r fortune and fame.

From Monday morning till Saturday night Sandoz sat fuming and fretting
at the municipal building of the fifth Arrondissement in a dark corner
of the registry office for births, rooted to his stool by the thought of
his mother, whom his salary of a hundred and fifty francs a month
helped in some fashion to keep. Dubuche, anxious to pay his parents the
interest of the money placed on his head, was ever on the look-out for
some petty jobs among architects, outside his studies at the School of
Arts. As for Claude, thanks to his thousand francs a year, he had his
full liberty; but the latter days of each month were terrible enough,
especially if he had to share the fag-end of his allowance. Luckily he
was beginning to sell a little; disposing of tiny canvases, at the
rate of ten and twelve francs a-piece, to Papa Malgras, a wary picture
dealer. After all, he preferred starvation to turning his art into
mere commerce by manufacturing portraits of tradesmen and their wives;
concocting conventional religious pictures or daubing blinds for
restaurants or sign-boards for accoucheuses. When first he had
returned to Paris, he had rented a very large studio in the Impasse des
Bourdonnais; but he had moved to the Quai de Bourbon from motives of
economy. He lived there like a savage, with an absolute contempt for
everything that was not painting. He had fallen out with his relatives,
who disgusted him; he had even ceased visiting his aunt, who kept a
pork-butcher's shop near the Central Markets, because she looked too
flourishing and plump.* Respecting the downfall of his mother, who was
being eaten out of doors and driven into the streets, he nursed a secret
grief.

* This aunt is Lisa of 'The Fat and the Thin' (Le Ventre de Paris)
in a few chapters of which Claude figures.--ED.

Suddenly he shouted to Sandoz, 'Will you be kind enough not to tumble to
pieces?' But Sandoz declared that he was getting stiff, and jumped
from the couch to stretch his legs a bit. They took ten minutes'
rest, talking meanwhile about many things. Claude felt condescendingly
good-tempered. When his work went smoothly he brightened up and became
talkative; he, who painted with his teeth set, and raged inwardly
directly he felt that nature was escaping him. Hence his friend had
scarcely resumed his attitude before he went on chattering, without,
however, missing a stroke of his brush.

'It's going on all right, old boy, isn't it?