Jacques had luckily to do with an honest fellow who understood that a
couple of hundredweight of cast iron, and three square feet of Pyrenean
marble were no payment for three months' work by Jacques, whose talent
had brought him in several thousand francs. He offered to give the
artist a share in the business, but Jacques would not consent. The lack
of variety in the subjects for treatment was repugnant to his inventive
disposition, besides he had what he wanted, a large block of marble,
from the recesses of which he wished to evolve a masterpiece destined
for Francine's grave.

At the beginning of spring Jacques' position improved. His friend the
doctor put him in relation with a great foreign nobleman who had come to
settle in Paris, and who was having a magnificent mansion built in one
of the most fashionable districts. Several celebrated artists had been
called in to contribute to the luxury of this little palace. A chimney
piece was commissioned from Jacques. I can still see his design, it was
charming; the whole poetry of winter was expressed in the marble that
was to serve as a frame to the flames. Jacques' studio was too small, he
asked for and obtained a room in the mansion, as yet uninhabited, to
execute his task in. A fairly large sum was even advanced him on the
price agreed on for his work. Jacques began by repaying his friend the
doctor the money the latter had lent him at Francine's death, then he
hurried to the cemetery to cover the earth, beneath which his mistress
slept, with flowers.

But spring had been there before him, and on the girl's grave a thousand
flowers were springing at hazard amongst the grass. The artist had not
the courage to pull them up, for he thought that these flowers might
perhaps hold something of his dead love. As the gardener asked him what
was to be done with the roses and pansies he had brought with him,
Jacques bade him plant them on a neighboring grave, newly dug, the poor
grave of some poor creature, without any border and having no other
memorial over it than a piece of wood stuck in the ground and surmounted
by a crown of flowers in blackened paper, the scant offering of some
pauper's grief. Jacques left the cemetery in quite a different frame of
mind to what he had entered it. He looked with happy curiosity at the
bright spring sunshine, the same that had so often gilded Francine's
locks when she ran about the fields culling wildflowers with her white
hands. Quite a s