t!' But the child's intelligence seemed, on the
contrary, to decrease in proportion as his skull became larger. Very
gentle and timid, he became absorbed in thought for hours, incapable of
answering a question. And when he emerged from that state of immobility
he had mad fits of shouting and jumping, like a young animal giving rein
to instinct. At such times warnings 'to keep quiet' rained upon him, for
his mother failed to understand his sudden outbursts, and became uneasy
at seeing the father grow irritated as he sat before his easel. Getting
cross herself, she would then hastily seat the little fellow in his
corner again. Quieted all at once, giving the startled shudder of one
who has been too abruptly awakened, the child would after a time doze
off with his eyes wide open, so careless of enjoying life that his toys,
corks, pictures, and empty colour-tubes dropped listlessly from his
hands. Christine had already tried to teach him his alphabet, but he
had cried and struggled, so they had decided to wait another year or two
before sending him to school, where his masters would know how to make
him learn.

Christine at last began to grow frightened at the prospect of impending
misery. In Paris, with that growing child beside them, living proved
expensive, and the end of each month became terrible, despite her
efforts to save in every direction. They had nothing certain but
Claude's thousand francs a year; and how could they live on fifty
francs a month, which was all that was left to them after deducting four
hundred francs for the rent? At first they had got out of embarrassment,
thanks to the sale of a few pictures, Claude having found Gagniere's old
amateur, one of those detested bourgeois who possess the ardent souls
of artists, despite the monomaniacal habits in which they are confined.
This one, M. Hue, a retired chief clerk in a public department, was
unfortunately not rich enough to be always buying, and he could only
bewail the purblindness of the public, which once more allowed a genius
to die of starvation; for he himself, convinced, struck by grace at the
first glance, had selected Claude's crudest works, which he hung by the
side of his Delacroix, predicting equal fortune for them. The worst was
that Papa Malgras had just retired after making his fortune. It was but
a modest competence after all, an income of about ten thousand francs,
upon which he had decided to live in a little house at Bois Colombes,
l