d motionless with his eyes turned upward. He had passed through
that gallery twice already, and yet that was certainly his picture up
yonder, so high up that he hesitated about recognising it. It looked,
indeed, so little, poised like a swallow at the corner of a frame--the
monumental frame of an immense painting five-and-thirty feet long,
representing the Deluge, a swarming of yellow figures turning
topsy-turvy in water of the hue of wine lees. On the left, moreover,
there was a pitiable ashen portrait of a general; on the right a
colossal nymph in a moonlit landscape, the bloodless corpse of a
murdered woman rotting away on some grass; and everywhere around there
were mournful violet-shaded things, mixed up with a comic scene of some
bibulous monks, and an 'Opening of the Chamber of Deputies,' with a
whole page of writing on a gilded cartouch, bearing the heads of the
better-known deputies, drawn in outline, together with their names.
And high up, high up, amid those livid neighbours, the little canvas,
over-coarse in treatment, glared ferociously with the painful grimace of
a monster.

Ah! 'The Dead Child.' At that distance the wretched little creature was
but a confused lump of flesh, the lifeless carcase of some shapeless
animal. Was that swollen, whitened head a skull or a stomach? And those
poor hands twisted among the bedclothes, like the bent claws of a bird
killed by cold! And the bed itself, that pallidity of the sheets, below
the pallidity of the limbs, all that white looking so sad, those tints
fading away as if typical of the supreme end! Afterwards, however, one
distinguished the light eyes staring fixedly, one recognised a child's
head, and it all seemed to suggest some disease of the brain, profoundly
and frightfully pitiful.

Claude approached, and then drew back to see the better. The light was
so bad that refractions darted from all points across the canvas. How
they _had_ hung his little Jacques! no doubt out of disdain, or perhaps
from shame, so as to get rid of the child's lugubrious ugliness. But
Claude evoked the little fellow such as he had once been, and beheld him
again over yonder in the country, so fresh and pinky, as he rolled
about in the grass; then in the Rue de Douai, growing pale and stupid
by degrees, and then in the Rue Tourlaque, no longer able to carry his
head, and dying one night, all alone, while his mother was asleep; and
he beheld her also, that mother, the sad woman who had