ever being tempted to return and gaze upon them.  Even the walks by the river-side had lost their charm—­one was broiled there in summer, and one caught cold there in winter.  And as for the plateau, the vast stretch of land planted with apple trees that overlooked the village, it became like a distant country, something too far off for one to be silly enough to risk one’s legs there.  Their house also annoyed them —­that barracks where they had to take their meals amid the greasy refuse of the kitchen, where their room seemed a meeting-place for the winds from every point of the compass.  As a finishing stroke of bad luck, the apricots had failed that year, and the finest of the giant rose-bushes, which were very old, had been smitten with some canker or other and died.  How sorely time and habit wore everything away!  How eternal nature herself seemed to age amidst that satiated weariness.  But the worst was that the painter himself was getting disgusted with the country, no longer finding a single subject to arouse his enthusiasm, but scouring the fields with a mournful tramp, as if the whole place were a void, whose life he had exhausted without leaving as much as an overlooked tree, an unforeseen effect of light to interest him.  No, it was over, frozen, he should never again be able to paint anything worth looking at in that confounded country!

October came with its rain-laden sky.  On one of the first wet evenings Claude flew into a passion because dinner was not ready.  He turned that goose of a Melie out of the house and clouted Jacques, who got between his legs.  Whereupon, Christine, crying, kissed him and said: 

‘Let’s go, oh, let us go back to Paris.’

He disengaged himself, and cried in an angry voice:  ’What, again!  Never! do you hear me?’

‘Do it for my sake,’ she said, warmly.  ’It’s I who ask it of you, it’s I that you’ll please.’

‘Why, are you tired of being here, then?’

’Yes, I shall die if we stay here much longer; and, besides I want you to work.  I feel quite certain that your place is there.  It would be a crime for you to bury yourself here any longer.’

‘No, leave me!’

He was quivering.  On the horizon Paris was calling him, the Paris of winter-tide which was being lighted up once more.  He thought he could hear from where he stood the great efforts that his comrades were making, and, in fancy, he returned thither in order that they might not triumph without him, in order that he might become their chief again, since not one of them had strength or pride enough to be such.  And amid this hallucination, amid the desire he felt to hasten to Paris, he yet persisted in refusing to do so, from a spirit of involuntary contradiction, which arose, though he could not account for it, from his very entrails.  Was it the fear with which the bravest quivers, the mute struggle of happiness seeking to resist the fatality of destiny?

‘Listen,’ said Christine, excitedly.  ’I shall get our boxes ready, and take you away.’