Christine at last began to grow frightened at the prospect of impending misery.  In Paris, with that growing child beside them, living proved expensive, and the end of each month became terrible, despite her efforts to save in every direction.  They had nothing certain but Claude’s thousand francs a year; and how could they live on fifty francs a month, which was all that was left to them after deducting four hundred francs for the rent?  At first they had got out of embarrassment, thanks to the sale of a few pictures, Claude having found Gagniere’s old amateur, one of those detested bourgeois who possess the ardent souls of artists, despite the monomaniacal habits in which they are confined.  This one, M. Hue, a retired chief clerk in a public department, was unfortunately not rich enough to be always buying, and he could only bewail the purblindness of the public, which once more allowed a genius to die of starvation; for he himself, convinced, struck by grace at the first glance, had selected Claude’s crudest works, which he hung by the side of his Delacroix, predicting equal fortune for them.  The worst was that Papa Malgras had just retired after making his fortune.  It was but a modest competence after all, an income of about ten thousand francs, upon which he had decided to live in a little house at Bois Colombes, like the careful man he was.

It was highly amusing to hear him speak of the famous Naudet, full of disdain for the millions turned over by that speculator, ’millions that would some day fall upon his nose,’ said Malgras.  Claude, having casually met him, only succeeded in selling him a last picture, one of his sketches from the nude made at the Boutin studio, that superb study of a woman’s trunk which the erstwhile dealer had not been able to see afresh without feeling a revival of his old passion for it.  So misery was imminent; outlets were closing instead of new ones opening; disquieting rumours were beginning to circulate concerning the young painter’s works, so constantly rejected at the Salon; and besides, Claude’s style of art, so revolutionary and imperfect, in which the startled eye found nought of admitted conventionality, would of itself have sufficed to drive away wealthy buyers.  One evening, being unable to settle his bill at his colour shop, the painter had exclaimed that he would live upon the capital of his income rather than lower himself to the degrading production of trade pictures.  But Christine had violently opposed such an extreme measure; she would retrench still further; in short, she preferred anything to such madness, which would end by throwing them into the streets without even bread to eat.