In the various corners some statues, of less bulky dimensions than the ‘Vintaging Girl,’ plaster figures which had been modelled with passion and exhibited, and which had then come back for want of buyers, seemed to be shivering with their noses turned to the wall, forming a melancholy row of cripples, some already badly damaged, showing mere stumps of arms, and all dust-begrimed and clay-bespattered.  Under the eyes of their artist creator, who had given them his heart’s blood, those wretched nudities dragged out years of agony.  At first, no doubt, they were preserved with jealous care, despite the lack of room, but then they lapsed into the grotesque honor of all lifeless things, until a day came when, taking up a mallet, he himself finished them off, breaking them into mere lumps of plaster, so as to be rid of them.

‘You say we have got two hours, eh?’ resumed Mahoudeau.  ’Well, I’ll just light a bit of fire; it will be the wiser perhaps.’

Then, while lighting the stove, he began bewailing his fate in an angry voice.  What a dog’s life a sculptor’s was!  The most bungling stonemason was better off.  A figure which the Government bought for three thousand francs cost well nigh two thousand, what with its model, clay, marble or bronze, all sorts of expenses, indeed, and for all that it remained buried in some official cellar on the pretext that there was no room for it elsewhere.  The niches of the public buildings remained empty, pedestals were awaiting statues in the public gardens.  No matter, there was never any room!  And there were no possible commissions from private people; at best one received an order for a few busts, and at very rare intervals one for a memorial statue, subscribed for by the public and hurriedly executed at reduced terms.  Sculpture was the noblest of arts, the most manly, yes, but the one which led the most surely to death by starvation!

‘Is your machine progressing?’ asked Claude.

‘Without this confounded cold, it would be finished,’ answered Mahoudeau.  ‘I’ll show it you.’

He rose from his knees after listening to the snorting of the stove.  In the middle of the studio, on a packing-case, strengthened by cross-pieces, stood a statue swathed is linen wraps which were quite rigid, hard frozen, draping the figure with the whiteness of a shroud.  This statue embodied Mahoudeau’s old dream, unrealised until now from lack of means—­it was an upright figure of that bathing girl of whom more than a dozen small models had been knocking about his place for years.  In a moment of impatient revolt he himself had manufactured trusses and stays out of broom-handles, dispensing with the necessary iron work in the hope that the wood would prove sufficiently solid.  From time to time he shook the figure to try it, but as yet it had not budged.

‘The devil!’ he muttered; ’some warmth will do her good.  These wraps seem glued to her—­they form quite a breastplate.’