After the rejection of Claude’s third picture, the summer proved so wonderfully fine that the painter seemed to derive new strength from it.  There was not a cloud; limpid light streamed day after day upon the giant activity of Paris.  Claude had resumed his peregrinations through the city, determined to find a masterstroke, as he expressed it, something huge, something decisive, he did not exactly know what.  September came, and still he had found nothing that satisfied him; he simply went mad for a week about one or another subject, and then declared that it was not the thing after all.  His life was spent in constant excitement; he was ever on the watch, on the point of setting his hand on the realisation of his dream, which always flew away.  In reality, beneath his intractable realism lay the superstition of a nervous woman; he believed in occult and complex influences; everything, luck or ill-luck, must depend upon the view selected.

One afternoon—­it was one of the last fine days of the season—­Claude took Christine out with him, leaving little Jacques in the charge of the doorkeeper, a kind old woman, as was their wont when they wanted to go out together.  That day the young painter was possessed by a sudden whim to ramble about and revisit in Christine’s company the nooks beloved in other days; and behind this desire of his there lurked a vague hope that she would bring him luck.  And thus they went as far as the Pont Louis-Philippe, and remained for a quarter of an hour on the Quai des Ormes, silent, leaning against the parapet, and looking at the old Hotel du Martoy, across the Seine, where they had first loved each other.  Then, still without saying a word, they went their former round; they started along the quays, under the plane trees, seeing the past rise up before them at every step.  Everything spread out again:  the bridges with their arches opening upon the sheeny water; the Cite, enveloped in shade, above which rose the flavescent towers of Notre-Dame; the great curve of the right bank flooded with sunlight, and ending in the indistinct silhouette of the Pavillon de Flore, together with the broad avenues, the monuments and edifices on both banks, and all the life of the river, the floating wash-houses, the baths, and the lighters.

As of old, the orb in its decline followed them, seemingly rolling along the distant housetops, and assuming a crescent shape, as it appeared from behind the dome of the Institute.  There was a dazzling sunset, they had never beheld a more magnificent one, such a majestic descent amidst tiny cloudlets that changed into purple network, between the meshes of which a shower of gold escaped.  But of the past that thus rose up before their eyes there came to them nought but invincible sadness—­a sensation that things escaped them, and that it was impossible for them to retrace their way up stream and live their life over again.  All those old stones remained cold.  The constant current beneath the bridges, the water that had ever flowed onward and onward, seemed to have borne away something of their own selves, the delight of early desire and the joyfulness of hope.  Now that they belonged to one another, they no longer tasted the simple happiness born of feeling the warm pressure of their arms as they strolled on slowly, enveloped by the mighty vitality of Paris.