Every Thursday, quite a band met at Sandoz’s:  friends from Plassans and others met in Paris—­revolutionaries to a man, and all animated by the same passionate love of art.

‘Next Thursday?  No, I think not,’ answered Dubuche.

‘I am obliged to go to a dance at a family’s I know.’

‘Where you expect to get hold of a dowry, I suppose?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be such a bad spec.’

He shook the ashes from his pipe on to his left palm, and then, suddenly raising his voice—­’I almost forgot.  I have had a letter from Pouillaud.’

’You, too!—­well, I think he’s pretty well done for, Pouillaud.  Another good fellow gone wrong.’

’Why gone wrong?  He’ll succeed his father; he’ll spend his money quietly down there.  He writes rationally enough.  I always said he’d show us a thing or two, in spite of all his practical jokes.  Ah! that beast of a Pouillaud.’

Sandoz, furious, was about to reply, when a despairing oath from Claude stopped him.  The latter had not opened his lips since he had so obstinately resumed his work.  To all appearance he had not even listened.

’Curse it—­I have failed again.  Decidedly, I’m a brute, I shall never do anything.’  And in a fit of mad rage he wanted to rush at his picture and dash his fist through it.  His friends had to hold him back.  Why, it was simply childish to get into such a passion.  Would matters be improved when, to his mortal regret, he had destroyed his work?  Still shaking, he relapsed into silence, and stared at the canvas with an ardent fixed gaze that blazed with all the horrible agony born of his powerlessness.  He could no longer produce anything clear or life-like; the woman’s breast was growing pasty with heavy colouring; that flesh which, in his fancy, ought to have glowed, was simply becoming grimy; he could not even succeed in getting a correct focus.  What on earth was the matter with his brain that he heard it bursting asunder, as it were, amidst his vain efforts?  Was he losing his sight that he was no longer able to see correctly?  Were his hands no longer his own that they refused to obey him?  And thus he went on winding himself up, irritated by the strange hereditary lesion which sometimes so greatly assisted his creative powers, but at others reduced him to a state of sterile despair, such as to make him forget the first elements of drawing.  Ah, to feel giddy with vertiginous nausea, and yet to remain there full of a furious passion to create, when the power to do so fled with everything else, when everything seemed to founder around him—­the pride of work, the dreamt-of glory, the whole of his existence!

‘Look here, old boy,’ said Sandoz at last, ’we don’t want to worry you, but it’s half-past six, and we are starving.  Be reasonable, and come down with us.’

Claude was cleaning a corner of his palette.  Then he emptied some more tubes on it, and, in a voice like thunder, replied with one single word, ‘No.’