rse was passing the city gate,
the painter leant towards the novelist.

'And the little woman, what is going to be done with her?'

'Ah! how dreadful it is!' replied Sandoz. 'I went to see her yesterday
at the hospital. She has brain fever. The house doctor maintains that
they will save her, but that she will come out of it ten years older and
without any strength. Do you know that she had come to such a point
that she no longer knew how to spell. Such a crushing fall, a young lady
abased to the level of a drudge! Yes, if we don't take care of her like
a cripple, she will end by becoming a scullery-maid somewhere.'

'And not a copper, of course?'

'Not a copper. I thought I should find the studies Claude made from
nature for his large picture, those superb studies which he afterwards
turned to such poor account. But I ferreted everywhere; he gave
everything away; people robbed him. No, nothing to sell, not a canvas
that could be turned to profit, nothing but that huge picture, which I
demolished and burnt with my own hands, and right gladly, I assure you,
even as one avenges oneself.'

They became silent for a moment. The broad road leading to St. Ouen
stretched out quite straight as far as the eye could reach; and over the
plain went the procession, pitifully small, lost, as it were, on that
highway, along which there flowed a river of mud. A line of palings
bordered it on either side, waste land extended both to right and left,
while afar off one only saw some factory chimneys and a few lofty white
houses, standing alone, obliquely to the road. They passed through the
Clignancourt fete, with booths, circuses, and roundabouts on either
side, all shivering in the abandonment of winter, empty dancing cribs,
mouldy swings, and a kind of stage homestead, 'The Picardy Farm,'
looking dismally sad between its broken fences.

'Ah! his old canvases,' resumed Bongrand, 'the things he had at the Quai
de Bourbon, do you remember them? There were some extraordinary bits
among them. The landscapes he brought back from the south and the
academy studies he painted at Boutin's--a girl's legs and a woman's
trunk, for instance. Oh, that trunk! Old Malgras must have it. A
magisterial study it was, which not one of our "young masters" could
paint. Yes, yes, the fellow was no fool--simply a great painter.'

'When I think,' said Sandoz, 'that those little humbugs of the School
and the press accused him of idleness and ignorance, repea