aved. The one he deemed the
most successful represented a soldier dressed in the three-cornered hat,
blue coat with red facings, yellow breeches and black gaiters of the
Volunteer, seated on a big drum, his feet on a pile of cannon-balls and
his musket between his knees. It was the _citizen of hearts_ replacing
the _ci-devant_ knave of hearts. For six months and more Gamelin had
been drawing soldiers with never-failing gusto. He had sold some of
these while the fit of martial enthusiasm lasted, while others hung on
the walls of the room, and five or six, water-colours, colour-washes and
chalks in two tints, lay about on the table and chairs. In the days of
July, '92, when in every open space rose platforms for enrolling
recruits, when all the taverns were gay with green leaves and resounded
to the shouts of "Vive la Nation! freedom or death!" Gamelin could not
cross the Pont-Neuf or pass the Hotel de Ville without his heart beating
high at sight of the beflagged marquee in which magistrates in tricolour
scarves were inscribing the names of volunteers to the sound of the
_Marseillaise_. But for him to join the Republic's armies would have
meant leaving his mother to starve.

Heralded by a grievous sound of puffing and panting the old _citoyenne_,
Gamelin's widowed mother, entered the studio, hot, red and out of
breath, the National cockade hanging half unpinned in her cap and on the
point of falling out. She deposited her basket on a chair and still
standing, the better to get her breath, began to groan over the high
price of victuals.

A shopkeeper's wife till the death of her husband, a cutler in the Rue
de Grenelle-Saint-Germain, at the sign of the Ville de Chatellerault,
now reduced to poverty, the _citoyenne_ Gamelin lived in seclusion,
keeping house for her son the painter. He was the elder of her two
children. As for her daughter Julie, at one time employed at a
fashionable milliner's in the Rue Honore, the best thing was not to know
what had become of her, for it was ill saying the truth, that she had
emigrated with an aristocrat.

"Lord God!" sighed the _citoyenne_, showing her son a loaf baked of
heavy dun-coloured dough, "bread is too dear for anything; the more
reason it should be made of pure wheat! At market neither eggs nor
green-stuff nor cheese to be had. By dint of eating chestnuts, we're
like to grow into chestnuts."

After a long pause, she began again:

"Why, I've seen women in the streets who