‘Hallo!’ exclaimed Sandoz, turning towards one sketch, ‘what’s that?’

Claude, indignant, waved his palette.  ’What! don’t you remember?  We were very nigh breaking our necks there.  Surely you recollect the day we clambered from the very bottom of Jaumegarde with Dubuche?  The rock was as smooth as your hand, and we had to cling to it with our nails, so that at one moment we could neither get up nor go down again.  When we were once atop and about to cook our cutlets, we, you and I, nearly came to blows.’

Sandoz now remembered.  ’Yes, yes; each had to roast his own cutlet on rosemary sticks, and, as mine took fire, you exasperated me by chaffing my cutlet, which was being reduced to cinders.’

They both shook with laughter, until the painter resumed his work, gravely concluding, ’That’s all over, old man.  There is to be no more idling at present.’

He spoke the truth.  Since the three inseparables had realised their dream of meeting together in Paris, which they were bent upon conquering, their life had been terribly hard.  They had tried to renew the long walks of old.  On certain Sunday mornings they had started on foot from the Fontainebleau gate, had scoured the copses of Verrieres, gone as far as the Bievre, crossed the woods of Meudon and Bellevue, and returned home by way of Grenelle.  But they taxed Paris with spoiling their legs; they scarcely ever left the pavement now, entirely taken up as they were with their struggle for fortune and fame.

From Monday morning till Saturday night Sandoz sat fuming and fretting at the municipal building of the fifth Arrondissement in a dark corner of the registry office for births, rooted to his stool by the thought of his mother, whom his salary of a hundred and fifty francs a month helped in some fashion to keep.  Dubuche, anxious to pay his parents the interest of the money placed on his head, was ever on the look-out for some petty jobs among architects, outside his studies at the School of Arts.  As for Claude, thanks to his thousand francs a year, he had his full liberty; but the latter days of each month were terrible enough, especially if he had to share the fag-end of his allowance.  Luckily he was beginning to sell a little; disposing of tiny canvases, at the rate of ten and twelve francs a-piece, to Papa Malgras, a wary picture dealer.  After all, he preferred starvation to turning his art into mere commerce by manufacturing portraits of tradesmen and their wives; concocting conventional religious pictures or daubing blinds for restaurants or sign-boards for accoucheuses.  When first he had returned to Paris, he had rented a very large studio in the Impasse des Bourdonnais; but he had moved to the Quai de Bourbon from motives of economy.  He lived there like a savage, with an absolute contempt for everything that was not painting.  He had fallen out with his relatives, who disgusted him; he had even ceased visiting his aunt, who kept a pork-butcher’s shop near the Central Markets, because she looked too flourishing and plump.* Respecting the downfall of his mother, who was being eaten out of doors and driven into the streets, he nursed a secret grief.