It was Fagerolles showing himself at the entrance of the gallery.  He discreetly stood there without entering, carrying his good fortune with the ease of a man who knows what he is about.  Besides, he was looking for somebody; he made a sign to a young man, and gave him an answer, a favourable one, no doubt, for the other brimmed over with gratitude.  Then two other persons sprang forward to congratulate him; a woman detained him, showing him, with a martyr’s gesture, a bit of still life hung in a dark corner.  And finally he disappeared, after casting but one glance at the people in raptures before his picture.

Claude, who had looked and listened, was overwhelmed with sadness.  The crush was still increasing, he now had nought before him but faces gaping and sweating in the heat, which had become intolerable.  Above the nearer shoulders rose others, and so on and so on as far as the door, whence those who could see nothing pointed out the painting to each other with the tips of their umbrellas, from which dripped the water left by the showers outside.  And Bongrand remained there out of pride, erect in defeat, firmly planted on his legs, those of an old combatant, and gazing with limpid eyes upon ungrateful Paris.  He wished to finish like a brave man, whose kindness of heart is boundless.  Claude, who spoke to him without receiving any answer, saw very well that there was nothing behind that calm, gay face; the mind was absent, it had flown away in mourning, bleeding with frightful torture; and thereupon, full of alarm and respect, he did not insist, but went off.  And Bongrand, with his vacant eyes, did not even notice his departure.

A new idea had just impelled Claude onward through the crowd.  He was lost in wonderment at not having been able to discover his picture.  But nothing could be more simple.  Was there not some gallery where people grinned, some corner full of noise and banter, some gathering of jesting spectators, insulting a picture?  That picture would assuredly be his.  He could still hear the laughter of the bygone Salon of the Rejected.  And now at the door of each gallery he listened to ascertain if it were there that he was being hissed.

However, as he found himself once more in the eastern gallery, that hall where great art agonises, that depository where vast, cold, and gloomy historical and religious compositions are accumulated, he started, and remained motionless with his eyes turned upward.  He had passed through that gallery twice already, and yet that was certainly his picture up yonder, so high up that he hesitated about recognising it.  It looked, indeed, so little, poised like a swallow at the corner of a frame—­the monumental frame of an immense painting five-and-thirty feet long, representing the Deluge, a swarming of yellow figures turning topsy-turvy in water of the hue of wine lees.  On the left, moreover, there was a pitiable ashen portrait of a general; on the right a colossal nymph in a moonlit landscape, the bloodless