‘My poor friend,’ said Sandoz, quite upset; ’it is hard to tell you so, but all the same you are right, perhaps, in delaying matters to finish certain parts rather more.  Still I am angry with myself, for I shall imagine that it was I who discouraged you by my everlasting stupid discontent with things.’

Claude simply answered: 

’You! what an idea!  I was not even listening to you.  No; I was looking, and I saw everything go helter-skelter in that confounded canvas.  The light was dying away, and all at once, in the greyish dusk, the scales suddenly dropped from my eyes.  The background alone is pretty; the nude woman is altogether too loud; what’s more, she’s out of the perpendicular, and her legs are badly drawn.  When I noticed that, ah! it was enough to kill me there and then; I felt life departing from me.  Then the gloom kept rising and rising, bringing a whirling sensation, a foundering of everything, the earth rolling into chaos, the end of the world.  And soon I only saw the trunk waning like a sickly moon.  And look, look! there now remains nothing of her, not a glimpse; she is dead, quite black!’

In fact, the picture had at last entirely disappeared.  But the painter had risen and could be heard swearing in the dense obscurity.

‘D—­n it all, it doesn’t matter, I’ll set to work at it again—­’

Then Christine, who had also risen from her chair, against which he stumbled, interrupted him, saying:  ‘Take care, I’ll light the lamp.’

She lighted it and came back looking very pale, casting a glance of hatred and fear at the picture.  It was not to go then?  The abomination was to begin once more!

‘I’ll set to work at it again,’ repeated Claude, ’and it shall kill me, it shall kill my wife, my child, the whole lot; but, by heaven, it shall be a masterpiece!’

Christine sat down again; they approached Jacques, who had thrown the clothes off once more with his feverish little hands.  He was still breathing heavily, lying quite inert, his head buried in the pillow like a weight, with which the bed seemed to creak.  When Sandoz was on the point of going, he expressed his uneasiness.  The mother appeared stupefied; while the father was already returning to his picture, the masterpiece which awaited creation, and the thought of which filled him with such passionate illusions that he gave less heed to the painful reality of the sufferings of his child, the true living flesh of his flesh.

On the following morning, Claude had just finished dressing, when he heard Christine calling in a frightened voice.  She also had just woke with a start from the heavy sleep which had benumbed her while she sat watching the sick child.

‘Claude!  Claude!  Oh, look!  He is dead.’

The painter rushed forward, with heavy eyes, stumbling, and apparently failing to understand, for he repeated with an air of profound amazement, ‘What do you mean by saying he is dead?’