was only too happy to see him back again after her anxious waiting.  At such times he madly scoured Paris, especially the outlying quarters, from a longing to debase himself and hob-nob with labourers.  He expressed at each recurring crisis his old regret at not being some mason’s hodman.  Did not happiness consist in having solid limbs, and in performing the work one was built for well and quickly?  He had wrecked his life; he ought to have got himself engaged in the building line in the old times when he had lunched at the ‘Dog of Montargis,’ Gomard’s tavern, where he had known a Limousin, a big, strapping, merry fellow, whose brawny arms he envied.  Then, on coming back to the Rue Tourlaque, with his legs faint and his head empty, he gave his picture much the same distressful, frightened glance as one casts at a corpse in a mortuary, until fresh hope of resuscitating it, of endowing it with life, brought a flush to his face once more.

One day Christine was posing, and the figure of the woman was again well nigh finished.  For the last hour, however, Claude had been growing gloomy, losing the childish delight that he had displayed at the beginning of the sitting.  So his wife scarcely dared to breathe, feeling by her own discomfort that everything must be going wrong once more, and afraid that she might accelerate the catastrophe if she moved as much as a finger.  And, surely enough, he suddenly gave a cry of anguish, and launched forth an oath in a thunderous voice.

‘Oh, curse it! curse it!’

He had flung his handful of brushes from the top of the steps.  Then, blinded with rage, with one blow of his fist he transpierced the canvas.

Christine held out her trembling hands.

‘My dear, my dear!’

But when she had flung a dressing-gown over her shoulders, and approached the picture, she experienced keen delight, a burst of satisfied hatred.  Claude’s fist had struck ‘the other one’ full in the bosom, and there was a gaping hole!  At last, then, that other one was killed!

Motionless, horror-struck by that murder, Claude stared at the perforated bosom.  Poignant grief came upon him at the sight of the wound whence the blood of his work seemed to flow.  Was it possible?  Was it he who had thus murdered what he loved best of all on earth?  His anger changed into stupor; his fingers wandered over the canvas, drawing the ragged edges of the rent together, as if he had wished to close the bleeding gash.  He was choking; he stammered, distracted with boundless grief: 

‘She is killed, she is killed!’

Then Christine, in her maternal love for that big child of an artist, felt moved to her very entrails.  She forgave him as usual.  She saw well enough that he now had but one thought—­to mend the rent, to repair the evil at once; and she helped him; it was she who held the shreds together, whilst he from behind glued a strip of canvas against them.  When she dressed herself, ‘the other one’ was there again, immortal, simply retaining near her heart a slight scar, which seemed to make her doubly dear to the painter.