housetops. He beheld it, moreover, beneath the setting sun, surrendering
itself to the night which was slowly rising from the river, with the
salient edges of its buildings still fringed with a glow as of embers,
and with final conflagrations rekindling in its windows, from whose
panes leapt tongue-like flashes. But in presence of those twenty
different aspects of the Cite, no matter what the hour or the weather
might be, he ever came back to the Cite that he had seen the first time,
at about four o'clock one fine September afternoon, a Cite all serenity
under a gentle breeze, a Cite which typified the heart of Paris beating
in the limpid atmosphere, and seemingly enlarged by the vast stretch of
sky which a flight of cloudlets crossed.

Claude spent his time under the Pont des Saints-Peres, which he had
made his shelter, his home, his roof. The constant din of the vehicles
overhead, similar to the distant rumbling of thunder, no longer
disturbed him. Settling himself against the first abutment, beneath the
huge iron arches, he took sketches and painted studies. The _employes_
of the river navigation service, whose offices were hard by, got to
know him, and, indeed, the wife of an inspector, who lived in a sort
of tarred cabin with her husband, two children, and a cat, kept his
canvases for him, to save him the trouble of carrying them to and fro
each day. It became his joy to remain in that secluded nook beneath
Paris, which rumbled in the air above him, whose ardent life he ever
felt rolling overhead. He at first became passionately interested in
Port St. Nicolas, with its ceaseless bustle suggesting that of a distant
genuine seaport. The steam crane, _The Sophia_, worked regularly,
hauling up blocks of stone; tumbrels arrived to fetch loads of sand; men
and horses pulled, panting for breath on the big paving-stones, which
sloped down as far as the water, to a granite margin, alongside which
two rows of lighters and barges were moored. For weeks Claude worked
hard at a study of some lightermen unloading a cargo of plaster,
carrying white sacks on their shoulders, leaving a white pathway behind
them, and bepowdered with white themselves, whilst hard by the coal
removed from another barge had stained the waterside with a huge inky
smear. Then he sketched the silhouette of a swimming-bath on the left
bank, together with a floating wash-house somewhat in the rear, showing
the windows open and the washerwomen kneeling in a r