Those were Sandoz’s jolly evenings.  Even at the times when he was hard up he had always had some boiled beef and broth to share with his comrades.  He felt delighted at having a number of them around him, all friends, inspired by the same ideas.  Though he was of their own age, he beamed with fatherly feelings and satisfied good-nature when he saw them in his rooms, around him, hand in hand, and intoxicated with hope.  As he had but two rooms, the bedroom did duty as a drawing-room, and became as much theirs as his.  For lack of sufficient chairs, two or three had to seat themselves on the bed.  And on those warm summer evenings the window remained wide open to let in the air.  From it two black silhouettes were to be seen rising above the houses, against the clear sky—­the tower of St. Jacques du Haut-Pas and the tree of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum.  When money was plentiful there was beer.  Every one brought his own tobacco, the room soon became full of smoke, and without seeing each other they ended by conversing far into the night, amidst the deep mournful silence of that deserted district.

On that particular evening, at about nine o’clock, the charwoman came in.

‘Monsieur, I have done.  Can I go?’

’Yes, go to bed.  You have left the kettle on the fire, haven’t you?  I’ll make the tea myself.’

Sandoz had risen.  He went off at the heels of the charwoman, and only returned a quarter of an hour afterwards.  He had no doubt been to kiss his mother, whom he tucked up every night before she dozed off.

Meanwhile the voices had risen to a high pitch again.  Fagerolles was telling a story.

’Yes, old fellow; at the School they even correct Nature herself.  The other day Mazel comes up to me and says:  “Those two arms don’t correspond”; whereupon I reply:  “Look for yourself, monsieur—­the model’s are like that.”  It was little Flore Beauchamp, you know.  “Well,” Mazel furiously replies, “if she has them like that, it’s very wrong of her."’

They almost all shrieked, especially Claude, to whom Fagerolles told the story by way of paying court.  For some time previously the younger artist had yielded to the elder’s influence; and although he continued to paint with purely tricky skill, he no longer talked of anything but substantial, thickly-painted work, of bits of nature thrown on to canvas, palpitating with life, such as they really were.  This did not prevent him, though, from elsewhere chaffing the adepts of the open-air school, whom he accused of impasting with a kitchen ladle.

Dubuche, who had not laughed, his sense of rectitude being offended, made so bold as to reply: 

’Why do you stop at the School if you think you are being brutified there?  It’s simple enough, one goes away—­Oh, I know you are all against me, because I defend the School.  But, you see, my idea is that, when a fellow wants to carry on a trade, it is not a bad thing for him to begin by learning it.’