draw back close to the houses in order to save themselves from being knocked down; while the shop-keepers, standing open-mouthed on their doorsteps, believed in a revolution.  The whole neighbourhood seemed topsy-turvy.  In the Rue Jacob, such was the rush, so frightful were the yells, that several house shutters were hastily closed.  As the Rue Bonaparte was, at last, being reached, one tall, fair fellow thought it a good joke to catch hold of a little servant girl who stood bewildered on the pavement, and drag her along with them, like a wisp of straw caught in a torrent.

‘Well,’ said Claude, ‘good-bye, then; I’ll see you to-night.’

‘Yes, to-night.’

The painter, out of breath, had stopped at the corner of the Rue des Beaux Arts.  The court gates of the Art School stood wide open in front of him, and the procession plunged into the yard.

After drawing breath, Claude retraced his steps to the Rue de Seine.  His bad luck was increasing; it seemed ordained that he should not be able to beguile a chum from work that morning.  So he went up the street, and slowly walked on as far as the Place du Pantheon, without any definite aim.  Then it occurred to him that he might just look into the Municipal Offices, if only to shake hands with Sandoz.  That would, at any rate, mean ten minutes well spent.  But he positively gasped when he was told by an attendant that M. Sandoz had asked for a day off to attend a funeral.  However, he knew the trick of old.  His friend always found the same pretext whenever he wanted to do a good day’s work at home.  He had already made up his mind to join him there, when a feeling of artistic brotherliness, the scruple of an honest worker, made him pause; yes, it would be a crime to go and disturb that good fellow, and infect him with the discouragement born of a difficult task, at the very moment when he was, no doubt, manfully accomplishing his own work.

So Claude had to resign himself to his fate.  He dragged his black melancholy along the quays until mid-day, his head so heavy, so full of thoughts of his lack of power, that he only espied the well-loved horizons of the Seine through a mist.  Then he found himself once more in the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tete, where he breakfasted at Gomard’s wine shop, whose sign ‘The Dog of Montargis,’ inspired him with interest.  Some stonemasons, in their working blouses, bespattered with mortar, were there at table, and, like them, and with them, he ate his eight sous’ ’ordinary’—­some beef broth in a bowl, in which he soaked some bread, followed by a slice of boiled soup-beef, garnished with haricot beans, and served up on a plate damp with dish-water.  However, it was still too good, he thought, for a brute unable to earn his bread.  Whenever his work miscarried, he undervalued himself, ranked himself lower than a common labourer, whose sinewy arms could at least perform their appointed task.  For an hour he lingered in the tavern brutifying himself by listening to the conversation at the tables around him.  Once outside he slowly resumed his walk in haphazard fashion.