sold for two or three hundred thousand francs to some pig-dealer of Chicago, who felt glorious at carrying off the most expensive canvas of the year.  But those fine strokes of business were not to be renewed at present, and Naudet, whose expenditure had increased with his gains, drawn on and swallowed up in the mad craze which was his own work, could now hear his regal mansion crumbling beneath him, and was reduced to defend it against the assault of creditors.

‘Won’t you take some more mushrooms, Mahoudeau?’ obligingly interrupted Henriette.

The servant was now handing round the undercut.  They ate, and emptied the decanters; but their bitterness was so great that the best things were offered without being tasted, which distressed the master and mistress of the house.

‘Mushrooms, eh?’ the sculptor ended by repeating.  ‘No, thanks.’  And he added:  ’The funny part of it all is, that Naudet is suing Fagerolles.  Oh, quite so! he’s going to distrain on him.  Ah! it makes me laugh!  We shall see a pretty scouring in the Avenue de Villiers among all those petty painters with mansions of their own.  House property will go for nothing next spring!  Well, Naudet, who had compelled Fagerolles to build a house, and who furnished it for him as he would have furnished a place for a hussy, wanted to get hold of his nick-nacks and hangings again.  But Fagerolles had borrowed money on them, so it seems.  You can imagine the state of affairs; the dealer accuses the artist of having spoilt his game by exhibiting with the vanity of a giddy fool; while the painter replies that he doesn’t mean to be robbed any longer; and they’ll end by devouring each other—­at least, I hope so.’

Gagniere raised his voice, the gentle but inexorable voice of a dreamer just awakened.

‘Fagerolles is done for.  Besides, he never had any success.’

The others protested.  Well, what about the hundred thousand francs’ worth of pictures he had sold a year, and his medals and his cross of the Legion of Honour?  But Gagniere, still obstinate, smiled with a mysterious air, as if facts could not prevail against his inner conviction.  He wagged his head and, full of disdain, replied: 

‘Let me be!  He never knew anything about chiaroscuro.’

Jory was about to defend the talent of Fagerolles, whom he considered to be his own creation, when Henriette solicited a little attention for the raviolis.  There was a short slackening of the quarrel amid the crystalline clinking of the glasses and the light clatter of the forks.  The table, laid with such fine symmetry, was already in confusion, and seemed to sparkle still more amid the ardent fire of the quarrel.  And Sandoz, growing anxious, felt astonished.  What was the matter with them all that they attacked Fagerolles so harshly?  Hadn’t they all begun together, and were they not all to reach the goal in the same victory?  For the first time, a feeling of uneasiness disturbed his dream of eternity, that delight in his Thursdays, which he had pictured following one upon another, all alike, all of them happy ones, into the far distance of the future.  But the feeling was as yet only skin deep, and he laughingly exclaimed: