‘The most surprising thing is that her trunk wasn’t hurt!’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Christine, in amazement.

‘Why, Mahoudeau’s girl,’ he answered.

At this she shook nervously, turned and buried her face in the pillow; and he was quite surprised on hearing her burst into sobs.

‘What! you are crying?’ he exclaimed.

She was choking, sobbing with heart-rending violence.

’Come, what’s the matter with you?—­I’ve said nothing to you.  Come, darling, what’s the matter?’

But, while he was speaking, the cause of her great grief dawned upon him.  No doubt, on a day like that, he ought to have shown more affection; but his neglect was unintentional enough; he had not even given the matter a thought.  She surely knew him, said he; he became a downright brute when he was at work.  Then he bent over and embraced her.  But it was as if something irreparable had taken place, as if something had for ever snapped, leaving a void between them.  The formality of marriage seemed to have killed love.

IX

AS Claude could not paint his huge picture in the small studio of the Rue de Douai, he made up his mind to rent some shed that would be spacious enough, elsewhere; and strolling one day on the heights of Montmartre, he found what he wanted half way down the slope of the Rue Tourlaque, a street that descends abruptly behind the cemetery, and whence one overlooks Clichy as far as the marshes of Gennevilliers.  It had been a dyer’s drying shed, and was nearly fifty feet long and more than thirty broad, with walls of board and plaster admitting the wind from every point of the compass.  The place was let to him for three hundred francs.  Summer was at hand; he would soon work off his picture and then quit.

This settled, feverish with hope, Claude decided to go to all the necessary expenses; as fortune was certain to come in the end, why trammel its advent by unnecessary scruples?  Taking advantage of his right, he broke in upon the principal of his income, and soon grew accustomed to spend money without counting.  At first he kept the matter from Christine, for she had already twice stopped him from doing so; and when he was at last obliged to tell her, she also, after a week of reproaches and apprehension, fell in with it, happy at the comfort in which she lived, and yielding to the pleasure of always having a little money in her purse.  Thus there came a few years of easy unconcern.

Claude soon became altogether absorbed in his picture.  He had furnished the huge studio in a very summary style:  a few chairs, the old couch from the Quai de Bourbon, and a deal table bought second-hand for five francs sufficed him.  In the practice of his art he was entirely devoid of that vanity which delights in luxurious surroundings.  The only real expense to which he went was that of buying some steps on castors, with a platform and a movable footboard.