ue de Douai, he made up his mind to rent some shed that would be
spacious enough, elsewhere; and strolling one day on the heights of
Montmartre, he found what he wanted half way down the slope of the Rue
Tourlaque, a street that descends abruptly behind the cemetery, and
whence one overlooks Clichy as far as the marshes of Gennevilliers. It
had been a dyer's drying shed, and was nearly fifty feet long and more
than thirty broad, with walls of board and plaster admitting the wind
from every point of the compass. The place was let to him for three
hundred francs. Summer was at hand; he would soon work off his picture
and then quit.

This settled, feverish with hope, Claude decided to go to all the
necessary expenses; as fortune was certain to come in the end, why
trammel its advent by unnecessary scruples? Taking advantage of his
right, he broke in upon the principal of his income, and soon grew
accustomed to spend money without counting. At first he kept the matter
from Christine, for she had already twice stopped him from doing so;
and when he was at last obliged to tell her, she also, after a week of
reproaches and apprehension, fell in with it, happy at the comfort in
which she lived, and yielding to the pleasure of always having a little
money in her purse. Thus there came a few years of easy unconcern.

Claude soon became altogether absorbed in his picture. He had furnished
the huge studio in a very summary style: a few chairs, the old couch
from the Quai de Bourbon, and a deal table bought second-hand for five
francs sufficed him. In the practice of his art he was entirely devoid
of that vanity which delights in luxurious surroundings. The only real
expense to which he went was that of buying some steps on castors, with
a platform and a movable footboard. Next he busied himself about his
canvas, which he wished to be six and twenty feet in length and sixteen
in height. He insisted upon preparing it himself; ordered a framework
and bought the necessary seamless canvas, which he and a couple of
friends had all the work in the world to stretch properly by the aid
of pincers. Then he just coated the canvas with ceruse, laid on with a
palette-knife, refusing to size it previously, in order that it might
remain absorbent, by which method he declared that the painting would be
bright and solid. An easel was not to be thought of. It would not have
been possible to move a canvas of such dimensions on it. So he invented
a s