of nature and life!  And then, with her eyes gazing into space, she would remain rigid, like a statue, keeping back the tears which made her heart swell, lacking even the wretched consolation of being able to cry.  And day by day the same sorry life began afresh for her.  To stand there as his model had become her profession.  She could not refuse, however bitter her grief.  Their once happy life was all over, there now seemed to be three people in the place; it was as if Claude had introduced a mistress into it—­that woman he was painting.  The huge picture rose up between them, parted them as with a wall, beyond which he lived with the other.  That duplication of herself well nigh drove Christine mad with jealousy, and yet she was conscious of the pettiness of her sufferings, and did not dare to confess them lest he should laugh at her.  However, she did not deceive herself; she fully realised that he preferred her counterfeit to herself, that her image was the worshipped one, the sole thought, the affection of his every hour.  He almost killed her with long sittings in that cold draughty studio, in order to enhance the beauty of the other; upon whom depended all his joys and sorrows according as to whether he beheld her live or languish beneath his brush.  Was not this love?  And what suffering to have to lend herself so that the other might be created, so that she might be haunted by a nightmare of that rival, so that the latter might for ever rise between them, more powerful than reality!  To think of it!  So much dust, the veriest trifle, a patch of colour on a canvas, a mere semblance destroying all their happiness!—­he, silent, indifferent, brutal at times, and she, tortured by his desertion, in despair at being unable to drive away that creature who ever encroached more and more upon their daily life!

And it was then that Christine, finding herself altogether beaten in her efforts to regain Claude’s love, felt all the sovereignty of art weigh down upon her.  That painting, which she had already accepted without restriction, she raised still higher in her estimation, placed inside an awesome tabernacle before which she remained overcome, as before those powerful divinities of wrath which one honours from the very hatred and fear that they inspire.  Hers was a holy awe, a conviction that struggling was henceforth useless, that she would be crushed like a bit of straw if she persisted in her obstinacy.  Each of her husband’s canvases became magnified in her eyes, the smallest assumed triumphal dimensions, even the worst painted of them overwhelmed her with victory, and she no longer judged them, but grovelled, trembling, thinking them all formidable, and invariably replying to Claude’s questions: 

’Oh, yes; very good!  Oh, superb!  Oh, very, very extraordinary that one!’