he way to rejoin Francine.

As he could still move about, Jacques begged the superintendent of the
hospital to let him have a little unused room, and he had a stand, some
tools, and some modelling clay brought there. During the first fortnight
he worked at the figure he intended for Francine's grave. It was an
angel with outspread wings. This figure, which was Francine's portrait,
was never quite finished, for Jacques could soon no longer mount the
stairs, and in short time could not leave his bed.

One day the order book fell into his hands, and seeing the things
prescribed for himself, he understood that he was lost. He wrote to his
family, and sent for Sister Sainte-Genevieve, who looked after him with
charitable care.

"Sister," said Jacques, "there is upstairs in the room that was lent me,
a little plaster cast. This statuette, which represents an angel, was
intended for a tomb, but I had not time to execute it in marble. Yes, I
had a fine block--white marble with pink veins. Well, sister, I give you
my little statuette for your chapel."

Jacques died a few days later. As the funeral took place on the very day
of the opening of the annual exhibition of pictures, the Water Drinkers
were not present. "Art before all," said Lazare.

Jacques' family was not a rich one, and he did not have a grave of his
own.

He is buried somewhere.

CHAPTER XIX

Musette's Fancies

It may be, perhaps, remembered how the painter Marcel sold the Jew
Medici his famous picture of "The Passage of the Red Sea," which was
destined to serve as the sign of a provision dealer's. On the morrow of
this sale, which had been followed by a luxurious dinner stood by the
Jew to the Bohemians as a clincher to the bargain, Marcel, Schaunard,
Colline, and Rodolphe woke up very late. Still bewildered by the fumes
of their intoxication of the day before, at first they no longer
remembered what had taken place, and as noon rung out from a neighboring
steeple, they all looked at one another with a melancholy smile.

"There goes the bell that piously summons humanity to refresh itself,"
said Marcel.

"In point of fact," replied Rodolphe, "it is the solemn hour when honest
folk enter their dining-room."

"We must try and become honest folk," murmured Colline, whose patron
saint was Saint Appetite.

"Ah, milk jug of my nursery!--ah! Four square meals of my childhood,
what has become of you?" said Schaunard. "What has become of you?" he