turned homewards over the
dusty road, with rounded shoulders and listless arms, listening to the
vanishing wheels.

In truth their _tete-a-tete_ life had become unbearable, and to avoid
it, he tried always to keep his house full. With his easy goodnature,
his weariness and indifference, he was soon surrounded by a lot of
literary starvelings. A set of scribblers, lazy, cracked day-dreamers,
settled down upon him and became more at home than himself; and as his
wife was but a fool, incapable of judging, because they talked more
loudly, she found them charming and very superior to her husband. The
days were spent in idle discussions. There was a clash of empty words,
a firing of smallest shot, and poor Heurtebise, motionless and silent
in the midst of the tumult, merely smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
Sometimes, however, towards the end of an interminable repast, when all
his guests, elbows on table, began around the brandy flasks one of
those lengthy maundering conversations, benumbing like clouds of tobacco
smoke, an immense feeling of disgust would seize hold of him, and not
having the courage to turn out all these poor wretches, he would himself
disappear and remain absent for a week.

[Illustration: p034-045]

"My house is full of imbeciles," he said one day to me. "I dare not
return." With this kind of existence, he no longer wrote. His name was
never seen, and his fortune, squandered in a perpetual craving to have
people in his house, disappeared in the outstretched hands around him.

[Illustration: p035-046]

It was a long time since we had met when I received one morning a line
of his dear little handwriting, formerly so firm, now trembling and
uncertain. "We are in Paris. Come and see me. I am so dull." I found him
with his wife, his child and his dogs, in a lugubrious little apartment
in the Batignolles. The disorder which in this narrow space could not be
spread about, seemed more hideous even than in the country. While the
child and dogs rolled about in rooms the size of a chessboard
compartment, Heurtebise; who was ill, lay with his face to the wall, in
a state of utter prostration. His wife, dressed out as usual, and ever
placid, hardly looked at him. "I don't know what is the matter with
him," she said to me with a gesture of indifference. On seeing me he had
for a moment a return of gaiety, and a minute of his old hearty laugh,
but it was soon stifled. As they had kept up in Paris all their suburb