade illustration, upon which the three painters, acting as but a single painter, turned their back.

“There’s that damned novelistic element again,” cried the one on the right, using the correct technical term to indicate the pair of lovers by the fountain. United in their resentment, the painters continued to wander the city randomly for a long time, constantly discovering new motifs, but each time offended again by the way in which some banal factor always ruined the stillness and simplicity of every image. By midnight they were back at the inn, in the room of the one on the left, the youngest of them, with no thought as yet of going to sleep. Their nocturnal wandering had awakened a plethora of plans and projects in them, and since they had just had it proved to them that they were of one mind, they now exchanged their respective views with the highest level of interest. No one could say that they produced flawless prose. They threw around a few terms that no ordinary profane individual would have understood, but among themselves they understood each other so well using them that the inhabitants of all the neighboring rooms were unable to get to sleep until nearly four in the morning.