‘If you think that he’ll be in soon, I’ll wait for him.’

‘Oh! he surely won’t be long.’

‘In that case I’ll wait, unless I am in your way.’

Never had her demeanour, the crushed look of a neglected woman, her listless movements, her slow speech, her indifference for everything but the passion that was consuming her, moved him so deeply.  For the last week, perhaps, she had not put a chair in its place, or dusted a piece of furniture; she left the place to go to wreck and ruin, scarcely having the strength to drag herself about.  And it was enough to break one’s heart to behold that misery ending in filth beneath the glaring light from the big window; to gaze on that ill-pargetted shanty, so bare and disorderly, where one shivered with melancholy although it was a bright February afternoon.

Christine had slowly sat down beside an iron bedstead, which Sandoz had not noticed when he came in.

‘Hallo,’ he said, ‘is Jacques ill?’

She was covering up the child, who constantly flung off the bedclothes.

’Yes, he hasn’t been up these three days.  We brought his bed in here so that he might be with us.  He was never very strong.  But he is getting worse and worse, it’s distracting.’

She had a fixed stare in her eyes and spoke in a monotonous tone, and Sandoz felt frightened when he drew up to the bedside.  The child’s pale head seemed to have grown bigger still, so heavy that he could no longer support it.  He lay perfectly still, and one might have thought he was dead, but for the heavy breathing coming from between his discoloured lips.

’My poor little Jacques, it’s I, your godfather.  Won’t you say how d’ye do?’

The child made a fruitless, painful effort to lift his head; his eyelids parted, showing his white eyeballs, then closed again.

‘Have you sent for a doctor?’

Christine shrugged her shoulders.

‘Oh! doctors, what do they know?’ she answered.  ’We sent for one; he said that there was nothing to be done.  Let us hope that it will pass over again.  He is close upon twelve years old now, and maybe he is growing too fast.’

Sandoz, quite chilled, said nothing for fear of increasing her anxiety, since she did not seem to realise the gravity of the disease.  He walked about in silence and stopped in front of the picture.

‘Ho, ho! it’s getting on; it’s on the right road this time.’

‘It’s finished.’

‘What! finished?’

And when she told him that the canvas was to be sent to the Salon that next week, he looked embarrassed, and sat down on the couch, like a man who wishes to judge the work leisurely.  The background, the quays, the Seine, whence arose the triumphal point of the Cite, still remained in a sketchy state—­masterly, however, but as if the painter had been afraid of spoiling the Paris of his dream by giving it greater finish.  There was also an excellent group on the left, the lightermen unloading the sacks of plaster being carefully and powerfully treated.  But the boat full of women in the centre transpierced the picture, as it were, with a blaze of flesh-tints which were quite out of place; and the brilliancy and hallucinatory proportions of the large nude figure which Claude had painted in a fever seemed strangely, disconcertingly false amidst the reality of all the rest.