in view of displaying any contempt for religion,
but to get the affair over quickly and simply. That would suffice.
The question of witnesses embarrassed them for a moment. As she was
absolutely unacquainted with anybody, he selected Sandoz and Mahoudeau
to act for her. For a moment he had thought of replacing the latter by
Dubuche, but he never saw the architect now, and he feared to compromise
him. He, Claude, would be content with Jory and Gagniere. In that way
the affair would pass off among friends, and nobody would talk of it.

Several weeks had gone by; they were in December, and the weather proved
terribly cold. On the day before the wedding, although they barely had
thirty-five francs left them, they agreed that they could not send their
witnesses away with a mere shake of the hand; and, rather than have
a lot of trouble in the studio, they decided to offer them lunch at a
small restaurant on the Boulevard de Clichy, after which they would all
go home.

In the morning, while Christine was tacking a collar to a grey linsey
gown which, with the coquetry of woman, she had made for the occasion,
it occurred to Claude, who was already wearing his frock-coat and
kicking his heels impatiently, to go and fetch Mahoudeau, for the
latter, he asserted, was quite capable of forgetting all about the
appointment. Since autumn, the sculptor had been living at Montmartre,
in a small studio in the Rue des Tilleuls. He had moved thither in
consequence of a series of affairs that had quite upset him. First
of all, he had been turned out of the fruiterer's shop in the Rue du
Cherche-Midi for not paying his rent; then had come a definite rupture
with Chaine, who, despairing of being able to live by his brush, had
rushed into commercial enterprise, betaking himself to all the fairs
around Paris as the manager of a kind of 'fortune's wheel' belonging to
a widow; while last of all had come the sudden flight of Mathilde, her
herbalist's business sold up, and she herself disappearing, it seemed,
with some mysterious admirer. At present Mahoudeau lived all by himself
in greater misery than ever, only eating when he secured a job at
scraping some architectural ornaments, or preparing work for some more
prosperous fellow-sculptor.

'I am going to fetch him, do you hear?' Claude repeated to Christine.
'We still have a couple of hours before us. And, if the others come,
make them wait. We'll go to the municipal offices all together.'

On