After shaking off the water, Claude went up the deep archway entrance, to a courtyard, where the light was quite greenish, and where there was a dank, musty smell, like that at the bottom of a tank.  There was an overhanging roofing of glass and iron at the foot of the staircase, which was a wide one, with a wrought-iron railing, eaten with rust.  As the painter passed the warehouse on the first floor, he glanced through a glass door and noticed M. Fagerolles examining some patterns.  Wishing to be polite, he entered, in spite of the artistic disgust he felt for all that zinc, coloured to imitate bronze, and having all the repulsive mendacious prettiness of spurious art.

‘Good morning, monsieur.  Is Henri still at home?’

The manufacturer, a stout, sallow-looking man, drew himself straight amidst all his nosegay vases and cruets and statuettes.  He had in his hand a new model of a thermometer, formed of a juggling girl who crouched and balanced the glass tube on her nose.

‘Henri did not come in to lunch,’ he answered drily.

This cool reception upset Claude.  ’Ah! he did not come back; I beg pardon for having disturbed you, then.  Good-day, monsieur.’

‘Good-day.’

Once more outside, Claude began to swear to himself.  His ill-luck was complete, Fagerolles escaped him also.  He even felt vexed with himself for having gone there, and having taken an interest in that picturesque old street; he was infuriated by the romantic gangrene that ever sprouted afresh within him, do what he might.  It was his malady, perhaps, the false principle which he sometimes felt like a bar across his skull.  And when he had reached the quays again, he thought of going home to see whether his picture was really so very bad.  But the mere idea made him tremble all over.  His studio seemed a chamber of horrors, where he could no more continue to live, as if, indeed, he had left the corpse of some beloved being there.  No, no; to climb the three flights of stairs, to open the door, to shut himself up face to face with ‘that,’ would have needed strength beyond his courage.  So he crossed the Seine and went along the Rue St. Jacques.  He felt too wretched and lonely; and, come what might, he would go to the Rue d’Enfer to turn Sandoz from his work.

Sandoz’s little fourth-floor flat consisted of a dining-room, a bedroom, and a strip of kitchen.  It was tenanted by himself alone; his mother, disabled by paralysis, occupied on the other side of the landing a single room, where she lived in morose and voluntary solitude.  The street was a deserted one; the windows of the rooms overlooked the gardens of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, above which rose the rounded crest of a lofty tree, and the square tower of St. Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.

Claude found Sandoz in his room, bending over his table, busy with a page of ‘copy.’

‘I am disturbing you?’ said Claude.

’Not at all.  I have been working ever since morning, and I’ve had enough of it.  I’ve been killing myself for the last hour over a sentence that reads anyhow, and which has worried me all through my lunch.’