Chaine, without answering, gave a chuckle of triumph which lighted up his face like a sunbeam.  By a crowning stroke of imbecility, and to make his misfortunes perfect, his protector’s advice had thrown him into painting, in spite of the real taste that he showed for wood carving.  And he painted like a whitewasher, mixing his colours as a hodman mixes his mortar, and managing to make the clearest and brightest of them quite muddy.  His triumph consisted, however, in combining exactness with awkwardness; he displayed all the naive minuteness of the primitive painters; in fact, his mind, barely raised from the clods, delighted in petty details.  The stove, with its perspective all awry, was tame and precise, and in colour as dingy as mire.

Claude approached and felt full of compassion at the sight of that painting, and though he was as a rule so harsh towards bad painters, his compassion prompted him to say a word of praise.

’Ah! one can’t say that you are a trickster; you paint, at any rate, as you feel.  Very good, indeed.’

However, the door of the shop had opened, and a good-looking, fair fellow, with a big pink nose, and large, blue, short-sighted eyes, entered shouting: 

’I say, why does that herbalist woman next door always stand on her doorstep?  What an ugly mug she’s got!’

They all laughed, except Mahoudeau, who seemed very much embarrassed.

‘Jory, the King of Blunderers,’ declared Sandoz, shaking hands with the new comer.

‘Why?  What?  Is Mahoudeau interested in her?  I didn’t know,’ resumed Jory, when he had at length grasped the situation.  ’Well, well, what does it matter?  When everything’s said, they are all irresistible.’

‘As for you,’ the sculptor rejoined, ’I can see you have tumbled on your lady-love’s finger-nails again.  She has dug a bit out of your cheek!’

They all burst out laughing anew, while Jory, in his turn, reddened.  In fact, his face was scratched:  there were even two deep gashes across it.  The son of a magistrate of Plassans, whom he had driven half-crazy by his dissolute conduct, he had crowned everything by running away with a music-hall singer under the pretext of going to Paris to follow the literary profession.  During the six months that they had been camping together in a shady hotel of the Quartier Latin, the girl had almost flayed him alive each time she caught him paying attention to anybody else of her sex.  And, as this often happened, he always had some fresh scar to show—­a bloody nose, a torn ear, or a damaged eye, swollen and blackened.