ce outside, Claude hurried along in the nipping cold which loaded
his moustache with icicles. Mahoudeau's studio was at the end of a
conglomeration of tenements--'rents,' so to say--and he had to cross a
number of small gardens, white with rime, and showing the bleak, stiff
melancholy of cemeteries. He could distinguish his friend's place from
afar on account of the colossal plaster statue of the 'Vintaging Girl,'
the once successful exhibit of the Salon, for which there had not been
sufficient space in the narrow ground-floor studio. Thus it was rotting
out in the open like so much rubbish shot from a cart, a lamentable
spectacle, weather-bitten, riddled by the rain's big, grimy tears. The
key was in the door, so Claude went in.

'Hallo! have you come to fetch me?' said Mahoudeau, in surprise. 'I've
only got my hat to put on. But wait a bit, I was asking myself whether
it wouldn't be better to light a little fire. I am uneasy about my woman
there.'

Some water in a bucket was ice-bound. So cold was the studio that it
froze inside as hard as it did out of doors, for, having been penniless
for a whole week, Mahoudeau had gingerly eked out the little coal
remaining to him, only lighting the stove for an hour or two of a
morning. His studio was a kind of tragic cavern, compared with which the
shop of former days evoked reminiscences of snug comfort, such was the
tomb-like chill that fell on one's shoulders from the creviced ceiling
and the bare walls. In the various corners some statues, of less bulky
dimensions than the 'Vintaging Girl,' plaster figures which had been
modelled with passion and exhibited, and which had then come back for
want of buyers, seemed to be shivering with their noses turned to the
wall, forming a melancholy row of cripples, some already badly damaged,
showing mere stumps of arms, and all dust-begrimed and clay-bespattered.
Under the eyes of their artist creator, who had given them his heart's
blood, those wretched nudities dragged out years of agony. At first, no
doubt, they were preserved with jealous care, despite the lack of room,
but then they lapsed into the grotesque honor of all lifeless things,
until a day came when, taking up a mallet, he himself finished them off,
breaking them into mere lumps of plaster, so as to be rid of them.

'You say we have got two hours, eh?' resumed Mahoudeau. 'Well, I'll just
light a bit of fire; it will be the wiser perhaps.'

Then, while lighting the stove