troyed his work? Still shaking,
he relapsed into silence, and stared at the canvas with an ardent fixed
gaze that blazed with all the horrible agony born of his powerlessness.
He could no longer produce anything clear or life-like; the woman's
breast was growing pasty with heavy colouring; that flesh which, in his
fancy, ought to have glowed, was simply becoming grimy; he could not
even succeed in getting a correct focus. What on earth was the matter
with his brain that he heard it bursting asunder, as it were, amidst his
vain efforts? Was he losing his sight that he was no longer able to see
correctly? Were his hands no longer his own that they refused to obey
him? And thus he went on winding himself up, irritated by the strange
hereditary lesion which sometimes so greatly assisted his creative
powers, but at others reduced him to a state of sterile despair, such as
to make him forget the first elements of drawing. Ah, to feel giddy with
vertiginous nausea, and yet to remain there full of a furious passion
to create, when the power to do so fled with everything else, when
everything seemed to founder around him--the pride of work, the
dreamt-of glory, the whole of his existence!

'Look here, old boy,' said Sandoz at last, 'we don't want to worry you,
but it's half-past six, and we are starving. Be reasonable, and come
down with us.'

Claude was cleaning a corner of his palette. Then he emptied some more
tubes on it, and, in a voice like thunder, replied with one single word,
'No.'

For the next ten minutes nobody spoke; the painter, beside himself,
wrestled with his picture, whilst his friends remained anxious at this
attack, which they did not know how to allay. Then, as there came a
knock at the door, the architect went to open it.

'Hallo, it's Papa Malgras.'

Malgras, the picture-dealer, was a thick-set individual, with
close-cropped, brush-like, white hair, and a red splotchy face. He
was wrapped in a very dirty old green coat, that made him look like an
untidy cabman. In a husky voice, he exclaimed: 'I happened to pass along
the quay, on the other side of the way, and I saw that gentleman at the
window. So I came up.'

Claude's continued silence made him pause. The painter had turned to his
picture again with an impatient gesture. Not that this silence in any
way embarrassed the new comer, who, standing erect on his sturdy legs
and feeling quite at home, carefully examined the new picture with his
bloodsh