throbbing with scientific formulas, his prejudiced vision lent too much force to delicate shades, and made him render what was theoretically correct in too vivid a manner:  thus his style, once so bright, so full of the palpitation of sunlight, ended in a reversal of everything to which the eye was accustomed, giving, for instance, flesh of a violet tinge under tricoloured skies.  Insanity seemed to be at the end of it all.

Poverty finished off Claude.  It had gradually increased, while the family spent money without counting; and, when the last copper of the twenty thousand francs had gone, it swooped down upon them—­horrible and irreparable.  Christine, who wanted to look for work, was incapable of doing anything, even ordinary needlework.  She bewailed her lot, twirling her fingers and inveighing against the idiotic young lady’s education that she had received, since it had given her no profession, and her only resource would be to enter into domestic service, should life still go against them.  Claude, on his side, had become a subject of chaff with the Parisians, and no longer sold a picture.  An independent exhibition at which he and some friends had shown some pictures, had finished him off as regards amateurs—­so merry had the public become at the sight of his canvases, streaked with all the colours of the rainbow.  The dealers fled from him.  M. Hue alone now and then made a pilgrimage to the Rue Tourlaque, and remained in ecstasy before the exaggerated bits, those which blazed in unexpected pyrotechnical fashion, in despair at being unable to cover them with gold.  And though the painter wanted to make him a present of them, implored him to accept them, the old fellow displayed extraordinary delicacy of feeling.  He pinched himself to amass a small sum of money from time to time, and then religiously took away the seemingly delirious picture, to hang it beside his masterpieces.  Such windfalls came too seldom, and Claude was obliged to descend to ‘trade art,’ repugnant as it was to him.  Such, indeed, was his despair at having fallen into that poison house, where he had sworn never to set foot, that he would have preferred starving to death, but for the two poor beings who were dependent on him and who suffered like himself.  He became familiar with ‘viae dolorosae’ painted at reduced prices, with male and female saints at so much per gross, even with ‘pounced’ shop blinds—­in short, all the ignoble jobs that degrade painting and make it so much idiotic delineation, lacking even the charm of naivete.  He even suffered the humiliation of having portraits at five-and-twenty francs a-piece refused, because he failed to produce a likeness; and he reached the lowest degree of distress—­he worked according to size for the petty dealers who sell daubs on the bridges, and export them to semi-civilised countries.  They bought his pictures at two and three francs a-piece, according to the regulation dimensions.  This was like physical decay, it made him waste away; he rose from such tasks feeling ill, incapable of serious work, looking at his large picture in distress, and leaving it sometimes untouched for a week, as if he had felt his hands befouled and unworthy of working at it.