Then, in a last sob of agony:  ’Ah, you are right; it’s wrong to desert the poor woman.  Ah!  I despise myself.  I wish I had the strength.  But I love you too much, I suffer too much; surely you won’t let me die?’

‘Oh!’ he cried in a passionate transport.  ’Let others die, there are but we two on earth.’

It was all so much madness.  Christine left Madame Vanzade in the most brutal fashion.  She took her trunk away the very next morning.  She and Claude had at once remembered the deserted old house at Bennecourt, the giant rose-bushes, the immense rooms.  Ah! to go away, to go away without the loss of an hour, to live at the world’s end in all the bliss of their passion!  She clapped her hands for very joy.  He, still smarting from his defeat, at the Salon, and anxious to recover from it, longed for complete rest in the country; yonder he would find the real ‘open air,’ he would work away with grass up to his neck and bring back masterpieces.  In a couple of days everything was ready, the studio relinquished, the few household chattels conveyed to the railway station.  Besides, they met with a slice of luck, for Papa Malgras gave some five hundred francs for a score of sketches, selected from among the waifs and strays of the removal.  Thus they would be able to live like princes.  Claude still had his income of a thousand francs a year; Christine, too, had saved some money, besides having her outfit and dresses.  And away they went; it was perfect flight, friends avoided and not even warned by letter, Paris despised and forsaken amid laughter expressive of relief.

June was drawing to a close, and the rain fell in torrents during the week they spent in arranging their new home.  They discovered that old Porrette had taken away half the kitchen utensils before signing the agreement.  But that matter did not affect them.  They took a delight in dabbling about amidst the showers; they made journeys three leagues long, as far as Vernon, to buy plates and saucepans, which they brought back with them in triumph.  At last they got shipshape, occupying one of the upstairs rooms, abandoning the other to the mice, and transforming the dining-room into a studio; and, above all, as happy as children at taking their meals in the kitchen off a deal table, near the hearth where the soup sang in the pot.  To wait upon them they engaged a girl from the village, who came every morning and went home at night.  She was called Melie, she was a niece of the Faucheurs, and her stupidity delighted them.  In fact, one could not have found a greater idiot in the whole region.