In the morning, while Christine was tacking a collar to a grey linsey gown which, with the coquetry of woman, she had made for the occasion, it occurred to Claude, who was already wearing his frock-coat and kicking his heels impatiently, to go and fetch Mahoudeau, for the latter, he asserted, was quite capable of forgetting all about the appointment.  Since autumn, the sculptor had been living at Montmartre, in a small studio in the Rue des Tilleuls.  He had moved thither in consequence of a series of affairs that had quite upset him.  First of all, he had been turned out of the fruiterer’s shop in the Rue du Cherche-Midi for not paying his rent; then had come a definite rupture with Chaine, who, despairing of being able to live by his brush, had rushed into commercial enterprise, betaking himself to all the fairs around Paris as the manager of a kind of ‘fortune’s wheel’ belonging to a widow; while last of all had come the sudden flight of Mathilde, her herbalist’s business sold up, and she herself disappearing, it seemed, with some mysterious admirer.  At present Mahoudeau lived all by himself in greater misery than ever, only eating when he secured a job at scraping some architectural ornaments, or preparing work for some more prosperous fellow-sculptor.

‘I am going to fetch him, do you hear?’ Claude repeated to Christine.  ’We still have a couple of hours before us.  And, if the others come, make them wait.  We’ll go to the municipal offices all together.’

Once outside, Claude hurried along in the nipping cold which loaded his moustache with icicles.  Mahoudeau’s studio was at the end of a conglomeration of tenements—­’rents,’ so to say—­and he had to cross a number of small gardens, white with rime, and showing the bleak, stiff melancholy of cemeteries.  He could distinguish his friend’s place from afar on account of the colossal plaster statue of the ’Vintaging Girl,’ the once successful exhibit of the Salon, for which there had not been sufficient space in the narrow ground-floor studio.  Thus it was rotting out in the open like so much rubbish shot from a cart, a lamentable spectacle, weather-bitten, riddled by the rain’s big, grimy tears.  The key was in the door, so Claude went in.

‘Hallo! have you come to fetch me?’ said Mahoudeau, in surprise.  ’I’ve only got my hat to put on.  But wait a bit, I was asking myself whether it wouldn’t be better to light a little fire.  I am uneasy about my woman there.’

Some water in a bucket was ice-bound.  So cold was the studio that it froze inside as hard as it did out of doors, for, having been penniless for a whole week, Mahoudeau had gingerly eked out the little coal remaining to him, only lighting the stove for an hour or two of a morning.  His studio was a kind of tragic cavern, compared with which the shop of former days evoked reminiscences of snug comfort, such was the tomb-like chill that fell on one’s shoulders from the creviced ceiling and the bare walls.