* This aunt is Lisa of ‘The Fat and the Thin’ (Le Ventre de Paris)
    in a few chapters of which Claude figures.—­ED.

Suddenly he shouted to Sandoz, ’Will you be kind enough not to tumble to pieces?’ But Sandoz declared that he was getting stiff, and jumped from the couch to stretch his legs a bit.  They took ten minutes’ rest, talking meanwhile about many things.  Claude felt condescendingly good-tempered.  When his work went smoothly he brightened up and became talkative; he, who painted with his teeth set, and raged inwardly directly he felt that nature was escaping him.  Hence his friend had scarcely resumed his attitude before he went on chattering, without, however, missing a stroke of his brush.

’It’s going on all right, old boy, isn’t it?  You look all there in it.  Oh, the brutes, I’ll just see whether they’ll refuse me this time.  I am more severe for myself than they are for themselves, I’m sure of it; and whenever I pass one of my own pictures, it’s more serious than if it had passed before all the hanging committees on earth.  You know my picture of the markets, with the two urchins tumbling about on a heap of vegetables?  Well, I’ve scratched it all out, it didn’t come right.  I found that I had got hold of a beastly machine,* a deal too heavy for my strength.  But, never you fear, I’ll take the subject up again some day, when I know better, and I’ll take up others, machines which will knock them all cock-a-hoop with surprise.’

  * In familiar conversation, French artists, playwrights, and
    novelists invariably call their productions by the slang
    term ’machines.’—­ED.

He made a magnificent gesture, as if to sweep a whole crowd away; emptied a tube of cobalt on his palette; and then began to jeer, asking what his first master would say to a picture like this?  His first master indeed, Papa Belloque, a retired infantry captain, with one arm, who for a quarter of a century had taught drawing to the youth of Plassans in one of the galleries of the Museum!  Then, in Paris, hadn’t the celebrated Berthou, the painter of ’Nero in the Circus’—­Berthou, whose lessons he had attended for six long months —­told him a score of times that he would never be able to do anything?  How he now regretted those six months wasted in idiotic efforts, absurd ‘studies,’ under the iron rule of a man whose ideas differed so much from his own.  He at last began to hold forth against working at the Louvre.  He would, he said, sooner chop his hand off than return there to spoil his perception of nature by undertaking one of those copies which for ever dim the vision of the world in which one lives.