choking; he stammered, distracted with boundless
grief:

'She is killed, she is killed!'

Then Christine, in her maternal love for that big child of an artist,
felt moved to her very entrails. She forgave him as usual. She saw well
enough that he now had but one thought--to mend the rent, to repair
the evil at once; and she helped him; it was she who held the shreds
together, whilst he from behind glued a strip of canvas against them.
When she dressed herself, 'the other one' was there again, immortal,
simply retaining near her heart a slight scar, which seemed to make her
doubly dear to the painter.

As this unhinging of Claude's faculties increased, he drifted into a
sort of superstition, into a devout belief in certain processes and
methods. He banished oil from his colours, and spoke of it as of a
personal enemy. On the other hand, he held that turpentine produced a
solid unpolished surface, and he had some secrets of his own which
he hid from everybody; solutions of amber, liquefied copal, and other
resinous compounds that made colours dry quickly, and prevented
them from cracking. But he experienced some terrible worries, as
the absorbent nature of the canvas at once sucked in the little oil
contained in the paint. Then the question of brushes had always worried
him greatly; he insisted on having them with special handles; and
objecting to sable, he used nothing but oven-dried badger hair.
More important, however, than everything else was the question of
palette-knives, which, like Courbet, he used for his backgrounds. He
had quite a collection of them, some long and flexible, others broad and
squat, and one which was triangular like a glazier's, and which had been
expressly made for him. It was the real Delacroix knife. Besides, he
never made use of the scraper or razor, which he considered beneath an
artist's dignity. But, on the other hand, he indulged in all sorts of
mysterious practices in applying his colours, concocted recipes and
changed them every month, and suddenly fancied that he had bit on the
right system of painting, when, after repudiating oil and its flow, he
began to lay on successive touches until he arrived at the exact tone
he required. One of his fads for a long while was to paint from right to
left; for, without confessing as much, he felt sure that it brought
him luck. But the terrible affair which unhinged him once more was an
all-invading theory respecting the complementary colours. G