corpse of a murdered woman rotting away on some grass; and everywhere around there were mournful violet-shaded things, mixed up with a comic scene of some bibulous monks, and an ’Opening of the Chamber of Deputies,’ with a whole page of writing on a gilded cartouch, bearing the heads of the better-known deputies, drawn in outline, together with their names.  And high up, high up, amid those livid neighbours, the little canvas, over-coarse in treatment, glared ferociously with the painful grimace of a monster.

Ah!  ‘The Dead Child.’  At that distance the wretched little creature was but a confused lump of flesh, the lifeless carcase of some shapeless animal.  Was that swollen, whitened head a skull or a stomach?  And those poor hands twisted among the bedclothes, like the bent claws of a bird killed by cold!  And the bed itself, that pallidity of the sheets, below the pallidity of the limbs, all that white looking so sad, those tints fading away as if typical of the supreme end!  Afterwards, however, one distinguished the light eyes staring fixedly, one recognised a child’s head, and it all seemed to suggest some disease of the brain, profoundly and frightfully pitiful.

Claude approached, and then drew back to see the better.  The light was so bad that refractions darted from all points across the canvas.  How they had hung his little Jacques! no doubt out of disdain, or perhaps from shame, so as to get rid of the child’s lugubrious ugliness.  But Claude evoked the little fellow such as he had once been, and beheld him again over yonder in the country, so fresh and pinky, as he rolled about in the grass; then in the Rue de Douai, growing pale and stupid by degrees, and then in the Rue Tourlaque, no longer able to carry his head, and dying one night, all alone, while his mother was asleep; and he beheld her also, that mother, the sad woman who had stopped at home, to weep there, no doubt, as she was now in the habit of doing for entire days.  No matter, she had done right in not coming; ’twas too mournful—­their little Jacques, already cold in his bed, cast on one side like a pariah, and so brutalised by the dancing light that his face seemed to be laughing, distorted by an abominable grin.

But Claude suffered still more from the loneliness of his work.  Astonishment and disappointment made him look for the crowd, the rush which he had anticipated.  Why was he not hooted?  Ah! the insults of yore, the mocking, the indignation that had rent his heart, but made him live!  No, nothing more, not even a passing expectoration:  this was death.  The visitors filed rapidly through the long gallery, seized with boredom.  There were merely some people in front of the ’Opening of the Chamber,’ where they collected to read the inscriptions, and show each other the deputies’ heads.  At last, hearing some laughter behind him, he turned round; but nobody was jeering, some visitors were simply making merry over the tipsy monks, the comic success of the Salon, which some gentlemen explained to some ladies, declaring that it was brilliantly witty.  And all these people passed beneath little Jacques, and not a head was raised, not a soul even knew that he was up there.