positivism of art—­modern art, experimental and materialistic.  And it seemed to him also that it would be a smart satire on the school which wishes every painting to embody an “idea,” a slap for the old traditions and all they represented.  But during a couple of years he began study after study without succeeding in giving the particular “note” he desired.  In this way he spoilt fifteen canvases.  His failure filled him with rancour; however, he continued to associate with his two models from a sort of hopeless love for his abortive picture.  When he met them prowling about in the afternoon, he often scoured the neighbourhood with them, strolling around with his hands in his pockets, and deeply interested in the life of the streets.

They all three trudged along together, dragging their heels over the footways and monopolising their whole breadth so as to force others to step down into the road.  With their noses in the air they sniffed in the odours of Paris, and could have recognised every corner blindfold by the spirituous emanations of the wine shops, the hot puffs that came from the bakehouses and confectioners’, and the musty odours wafted from the fruiterers’.  They would make the circuit of the whole district.  They delighted in passing through the rotunda of the corn market, that huge massive stone cage where sacks of flour were piled up on every side, and where their footsteps echoed in the silence of the resonant roof.  They were fond, too, of the little narrow streets in the neighbourhood, which had become as deserted, as black, and as mournful as though they formed part of an abandoned city.  These were the Rue Babille, the Rue Sauval, the Rue des Deux Ecus, and the Rue de Viarmes, this last pallid from its proximity to the millers’ stores, and at four o’clock lively by reason of the corn exchange held there.  It was generally at this point that they started on their round.  They made their way slowly along the Rue Vauvilliers, glancing as they went at the windows of the low eating-houses, and thus reaching the miserably narrow Rue des Prouvaires, where Claude blinked his eyes as he saw one of the covered ways of the market, at the far end of which, framed round by this huge iron nave, appeared a side entrance of St. Eustache with its rose and its tiers of arched windows.  And then, with an air of defiance, he would remark that all the middle ages and the Renaissance put together were less mighty than the central markets.  Afterwards, as they paced the broad new streets, the Rue du Pont Neuf and the Rue des Halles, he explained modern life with its wide footways, its lofty houses, and its luxurious shops, to the two urchins.  He predicted, too, the advent of new and truly original art, whose approach he could divine, and despair filled him that its revelation should seemingly be beyond his own powers.