The sky did not clear, it still remained dirty and mournful—­it was one of those lugubrious winter dawns; and an hour later Christine herself awoke with a great chilly shiver.  She did not understand at first.  How did it happen that she was alone?  Then she remembered:  she had fallen asleep with her cheek against his.  How was it then that he had left her?  Where could he be?  Suddenly, amid her torpor, she sprang out of bed and ran into the studio.  Good God! had he returned to the other then?  Had the other seized hold of him again, when she herself fancied that she had conquered him for ever?

She saw nothing at the first glance she took; in the cold and murky morning twilight the studio seemed to her to be deserted.  But whilst she was tranquillising herself at seeing nobody there, she raised her eyes to the canvas, and a terrible cry leapt from her gaping mouth: 

‘Claude! oh, Claude!’

Claude had hanged himself from the steps in front of his spoilt work.  He had simply taken one of the cords which held the frame to the wall, and had mounted the platform, so as to fasten the rope to an oaken crosspiece, which he himself had one day nailed to the uprights to consolidate them.  Then from up above he had leapt into space.  He was hanging there in his shirt, with his feet bare, looking horrible, with his black tongue protruding, and his bloodshot eyes starting from their orbits; he seemed to have grown frightfully tall in his motionless stiffness, and his face was turned towards the picture, close to the nude woman, as if he had wished to infuse his soul into her with his last gasp, and as if he were still looking at her with his expressionless eyes.

Christine, however, remained erect, quite overwhelmed with the grief, fright, and anger which dilated her body.  Only a continuous howl came from her throat.  She opened her arms, stretched them towards the picture, and clenched both hands.

‘Oh, Claude! oh, Claude!’ she gasped at last, ’she has taken you back —­the hussy has killed you, killed you, killed you!’

Then her legs gave way.  She span round and fell all of a heap upon the tiled flooring.  Her excessive suffering had taken all the blood from her heart, and, fainting away, she lay there, as if she were dead, like a white rag, miserable, done for, crushed beneath the fierce sovereignty of Art.  Above her the nude woman rose radiant in her symbolic idol’s brightness; painting triumphed, alone immortal and erect, even when mad.

At nine o’clock on the Monday morning, when Sandoz, after the formalities and delay occasioned by the suicide, arrived in the Rue Tourlaque for the funeral, he found only a score of people on the footway.  Despite his great grief, he had been running about for three days, compelled to attend to everything.  At first, as Christine had been picked up half dead, he had been obliged to have her carried to the Hopital de Lariboisiere; then he had gone from the municipal