‘He’s happy,’ said Claude, after they had gone some fifty paces in silence.

‘He!’ cried Sandoz; ’why, he believes he has missed becoming a member of the Institute, and it’s killing him.’

Shortly after this meeting, and towards the middle of August, Sandoz devised a real excursion which would take up a whole day.  He had met Dubuche—­Dubuche, careworn and mournful, who had shown himself plaintive and affectionate, raking up the past and inviting his two old chums to lunch at La Richaudiere, where he should be alone with his two children for another fortnight.  Why shouldn’t they go and surprise him there, since he seemed so desirous of renewing the old intimacy?  But in vain did Sandoz repeat that he had promised Dubuche on oath to bring Claude with him; the painter obstinately refused to go, as if he were frightened at the idea of again beholding Bennecourt, the Seine, the islands, all the stretch of country where his happy years lay dead and buried.  It was necessary for Christine to interfere, and he finished by giving way, although full of repugnance to the trip.  It precisely happened that on the day prior to the appointment he had worked at his painting until very late, being taken with the old fever again.  And so the next morning—­it was Sunday —­being devoured with a longing to paint, he went off most reluctantly, tearing himself away from his picture with a pang.  What was the use of returning to Bennecourt?  All that was dead, it no longer existed.  Paris alone remained, and even in Paris there was but one view, the point of the Cite, that vision which haunted him always and everywhere, that one corner where he ever left his heart.

Sandoz, finding him nervous in the railway carriage, and seeing that his eyes remained fixed on the window as if he had been leaving the city—­which had gradually grown smaller and seemed shrouded in mist —­for years, did all he could to divert his mind, telling him, for instance, what he knew about Dubuche’s real position.  At the outset, old Margaillan, glorifying in his bemedalled son-in-law, had trotted him about and introduced him everywhere as his partner and successor.  There was a fellow who would conduct business briskly, who would build houses more cheaply and in finer style than ever, for hadn’t he grown pale over books?  But Dubuche’s first idea proved disastrous; on some land belonging to his father-in-law in Burgundy he established a brickyard in so unfavourable a situation, and after so defective a plan, that the venture resulted in the sheer loss of two hundred thousand francs.  Then he turned his attention to erecting houses, insisting upon bringing personal ideas into execution, a certain general scheme of his which would revolutionise the building art.  These ideas were the old theories he held from the revolutionary chums of his youth, everything that he had promised he would realise when he was free; but he had not properly reduced the theories to method, and he applied them unseasonably, with