However, the painter had a gleam of hope.  On the central settee, two personages, one of them fat and the other thin, and both of them decorated with the Legion of Honour, sat talking, reclining against the velvet, and looking at the pictures in front of them.  Claude drew near them and listened.

‘And I followed them,’ said the fat fellow.  ’They went along the Rue St. Honore, the Rue St. Roch, the Rue de la Chaussee d’Antin, the Rue la Fayette—­’

‘And you spoke to them?’ asked the thin man, who appeared to be deeply interested.

‘No, I was afraid of getting in a rage.’

Claude went off and returned on three occasions, his heart beating fast each time that some visitor stopped short and glanced slowly from the line to the ceiling.  He felt an unhealthy longing to hear one word, but one.  Why exhibit?  How fathom public opinion?  Anything rather than such torturing silence!  And he almost suffocated when he saw a young married couple approach, the husband a good-looking fellow with little fair moustaches, the wife, charming, with the delicate slim figure of a shepherdess in Dresden china.  She had perceived the picture, and asked what the subject was, stupefied that she could make nothing out of it; and when her husband, turning over the leaves of the catalogue, had found the title, ‘The Dead Child,’ she dragged him away, shuddering, and raising this cry of affright: 

‘Oh, the horror!  The police oughtn’t to allow such horrors!’

Then Claude remained there, erect, unconscious and haunted, his eyes raised on high, amid the continuous flow of the crowd which passed on, quite indifferent, without one glance for that unique sacred thing, visible to him alone.  And it was there that Sandoz came upon him, amid the jostling.

The novelist, who had been strolling about alone—­his wife having remained at home beside his ailing mother—­had just stopped short, heart-rent, below the little canvas, which he had espied by chance.  Ah! how disgusted he felt with life!  He abruptly lived the days of his youth over again.  He recalled the college of Plassans, his freaks with Claude on the banks of the Viorne, their long excursions under the burning sun, and all the flaming of their early ambition; and, later on, when they had lived side by side, he remembered their efforts, their certainty of coming glory, that fine irresistible, immoderate appetite that had made them talk of swallowing Paris at one bite!  How many times, at that period, had he seen in Claude a great man, whose unbridled genius would leave the talent of all others far behind in the rear!  First had come the studio of the Impasse des Bourdonnais; later, the studio of the Quai de Bourbon, with dreams of vast compositions, projects big enough to make the Louvre burst; and, meanwhile, the struggle was incessant; the painter laboured ten hours a day, devoting his whole being to his work.  And then what?  After twenty years of that passionate life he ended thus—­he finished with that poor, sinister little thing, which nobody noticed, which looked so distressfully sad in its leper-like solitude!  So much hope and torture, a lifetime spent in the toil of creating, to come to that, to that, good God!