The rapin of Paris is the sparrow of the artistic temple, but he is much more besides. For one thing, he is sometimes an eagle in disguise. He laughs as he paints, and plays dominoes with fantastic gravity. He is generally ugly, but he loves Beauty, and draws her in all postures, even immodest ones. Sometimes he becomes literary, and publishes a journal the size of a prayer-book, in which he has written nonsense and which lives for three months. In this way, I suppose, he takes a vague sort of revenge for all the nonsense that has been written about him.

I do not think you will find in Europe a more foul-minded person than the rapin, or a more joyous, or a more lovable, or a more pitiable. And though he is certainly the most consequential creature in the world, he is the greatest knocker-down of pedestals. Delacroix declared he could smell corruption in the air of Paris. I think he must have smelt the rapin. Yet out of this dung spring the fairest flowers of art.

Toto, forsaking his world for a space, had cast in his lot with this creation, and CÉlestin, like an angel made blind by love, followed him. Dodor had no voice in the matter, yet he endeavored to put it in as he swung in his cage from the nail in the wall.

“Oh!” sighed CÉlestin next morning as she sat beside Toto on the couch opposite the stove. “Am I on earth still, or can it be that we are in heaven?”

In one day she had become a woman without ceasing to be an angel, and Dodor sang as if to assure her of the fact, whilst Toto kissed her, and a beam of sun through the top light touched the tulip.

That was their morning, spent amidst the great flowers of the chintz-covered couch, whilst time passed over them like a butterfly with blue wings, and Paris grumbled through the top light like a jealous monster.

In the afternoon Toto, in his blouse, settled his painting things and rearranged drapery, whilst his companion, whose fingers could not be still, turned the morning, gone now forever, into a hat. She murmured to the hat as she made it, telling it of her happiness—a most adorable soliloquy lost to the world forever, for Toto was too busy to note it down. Then, when the structure was finished, she held it out on her finger-tip for admiration. It blushed there as if ashamed of its beauty and happiness. And Toto said “It is beautiful,” in an abstracted voice, for he was hunting for a palette-knife.

They dined at a little restaurant near the Palais Bourbon, and spent their evening at the Porte St. Martin Theater, where a bloody drama was enacted, which caused CÉlestin to weep deliciously and shiver.

This was their honeymoon, for next day work began in earnest, and Toto started for Melmenotte’s studio, a large bleak room filled with canvases and diligent students, a naked woman, large and solid and sitting on a throne, in their midst.

They hazed him at first, but he did not lose his temper, so they left him alone; besides, he showed no talent, therefore created no envy, hatred, or malice.

But Garnier, the man who worked on his right, took an interest in him just, perhaps, because the others voted him uninteresting and his work hopeless. It was Garnier’s way; he was a friend of failures, and took an interest in the forlorn. Sparrows, stray cats, or people like Toto appealed to him strangely.

He was an immense fellow, with Southern blood in his veins and hopes of humanity, and his secret ambition in life was to be a politician and set the world to rights. Nature, however, the sworn foe of secret ambitions, had placed all his talents in his eyes and fingers, insisting that this wayward child should be no politician, but a divine artist.

He had a great reputation as a scamp. He swore terrifically, and could out-talk a washerwoman. He was always borrowing, and spending, and lending, and giving, and he boasted that he kept a mistress. No one ever saw her; he kept her jealously hid, for she was eighty. He had, in fact, met her one day on one of the bridges crossing the Seine, and pensioned her forthwith because she reminded him of his mother, whom he had never beheld.

He was a love-child, it seems, and certainly a most terrible mixture as far as mind and morals were concerned, for his ideals were always very high, and his ideas often very low, and his language very often pornographic. To complete himself, he always stank of garlic, and his pockets were generally stuffed with cheap cigarettes and sweets, which he dispensed open-handed to his friends.

“Thanks,” said Toto, taking a cigarette from a dozen held out by Garnier.

It was the third morning of his attendance at the studio, and he was feeling depressed; he was also putting away his things, for it was Saturday, and work stopped at twelve.

“I,” said Garnier, “am going to enjoy myself, but the question is, How? Shall I go home and go to bed and read EugÈne Sue, or shall I go to the Tobacco-Pot and play dominoes? Jolly, have you any money?”

“None,” answered a lank-haired and evil-faced youth, darting out of the room, and clattering away down the stairs after the others.

“I have,” said Toto.

“How much?” inquired Garnier, with the air of a judge.

“Ten francs.”

“That settles it. We will go to the Tobacco-Pot. Ten francs, and this is Saturday! Mon Dieu, what a Rothschild you must be! Where did you get your money from?”

“My father.”

“What is he?”

“He keeps a shop.”

“Happy for you. You can paint away, and the old bird feeds you. Oh, I should like a shop—a little shop, where I would sell sweets and cigarettes, and live in my shirt-sleeves, and read the Ami du Peuple and kick my heels.”

“What do you think of my work?” asked Toto, glancing at the mediocre drawing upon his canvas.

“It’s capital,” said Garnier, his mind running on his little shop, where children would toddle in with their sou for sugar-sticks, and old women totter in for hap’orths of snuff: for, though Garnier loved all humanity, he perhaps loved the two extremes, childhood and old age, most.

“What made Melmenotte turn up his nose at it the way he did this morning when he came round?”

“He never praises anyone—he’s a fossil. Come, let us be off to the Tobacco-Pot. Annette will be here in a moment to clear up.”

“Come home with me and have some dÉjeuner; that will be better than the Tobacco Pot,” said Toto, as they went down the stairs.

“To your father’s place?”

“Oh, no; my atelier—Rue de Perpignan. I will introduce you to my—wife.”

“You married!” cried Garnier, stopping in astonishment, and clutching Toto’s arm. “Why, you are scarcely out of the egg!”

“I am twenty-two.”

“Mon Dieu! well, why not? it is the happiest life. Oh, I should like to have a wife and twelve little children all three years old. That is the age of all others; they talk like birds, and sentences from heaven slip into their conversation; and tumble on their noses, and pull one’s beard. I have always seen myself as I ought to be some day, with a big stomach, sitting in an armchair, the children pulling my watch-chain, and mamma plying her needle, whilst the cat purred on the hearth: and here are you, three years younger than I am, and you have it all. What an eye the Germans have for children! how they draw them! Mon Dieu! I can almost forgive them SÉdan for the sake of those adorable little Fritzes and Gretchens one sees in their funny little books.”

They reached the Rue de Perpignan at last, and found dÉjeuner waiting. There was a little salad, some stewed beef, and a bottle of white wine, also some fruit on a plate.

As Toto and CÉlestin embraced, Garnier looked around him with a sigh. His room was an attic, yet I doubt if he would have exchanged his attic, where he lay abed on Sunday reading the “Mysteries of Paris” and imagining himself Prince Rudolph, and of a week-day night reading the IntransigÈant by the light of a tallow candle and imagining himself Henri Rochefort, for this atelier, even were CÉlestin thrown in—at least, at present.

Not that he undervalued CÉlestin, even at the first glance; far from it. The great, noisy Garnier was silent and quelled for quite ten minutes. He had never met CÉlestin before amidst all the women he had met, and he seemed undecided for a while as to whether an angel or a child was dispensing the cold stewed beef and the salad. Then he made up his mind, evidently, that it was a child, and began to play with her. He told stories, really droll little stories, that a child or a man might laugh over, and stainless as the white roads of Provence. And he mimicked old men and women without malice, and in such a way that CÉlestin wept from laughing.

After dÉjeuner he taught his hostess how to make cat’s cradles, and Dodor’s history was told to him whilst he sat on the couch and nursed his knee and smoked his villainous cigarettes of Caporal.

The guitar was taken down from the wall, and he played cafÉ-chantant songs, things with the ghost of an air moving in a whirl of sound, and sang the “Girls of Avignon” with tears in his eyes, that seemed to behold the whirl of the farandole, the white road to Arles, the moonlight, the fireflies, and the orange trees shivering in the mistral.

Altogether it was a most enjoyable afternoon, and the excitement and laughter left CÉlestin quite spent. A fit of coughing seized her when the time came for them to go out to dinner, and she declared that she must lie down. So she lay down on her bed, and Toto covered her up with a shawl, and gave her one of the lozenges Mme. Liard had placed in her trunk to suck.

Then he went out with Garnier, and they dined at a little cafÉ for two francs each, wine included.

“I found this little cafÉ only three months ago,” said Garnier. “It is a wizard cafÉ. I dine here as often as I can, for some day I expect to find it vanished. Those whom the gods love die young, and I am sure the gods must love this little cafÉ. I cannot tell how they give one such a dinner for two francs, including a bottle of Maconolais. That hare soup was a miracle. I suspect the miracle to be cats. But no matter; the taste was right. I save up on week-days, and dine here on Sundays.”

“How long have you been working at art?”

“Five years.”

Toto felt rather aghast.

“Have you been working at Melmenotte’s atelier all that time?”

“Oh, no; for the last two years I have been in his private studio; it is being altered just now, so I just come to herd with the rest to keep my hand in. I must be doing something.”

“Have you exhibited yet?”

“No; Melmenotte will not let me. I am to next year; I shall have a picture in the Salon next year.”

“How sure he is of himself!” thought Toto. “And how dull he must be to have worked five years without exhibiting!” Then to Garnier: “One of the fellows told me one could live by selling pot-boilers.”

“Yes; one could live by house-painting, for the matter of that. Who was it told you?”

“That young fellow with the long hair—Jolly you called him, I think.”

“He is an awful wretch, that man, but a fine artist. Beware of him; do not ask him to your home. I never speak bad of people; but Jolly is not a person: he is a genius who will die in a jail or a lunatic asylum. I’ve told him so often. It would not do for him to make the acquaintance of Mlle. CÉlestin.”

Garnier gave a little sigh as he ate a lark on toast, which he declared he suspected of being a rat. He seemed thinking a great deal of CÉlestin. The talk wandered over a number of topics, but somehow always back to or near CÉlestin.

Then Toto paid the score, and produced so much money that Garnier borrowed a napoleon in as natural a manner as that of a bee taking a suck at a flower. He then, as they walked away smoking Trabucos, bought a copy of the IntransigÈant, and wandered home to read it, reminding Toto as they parted to give his regards to CÉlestin.

CHAPTER II.
THE SORROWS OF GAILLARD.

A week passed, making in all ten days of the new life, and still the novelty of it had not palled; but five hundred francs of the three thousand were gone. Where were they gone to? Toto scratched his head. CÉlestin helped him in his accounts, casting her beautiful eyes up as if for her angels to help her; but they were very bad mathematicians, these angels, though perfect milliners.

Garnier, in his big way, had declared to the studio that Toto was the best of good fellows when one got to know him. Jolly had pricked his ears at this, and instantly borrowed twenty-five francs from the new man, to send to his brother in the country; several others had done likewise, but this only accounted for eighty francs or so. True, they had paid the restaurateur and the washwoman; and they had gone the Sunday before to the Buttes Chaumont, so they finished making up their accounts with a kiss, and declared they must be more careful in the future.

“I will sell some hats,” said CÉlestin, “and, oh, I know: we will get a money-box. It is wonderful, a money-box. Dodor has quite a fortune since I started his. Money seems to grow in a money-box. Kiss me again, DÉsirÉ.”

Sometimes Toto thought of the world he had left. What were they all doing? Sometimes he felt slightly uneasy at the great absence of Gaillard. The poet had promised to call in three or four days, and, lo! ten had passed. His friends thought him in Corsica, but what was his mother doing? He had entered into a compromise with her not to bother him, and Helen Powers had promised to use her influence that he might be left alone to follow his art. Still, he felt nervous that some day Mme. la Princesse might break her word and arrive on the scene. She did not know his address, it is true; but, still, she had a way of finding things out.

He had worked fairly hard during these ten days, all things considered, and Garnier had dropped in to visit them now and then, bringing presents of sweets for CÉlestin.

Toto in the eyes of Garnier seemed a very enviable person. His father had a shop, and all shopkeepers, in the eyes of Garnier, were desperately rich; besides, the little mÉnage in the Rue de Perpignan did his heart good. The lovers seemed so young and innocent, their way of life so ideal, and their conversation so charming, especially CÉlestin’s.

It was on the twelfth day that Gaillard burst in upon them. CÉlestin was out marketing, Toto was at home smoking cigarettes, for it was the day Melmenotte came round,—that is to say, Saturday,—and Toto had taken a dislike to the great painter: he was not a gentleman.

Gaillard had a debauched air, and three books under his arm; and Toto, who had somehow been very much in the blues, felt an unholy joy at the sight of the poet.

“Pantin is out,” said Gaillard, collapsing into a chair and flinging all his books on the floor. He produced a heavy and respectable-looking journal from his back pocket and cast it to the painter.

Toto scarcely glanced at it.

“Where have you been all this time?”

“Ah, my God! you may well ask me that. I have been at the beck and call of Pelisson. It is cruel; I have done all the work, and De Nani is getting all the praise; everyone is talking of De Nani—his jokes, his witticisms, his women, his wealth. And the old fool has not three ideas in his head, nor three sous in his pocket; no woman would look at him twice, and he never made a bonmot in his life. My ‘Fall of the Damned’ came out the day before yesterday; no one is speaking of it, everyone is talking of De Nani. He has killed my little book, he and Pantin. It is all Pelisson’s fault. He is only using De Nani as an advertisement. Struve was right: this old man is a goat; he smells like one, faugh! and he paints his face. Struve is the only man of sense of the lot. I always said so. Give me an absinthe, Toto; my nerves are gone.”

“But how did Pelisson get his paper out so quickly?” asked Toto, helping the poet to a glass of vermouth, and feeling a dim sort of pleasure at his trouble.

“He has been working like a mole for months. You know the Trumpet; it came to grief last month; he has bought the plant and offices for a song. They are situated near the offices of the Figaro in the Rue Drouot. Oh, you should see that villain of a De Nani; he has bought a white hat, or got it on credit. He dines every day with Pelisson in a cabinet particulier at the Anglaise. No one is admitted, for fear they would find out the fraud, and the fact that he has no brains. Pelisson makes him drunk and sends him off in a cab to Auteuil, and then goes about telling people all the quaint things he has said. He is absorbing all Pelisson’s money. Pierre has never a sou now to lend to a friend, and one can’t dine with him, for he dines alone with De Nani. Conceive my feelings: this old beast has killed my book, cut off my supplies, and to crown all, wherever I go I hear nothing but De Nani, De Nani, De Nani! My God, I will go mad! Give me another vermouth.”

“What are those books?” asked Toto, handing the glass.

“Those? They are insult added to an injury—books for review, and such books! See here Fourrier’s ‘Social Economy’; I am to write a trenchant quarter-column review of it, and abuse it, for that will please the bourgeoisie. I know nothing of social economy, so how can I abuse it? I could praise it, for then Fourrier, whoever he is, would not reply; besides, one can praise a book with one’s eyes shut—bah! See here, a brochure on the American sugar trust. Mon Dieu! does Pelisson take me for a grocer? And here, again, a drama called ‘Henri Quatre,’ by some silly beast called Chauveau; all the lines limp, it is written in five-footed hexameters; and I am to praise it with discretion. With discretion, mind you! I wrote him a little poem for his abominable Pantin; it was called ‘Carmine-Rouge.’ You know I scarcely ever touch color in poetry; but I made an exception for once. He would not publish it; it was indecent, forsooth, and would bring the blush to the cheek of the bourgeoisie. Between the bourgeoisie on one hand and De Nani on the other, I feel as if I were in a terrible nightmare.”

“Have you heard anyone speak of me?”

“No one; they think you are in Corsica. But I have seen Mme. la Princesse; she sent for me to inquire after your health, and how you were progressing.”

“And you said——”

“Oh, I said ‘Admirably’; it was the best thing to say. I promised to call again and inform her of your progress; she entreated me to implore you not to discard your woolen vests. There was also a message about an overcoat, which I have forgotten; it was either to wear one or not wear one, but I cannot tell which: you know a mother’s ways. Toto, I feel hungry; have you anything to eat in this atelier of yours?”

Toto got together some bread and butter, half a cold tongue, and a bottle of wine. Gaillard turned up his nose at the feast provided for him, but began to eat.

“Toto, how much longer are you going to remain in this wretched Rue de Perpignan? Everywhere I go the cry is ‘Where is Toto?’ or ‘When will Toto be back?’”

“Why, you said a moment ago nobody asked for me.”

“Neither do they, but they speak of you, nevertheless; they do not ask for you because they imagine you in Corsica, but they mourn your absence.”

“Oh, bother them—let them mourn!” said Toto in a gruff voice, chewing his cigarette in an irritable manner.

“And how is Art going on?” asked Gaillard, casting his eyes about as if he were looking for her.

“All right; don’t bother me. I’m sick of talking art; tell me, How is Struve?”

“Struve is very well, though he declares that De Nani makes him sick.”

He finished the wine in the bottle, and proceeded to the question of a loan.

“But,” said Toto in horror, “you surely have not spent all that three thousand francs I gave you?”

Gaillard laughed harshly.

“Do I ever spend money? I spend my life paying it out, it seems to me; but how much do I spend on myself, how much have I for pleasure? Not a denier. I assure you, Toto, if I have three francs in my pocket people seem to smell it. No sooner had I got home the other day than Mme. Plon appeared with a bill, which I had imagined paid. Then Brevoart attached me for seven hundred and fifty. It was my fault for dealing with a German tailor; he got an order against me, and would have attached my royalties had I not paid. People think you are in Corsica, and so they make raids on me—then there is AngÉlique.”

“But, see here: I am very hard up myself. You know I determined to do on three thousand; well, I have spent over five hundred in a fortnight.”

“Only five hundred!”

“But think what that means; if I go on at this rate, in a couple of months I shall have nothing.”

“Toto,” said Gaillard earnestly, “I speak to you as a friend: Why pursue this course? Were I an enemy of yours I would urge you on, and then, when you came to grief, laugh at your sufferings. I am your friend, and I say stop. You are a fine artist, and for that very reason you must fail in this course. Genius was never intended to buffet with the world, to pay rent and fight with tradespeople; it is always allied to a fine nature, and I predict the most horrible sufferings for you should you continue this fictitious and insane battle with the world. It is only the duffers and the dullards who succeed in this game; they have blunt noses, and they do not feel blows. Look at De Nani, a miserable wreck without an idea, of whom all Paris is talking. Look at me. Could I tell you one-half the hardships I have undergone in my struggle for art, you would stop your ears. Well, then, I say desist; you can only live once: why make a hell of life? Come back to us; you have made an experiment in life. It is like a curious philosophical experiment that dirties one’s hands; well, then, let us wash our hands, and turn down our cuffs again.”

“Even if I wanted to stop this life, which I do not,” said Toto, playing with Gaillard’s bait, “I couldn’t—sooner do anything than that.”

“Nobody knows; it’s a matter between you and your conscience; I will never speak. You come back from Corsica in a hurry; well, what of that? it is a whim, and admirably in keeping with your character. Do, for Heaven’s sake, Toto, consider your position; and mine, for I feel that I am in some sort responsible for this act of yours, but I have been at least discreet, and, as I said before, nobody knows.”

“My mother knows.”

“What is a mother, if not a confidante of our little eccentricities?”

“And the American girl knows.”

“What! that American girl—would you give her a second thought? Mon Dieu! this is very funny. Oh, mon Dieu! this will kill me. An American pork butcheress; you told me yourself she was a pork butcheress. You are afraid of the jeers of this tripe-seller’s daughter. I passed to-day three American women in green veils; they were promenading the Rue St. HonorÉ, and screaming through their noses; they had alpenstocks, or at least little sticks, adorned with horn handles and branded ‘Rigi Kulm,’ ‘Rigi Scheideck.’ They had ascended the Rigi, and were announcing the fact to the Rue St. HonorÉ; that is your American woman. They had faces like dollars, and for people like these you would inconvenience yourself.”

“I tell you I don’t want to go back. I am perfectly happy, perfectly contented. Don’t talk any more about it. And I wish you would not call me Toto.”

Gaillard turned the conversation to his own immediate wants, and the process of extraction was resumed till he had salved five hundred francs from this derelict, promising upon his honor to pay it back in three weeks. And scarcely had the money changed hands than CÉlestin entered, her arms full of parcels, and accompanied by Garnier. He had met her shopping, and accompanied her home, it being Saturday.

Then the poet took his departure, chuckling to himself about Garnier and the obvious worship of the big ProvenÇal for the pretty CÉlestin; but for all that, he felt desperately uneasy about Toto. This foolishness might linger on for months like typhoid, and the best part of the year was coming on. At Christmas Toto had talked of hiring a steam yacht for the summer, and now this wretched CÉlestin and this vile art craze had spoiled it all. He could have wept as he walked hurriedly down the Rue de Perpignan looking for a cab to bear him to civilization, and after an absinthe, which acted on his trouble as stimulants on an abscess, heightening the inflammation and bringing it to a head, he sought Struve out in his rooms.

Struve was working in his shirt-sleeves at that book of his which made such a sensation a year later, “The Saint in Art.”

“I am very uneasy about Toto.”

“What’s wrong with him? Has he been butted by a moufflon?”

“Toto is not in Corsica; Toto is in Paris.”

“Oh, he’s come back, is he?”

“Do attend to me, Struve. Toto is in an attic.”

“What is he doing in an attic?”

“He is painting pictures.”

“Has he gone mad?”

“No, he is not mad; but I fear he will make a very great fool of himself.”

“I always said he would do that,” granted Struve, examining attentively a tiny colored picture of St. Cecilia that was destined to adorn “The Saint in Art.”

“I fear, if he is not stopped, he will make a very great mess of himself. He has taken only three thousand francs of his patrimony, and he swears that if he does not succeed on it he will cut his throat.”

“You don’t mean to say he has gone on with that foolishness?” asked Struve, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands in his pockets.

“I do indeed. It is a great piece of madness; but what is to be done?”

“Leave him alone.”

“But he will starve to death.”

“A little starvation will do him a lot of good; he has too much kick in him. The man is tired of playing the devil. He has tried everything, and now he is trying work. He will be back in a fortnight, a greater devil than ever. I like Toto. He is such a fool; but it’s rather a pity. You see, he is a moon, and he wants to be a sun. He is tired of shining by the reflected glory of his fortune, and he wants to shine by his own light. He hasn’t any to shine by, and there you are.”

“He has certainly no genius, but he is a very facile painter.”

“Facile rubbish! He can’t paint.”

“Do you not think, Otto, if you were to call upon him, and speak to him, and explain——”

“Gott im Himmel! what do you think my time is made for? Here am I behindhand with my book, and Flammarion like a caged tiger waiting for it. Go and tell his mother, go and tell his aunt, go to the devil, go anywhere, but don’t bother me about it. I have no time to be running after Totos; I am not a wet-nurse. Go and get a perambulator and wheel him home. How is Pantin?”

“Pantin is very well. Has not Pelisson offered you the art criticisms?”

“Yes; but I am too busy to be bothered by Pantins.”

“You are right. Pelisson makes a rotten editor; he gives out books for review as if they were clothes for wash. And De Nani——”

“I know; he is an old fool. But do leave me now, like a good fellow,” lisped Struve. “My head is so full of saints, it has no room for De Nanis.”

Gaillard went off in a huff, but at the entresol returned to borrow a few cigarettes, for Struve’s cigarettes were a dream.

“I forgot to tell you,” said Gaillard as he lighted one, “not to say a word to anyone about Toto and his attic; he made me swear to tell no one.”

“Then why did you tell me, you infernal idiot!” cried Struve, half laughing, yet nearly weeping at all these interruptions to his work.

“I quite forgot,” said Gaillard, running off to confide his troubles to someone else, whilst the critic locked his door and bolted it.

The poet turned into the offices of Pantin in the Rue Drouot.

Since the birth of the new journal Pelisson had been pestered with a rain of old friends whom he had not seen for years, and some of whom he had never seen before. They all wanted employment, or, failing that, a loan. Gaillard’s long-suffering creditors, hearing that he was on the staff, all appeared seeking for their money—a procession as infinite as the Leonids, and on a business as apparently futile. The unfortunate Pelisson had also to supervise his leader writers, write leaders himself, and, worst of all, select the subjects. For this purpose he had to keep one eye fixed steadily upon the whole world—that is to say, Paris. The other eye was fully occupied by De Nani, who had caught on most amazingly. Everyone was craving to see De Nani. They saw glimpses only of him, and that made them crave to see more. De Nani’s white hat loomed mysteriously above Pantin; his caustic and cutting witticisms circulated in salon and club. Quite a number of old gentlemen took to wearing white hats and making cutting remarks about their wives, and in the Rue St. HonorÉ one might see De Nani waistcoats by the score. Kuhn’s window in the Rue de Rivoli exposed his portrait, the white hat tilted to one side above the fiendish old face. It was bought by the hundred, and Gaillard, like a periodic comet, turned up at this window daily to grit his teeth with anguish and envy and walk on with rage in his heart.

Pelisson was right. He had caught an old wether and belled it, and the crowd followed like the proverbial sheep. But the bell-wether required incessant watching; besides, De Nani during the last forty years had improved borrowing into one of the fine arts, and he was taking a thousand francs a day out of Pantin in various legitimate and illegitimate ways. He tapped Pelisson, he tapped the staff, he had established a credit at three cafÉs, he tapped the proprietors. He came east every morning from Auteuil as an American farmer comes to his maple trees, or a physician to a hospital for dropsy. He patronized three tailors, and bundles of clothes were constantly being left at the offices of Pantin; in fact, he seemed to be laying in a store of clothes, not only for this life, but for the next.

“I wonder he does not get a coffin as well to complete the outfit,” said Gaillard once, viciously.

No doubt he would if he could have got a silver one to melt. He made up for his abstinence, however, in this respect by jewelry, scent, cosmetics, cigars, knickknacks. China mandarins, and varnished boots. It was not altogether his fault, for the tradesmen rushed upon him.

Pelisson did not much care what he got on credit, for he was editor only in name. If he lasted over the season it would be quite enough, for Pantin would then be well rooted, and any fiasco of bankruptcy would only make Pantin bloom the more. One might fancy that the bankruptcy of the editor would shake the paper in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, but the wise Pelisson knew better. “There is nothing,” said he, “that a tradesman enjoys more than seeing another tradesman let in.”

Pantin, be it observed, was now read, not only by the shopkeepers, but by the beau monde. Through its starch people observed a secret spirit at work. Its heavy sledge-hammer articles were supposed to be molding a crown. The journal was evidently a hit at the existing state of things; it was also strangely well informed, and the Ministry felt somewhat as a master might feel who suspected his butler of being a rogue, but could not prove the fact.

Amidst De Nani’s other vagaries, affairs with women figured chief, so you may imagine Pierre Pelisson had his hands full, and no ears for Gaillard’s tale of tribulation about Toto. But De Nani had; he was sitting in a room adjoining the inner office, and heard the whole story—everything, in fact, but Toto’s address.

CHAPTER III.
THE SORROWS OF ART.

Like Pelisson, the atelier in the Rue de Perpignan had its limitations; like Pelisson, it was also at times noisy. From the Gare de Sceaux at night and in the early morning came the sounds of shunting and the plaintive “toot-toot” of locomotives, whilst the top light seemed the chosen rendezvous of all the cats of the neighborhood who were in love.

“Those frightful cats!” would murmur CÉlestin, trembling beside Toto lest his sleep should be broken.

There were also draughts not specified in the lease, and the sink had a habit of getting stopped up at least once a day; then there was sometimes a smell of cooking from the rooms below.

Toto grumbled a little sometimes, but not much at first. The new life was so entirely different from the life he had led heretofore, so free, and withal so joyous, that for a little while he did not trouble himself as to the morrow. The only rose leaf that disturbed his rest during the first fortnight was the atelier of Melmenotte—art, in short.

Melmenotte had the air and aspect of a vieux sabreur. He inspected a picture as an infantry colonel inspects a regiment of the line, generally with a frown, sometimes with a few cutting words, sometimes with dead silence. He had inspected Toto’s attempts with a damnatory sniff and passed on.

For this reason Toto avoided the atelier on the days when Melmenotte went round; for this reason, though he had dwelt now with art only a fortnight, he had, when Gaillard made his proposition of return, almost nibbled at it. Melmenotte and his crew had somewhat disillusioned him. They were such a coarse lot. Their conversation was generally silly, sometimes absolutely vile; they pelted him with bits of bread when Garnier was not looking, and even the little loans he made to them did not buy him much esteem. It leaked out that his father had a shop; not that that fact would have influenced the students much one way or the other had he possessed talent, but, lacking talent, they saw in him an inevitable counter-jumper, and as a result would have made his life a misery to him but for Garnier, whose word was law, both on questions of art and conduct.

But CÉlestin knew nothing of these worries. She knew nothing and cared nothing about anything except Toto; she did not even know his surname, for, though he had told it to her once, she had forgotten it.

Neither did she inquire about his past. She knew in a vague sort of way that he had always lived in Paris, studying art, and being without guile, as a flower, she never made that hackneyed old inquiry, “Tell me, have you ever loved a woman before?”—to be answered by that hackneyed old lie, “Never.” Then, with that instinct which orders what we might call the good manners of love, she never loved him to weariness; she knew the psychological moment for a kiss, the right time for silence, and when to get upon his knee and cheer him up, and talk to him in the language she used to Dodor. Always pretty, she had almost in a night become beautiful. Toto had presented her with this added charm, but he did not perceive it; this extra beauty made up for the amount she had lost by surrendering herself to him.

One day Mme. Liard called to see how they were getting on, and brought a box of Choiseul’s cough lozenges for CÉlestin as a sort of wedding gift. The good woman was greatly taken with the atelier, the couch which she sat on to sample and declared to be a marvel, and the great empty canvas on one of the easels.

“That is for his great picture,” said CÉlestin proudly. “Isn’t it beautiful? and will it not be large? And see our tulip”—pointing to the flower in the pot, which had burst into bloom. “Is it not beautiful? But Dodor is so jealous of it.”

“Tulips die so soon,” said Mme. Liard, who was a bit of a pessimist. “Give me a double geranium. But flowers—bless you! I cannot keep them, for no sooner do I get a flower than Mimi scratches it up.”

“Ah, Mimi!” said CÉlestin; “tell me how she is.”

And Mme. Liard plunged into the inexhaustible subject of her cat.

Gaillard came down on them now and then like the wolf on the fold, and ate up a great deal of provisions. In return, he taught them how to make coffee and told them fairy tales. He also borrowed little sums at parting, but that goes without saying. He also acted as a sort of intermediary between Toto and his mamma, and one day he brought them a ham from that lady, omitting to mention from whence it had come, presenting it as a gift of his own, in fact, and borrowing an extra five francs on the strength of it. He also brought to the Rue de Perpignan all his troubles, including the books for review doled out by Pelisson, and horrible stories about De Nani. The “Fall of the Damned” had been furiously attacked by a friend in the columns of the Libre Parole, yet it was far from flourishing. He brought a copy dressed in a fawn-colored wrapper, and adorned with red devils tumbling head over heels, and presumably into the pit.

“The cover,” said Gaillard, “has spoiled the sale a good deal. You have no idea of the influence of a cover on a book: devils have gone out of fashion in the last month. It’s all owing to that exposure of the Satanists—silly fools!—and of course it is just my luck, for I have a little brochure in proof called ‘Bon Jour, Satan.’ Well, then, I must change the title, and what does that mean? Why, rewriting the book. People are turning religious, it seems; that is where art hits one. The silly public takes a whim into its head; the artist must meet it or starve. I had a meeting with Chauvin, my publisher, to-day. You should have seen his face. He declares the market for poetry is dead, and the silly fool wants me to write him something manly and religious. We nearly came to words, but we made it up. I am actually like a rat in a horrible trap. Do, Toto, act as a friend in this matter, and till the end of the month, when my royalties are due——”

“It is absolutely disgusting,” Gaillard would murmur to himself as he made for home after these expeditions. “It is like asking a loan from a laborer. He takes out a few francs and looks at them as if they were his last, and that little CÉlestin, I believe she puts him up to resist lending; I believe she puts all his spare money into the money-box of that wretched lark. I believe she is in love with that great fat beast who smells of garlic, and who always runs away when I come, as if he feared the presence of a gentleman; that is the lark she is saving up for. Yes, some day Toto will wake up to find nothing but a smell of garlic and CÉlestin flown. It will serve him right.”

Yet, were Toto out when he called at the atelier, he would lay his troubles on the back of CÉlestin, always sure of attention and commiseration. And smoking his eternal cigarettes, he would pour into her ear the horrors of life, the futility of Pelisson, the detestable nature of De Brie, and the villainy of De Nani. Sometimes Toto, returning after one of these sÉances had lasted an hour or so, would find CÉlestin looking almost old, and with tears in her heavenly eyes.

“I have been telling her a society fairy tale,” would say Gaillard.

It was now June, and lately Toto had become subject to moods, or, to speak more correctly, fits of moodiness. He had now for a month or more been living face to face with Art, and the prolonged interview with that lady was bearing fruit in his manners and customs.

Three weeks ago he would not have cared very much had Paris known of his mode of life and ridiculed him for it. Cocksure, and blinded by the fata Morgana of success, he would have shaken his palette in the face of Paris; but Art had changed all that.

“Art is not a wanton, to be hired for a night,” said Garnier one day in answer to a remark of Toto’s. “Mon Dieu! no; she is like that woman in the Bible whose courting took seven years, and then again seven years, and seven years again. Work, and don’t think, work and don’t think.”

Easy advice to give. Toto was now continually thinking. He was in a worse Bastille than that from which Latude made his escape, for he had devised his own bondhouse, and the prison a man makes for himself is of all prisons, perhaps, the most difficult to leave.

He dreaded now meeting anyone that he knew, and in the street going to and from the studio glanced about him with the eyes of a frightened hare. As yet no one knew of his folly but Gaillard, Helen Powers, and his mother, but, indeed, that audience, together with his self-respect, were quite enough to keep him performing a little while longer.

Then there was CÉlestin. The unutterable contentment and bliss of CÉlestin with her new life filled the heart of Toto sometimes now with a vague sort of terror. She seemed to think that this sort of thing was to go on forever. Her love for him, expressed in a thousand different ways, seemed to spring from infinity itself, and love like this is to the beloved either a blessing beyond all blessings or a curse. To Toto just now it was not a blessing.

Of course, by a cab to the Nord, or the L’Ouest, or the Orleans railway, and a ticket to anywhere, and a few months’ absence, he could have put everything to rights. Paris, like a cold gray sea, would have washed over CÉlestin and Dodor, washed away the furniture of the atelier, washed away his memory from the rapins at Melmenotte’s, and obliterated all traces. Paris, whose motto is “I have forgotten,” would not trouble even to repeat those funereal and final words over this small escapade.

But Toto was not the person to leave CÉlestin and Dodor to the mercies of Paris. In some unaccountable way CÉlestin had drawn the better parts of his nature to herself; to wound her would be to wound himself. If he thought CÉlestin were weeping alone in some attic, it would have taken the pleasure from life, and spoiled his digestion, and filled his nights with nightmares, for his better parts would have been weeping with her. In short, though capable of a foolish action, he was as yet incapable of a ruffianly, and as a result he was unhappy. A perfectly happy fool must always, I think, be a ruffian.

One day Garnier, who called frequently now as a friend of the family, found CÉlestin on the verge of tears. The tulip in the red-tile pot had died, and she was inconsolable. She declared that she would never keep another when Garnier offered to replace it.

“Never mind,” said the painter; “I will procure you a flower that will not die.”

A juggler who had lodged once in the same house had instructed him in the manufacture of roses that never die, immortal tulips, and decay-defying camellias. They were made from turnips cunningly carved and dyed in cochineal. Camellias were the easiest to make, roses more difficult, whilst tulips, strange to say, were the most difficult of all. The tulip had first to be blocked out roughly from the succulent root; then the exterior had to be carved, and lastly, the whole thing hollowed neatly.

So Garnier took a day off, and procured a turnip and a knife, some cochineal, and all the other necessary paraphernalia, and, with his work cut out before him, locked his door. This room of Garnier’s was close to the roof, and from its window one could see the spires of Notre Dame by standing on a chair. A desperate-looking cat lived here, whose life had been saved by the artist one morning as he was starting to work. It had repaid him lately by kittening under his bed. In one corner of the room lay a pile of newspapers, on the chimney-piece some books—Rousseau’s “Nouvelle HÉloÏse” in paper covers; a little book of German fairy tales, which he could not read, but which he treasured because of the delightful pictures; “The Mysteries of Paris,” which he had read four times; and a few others.

On this floor also there was a large atelier kept up by three young men from the South, who did their own cooking, so that the place was always filled with the sound of frying and the smell of garlic. They did their own washing, too, and so defied the laundress; they also at times defied the landlord when he threatened to turn them out. They had got an old banjo from somewhere, and, needless to say, they played on it. Garnier worked in this atelier when he was not working elsewhere. He loved its discords, and never painted better than when Castanet was playing the banjo, Lorillard accompanying him on a comb, and Floquet frying things over the stove, for then he imagined himself back in Provence, and the atelier became flooded with the light that never was in Paris except on the canvas of a Diaz or a Garnier.

Floquet had a sweetheart, who sat to him for love, and of course also to his friends. She darned Castanet’s stockings, for he wore them out in some miraculous way quicker than anyone else. As for Lorillard, he never wore stockings—at least, in summer—and laughed at people who did.

Altogether they were as disreputable a colony as one could find in the whole quarter, but as good-hearted as they were jolly. Castanet, be it observed, was a law student; he lived with the others just as the owl lives with the prairie-dogs, because he liked them.

All these people noticed a change that had come over Garnier during the last fortnight. He was abstracted, he sighed, he laughed at nothing, burst out laughing sometimes as he painted, in a happy manner, as if a child had performed some antic for his amusement, and then a few minutes later he would give a little groan. He no longer cast his brushes joyously aside when Floquet turned the shrieking and fizzing pan of fish stewed in garlic onto a dish; his appetite had diminished.

The fact was, the great Garnier was miraculously in love. When an elephant falls into a pit he does it in a whole-hearted manner; so fell Garnier into this passion. CÉlestin had been for him that dangerous thing—a revelation. She had eclipsed the IntransigÈant, and robbed Henri Rochefort of his power; she had touched Prince Rudolph, and he had slunk back into his impossible mysteries; she had taken the charm from garlic, and even the wizard cafÉ lost its fascination.

Yet for all this he was not in love with CÉlestin in the ordinary acceptation of the term. He never dreamt of marriage with her, simply because during the last twelve days he had become miraculously married to her. She dwelt with him always now in that atelier he called his head. There she made her hats, trimming them with sunbeams, and turning to him for admiration with her celestial smile.

She was the wife of his soul. Never was there a purer passion begotten of man and woman; yet, strangely enough, it did not purify him. He talked of women in the same old free-and-easy way, and the jokes of Castanet, Lorillard, Floquet & Co. did not shock him.

Had CÉlestin lived in a romance, she would doubtless have cast her light on womanhood. She would have elevated Garnier, and he certainly would have been none the worse for that. In reality, however, her effulgence showed him nothing but herself.

She had such pretty ways. Her slightest movement had a deeply artistic meaning. She interpreted unspoken sentences with a motion of her hands. A poppy swaying in the wind had not the grace of CÉlestin crossing the floor to put the little kettle on the stove. Her talk seemed a strange sister of Dodor’s song. And then the way she had of casting her eyes up to heaven! Her gaze always seemed to return bluer from that journey, and filled with light gathered from the ghostly distance.

She was all those twelve children he had longed for rolled into one, and much more besides. She was one of those delightful little cherubs over the fonts in the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois; she was the wind that waved the trees at Barbizon, the flowers that blew to the wind, and the sparrows that flew in the street; she was Mistigris, the cat who lived under his bed, and each of Mistigris’s six kittens. For all of these things that he loved when he thought of, beheld, or felt them, reminded him of CÉlestin.

He labored away over his tulip, carving at it with infinite care. Castanet came and kicked at his door, and asked him what he was doing, and then he felt the eye of Castanet peering through the key-hole, and heard his voice informing Floquet that Garnier was writing a letter to his sweetheart. Then the banjo struck up, and the doleful sound of the comb laboring out “Partant pour la Syrie” mixed with the sound of Lorillard washing his shirt and beating it between his hands as a sort of accompaniment to the music.

Then the flower was at last accomplished—a bit too thick in the petal, perhaps, but still a fairly accurate representation. He dyed it with the cochineal, and mounted it on a little green stick he had prepared to do duty for a stalk. It was a poor child for so great an artist to produce, yet he smiled at it in a satisfied manner, for it reminded him of CÉlestin.

He then went to the atelier of Castanet & Co. to see if he could get a piece of fish for Mistigris, who had come out from under the bed with a kitten in her mouth, as if to remind him that she was the mother of a family and required sustaining. And when he had fed her, he darted off with the tulip in his hand, making for the Rue de Perpignan, regardless of the ribaldry of his compatriots, who were watching him from their window away up near the roof. He hurried along like a man pursuing fortune, or as if fearful that the tulip would wither. Toto was out, but CÉlestin was at home mending a glove.

“Ah, ciel!” cried CÉlestin, as she held the tulip out between finger and thumb. “What a marvelous thing! You made it, and from a turnip! It is a miracle!”

“We will plant it!” cried Garnier, running about with the red-tile pot in his hand, and looking for some place in which to throw the dead flower. There was a sink outside the door; he cast it there.

Then they planted the new tulip, pressing the mold tightly around the base of the stick, and hardly was the thing accomplished when Toto entered, looking worried, and as if he had been walking in a hurry.

“Yes, it is very nice,” said Toto in the manner of an absent-minded parent as they called upon him to admire their handiwork.

He kissed CÉlestin without fervor, and then, pulling Garnier aside by the arm, invited him to come outside for a moment and have a glass of beer, and give his advice about a picture.

“I have had a row at the studio,” said Toto, when they were in the street.

“Eh! what? with Melmenotte?”

“No, that fool Jolly. I knocked him down.”

“What! you did that? Boufre! but it will do him a lot of good, that same Jolly. I have often wished to do so myself, but I am too big, and he is too small. You are more of his size. And why did you knock him down?”

“He told me I wasn’t able to paint, that any demi-mondaine had more art in painting her face than I had in painting a picture.”

“But that is nothing; we all tell each other things like that.”

“Yes, but he meant it; and, he said it in such an insulting manner, and, besides, he only said it because I had refused to lend him more money.”

“So you knocked him down!” cried Garnier, breaking into a roar of laughter. “Mon Dieu! and I missed it! I would have given five francs to have been there.”

They entered a little cafÉ, and Toto called for two bocks.

“I am very unhappy,” said Toto as he sipped his beer.

“What! about that rascal Jolly?”

“Oh, no; it is not that. I am unhappy about a lot of things. I wish I had never come to the Rue de Perpignan.”

“Oh!”

“Yes, tell me something seriously. How long do you think it will be before I am able to exhibit?”

Garnier shifted about in his seat. He did not know exactly what to say; he had never considered Toto’s art seriously. His father had a shop, and the son, after dabbling a while with art, would doubtless end happily behind the counter. He was having his Wanderjahr now. Even at the worst he might become a great artist. Who could tell? And who was Garnier that he should throw water on another man’s aspirations?

“Five years,” said Garnier. “You see, you are only beginning. The great thing in art is time; nothing is done without time and patience. Another thing: one must not think. Work away and don’t think. Don’t ask ‘How am I getting on?’ or, at least, only on New Year’s Day. Then, enjoy yourself, and keep your eyes open. Paris is a big atelier. An artist wants to study movement as well as the nude. I never walk down the street but I pick up something; it all comes in handy. If you want to paint life, you must dip your brush in everything, even mud. Those old men who spent their lives painting pots and pans and saints leave me cold. I would like to clap the Rue St. HonorÉ into a canvas—will, too, some day. I don’t think there is anything more fine in nature than a fire-engine going full speed to a fire, except, maybe, a dragon-fly.”

Garnier buried his nose in his glass, and Toto put his chin on his palm, his elbow on the table, and stared before him, as if gazing at a cheerless view.

“Or a girl flinging up her arms to yawn,” continued Garnier. “Girls are all art—that is why they make such rotten artists; but they are natural when they are flinging up their arms to yawn, or stooping to tie their garters, because then they think no one is looking at them, or they don’t care.”

He held out a handful of cigarettes, and Toto took one.

“I have never seen CÉlestin yawn,” said Toto in a meditative voice, as he lit the cigarette.

“Heavens! no,” said Garnier.

“Why not?”

“The gift of weariness is not given to her. Have you ever seen a butterfly yawn, or a happy child?”

“She is happy!” said Toto in a half-regretful voice.

“She is happiness, you mean. Mon Dieu! yes, she is happiness; as for me, when I see her I always feel ten years younger, twenty years younger when she speaks, thirty years younger when she smiles.”

“You are only twenty-five.”

“Oh, yes; so you see, Mlle. CÉlestin’s smile puts me back to five years before my birth. I was then an angel, a fat little angel in the cherub cage; there I would have been still had not the Father Eternal put in his hand and taken me out, and flung me to the blue, crying ‘Try your wings.’ That is how the business is managed: the world is pursued by a flock of cherubs in search of a roost; when they overtake the world, they take it by storm, people want to marry, and that makes spring; when the world outstrips them that makes winter. I have never begotten a child, so I have never given a perch to one of those sparrow angels, worse luck!” and Garnier sighed and called for more beer.

“Shall I tell you something?” asked Toto, who had been slowly making up his mind as the painter prattled.

“Why, yes!”

“Well, you remember, when I met you first, you asked me what my father was. I said he had a shop. Well, I told you a lie.”

“Ma foi! why not? What do I care what your father is?—you are a good fellow. That is enough for me. We all boast a bit, we artists.”

“I was not exactly boasting,” said Toto, knocking the ash off his cigarette in a nervous manner. “My father made all his money out of a bank.”

“You don’t mean to say he is a banker!” said Garnier, opening his eyes in astonishment, for a banker to Garnier was a much more extraordinary person than even one of those cherubs he talked about.

“No; not exactly a banker: he was a partner in a great bank. He was always awfully ashamed of the bank. He is dead, you know.”

“Ashamed of being a banker!” gasped Garnier. “What sort of man was he?”

“He was an awfully funny old fellow. I can just remember him. He scarcely ever spoke to me; he was very stiff and straight, and he used to paint his face and wear stays.”

“He was mad, then?” said Garnier.

“Not he; he was as sane as I am—saner; for I believe I am cracked. No matter, it’s not my fault; I did not make myself.”

“Paint his face and wear stays and ashamed of being a banker,” murmured Garnier. “You are not making an April fish of me? No, you can’t be, for it is the second of June.”

“No, I wish I was; but I have a lot more to tell. You know I came down here to paint and live in the Rue de Perpignan a little more than a month ago. Well, I thought I was going to be a great artist. No, worse than that: I thought I was a great artist.”

“So do we all, till we find out the right side of our palettes,” said Garnier.

“Well, I am only a dauber; don’t say no—I have been finding it out in the last week. I didn’t want that fellow Jolly to tell me; that’s what made me so angry, I suppose, for I knew he was telling me the truth. Well, I am sick of it all; the pleasure is all gone from my life. I have a lot of anxieties; it is like being in prison. When I go out on the street, even here in this quarter, where I am not likely to come across anyone, I have to be always on the watch for fear of meeting anyone I know; I always look down a street before I walk down it.”

“Ah, yes! I know that feeling. There are three streets forbidden to me just at present; they are barricaded by creditors.”

“Oh, it is not creditors I fear.”

“What then?”

“Friends.”

“Mon Dieu! what a funny man you are! What is there pleasanter to meet than a friend?”

“Yes; but don’t you understand? I don’t want my friends to know that I am an artist.”

“And, for Heaven’s sake, why not?”

“Well, for one thing, they would laugh at me.”

“Laugh at you for being an artist! Sacred Heaven! what a funny man you are, and what funny friends you must have! And why should they laugh at you for being an artist?”

“Well, you see, they don’t know anything about art, for one thing.”

“Ah, I can see those friends of yours!” said Garnier, with an inspired air. “Old religious ladies, aunts, and what not,—they drive in carriages with pug dogs,—and old gentlemen with the Legion of Honor.”

“Not at all; my friends are quite young.”

“Who are they, then?”

“Well, there is EugÈne Valfray, son of the railway man.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Then there is the Prince de Harnac—Gustave.”

“What, you know a Prince!”

“Why, man, I am a Prince.”

“You are a what?”

“I am a Prince,” said Toto shamefacedly.

“Ah, mon Dieu! what a droll you are!” cried Garnier, breaking into a laugh. “First you are a bourgeois, then you are a banker, then you are a Prince.”

“I am not joking; I am what I say.”

“But,” cried Garnier, sobered by the serious face of Toto, “you a Prince, sitting here at the Trois FrÈres with me! Come now! a joke is all very well up to a certain point; beyond that it makes one feel giddy. Besides, you are not like a Prince.”

“For Heaven’s sake, what is a Prince like?” asked Toto, half laughing, half vexed. “I have never seen a Prince that was different from anyone else; they are generally more stupid, perhaps, but that is all.”

“But what are you Prince of?” cried the painter, belief and disbelief battling in his mind.

“My father was a prince of the Roman Empire. I am the same, of course, now that he is dead.”

“But, my dear child!” cried the ProvenÇal, to whom a Prince was a Prince, no matter what empire he belonged to, “what made you come amongst us at Melmenotte’s? it is like what one reads in a romance, all this. I could not have believed it. And what made you come to live in the Rue de Perpignan? And CÉlestin! Ah, ciel! I see it all now: she is a Princess; that is what makes her different from other people. A Princess! she has made me coffee, whilst I have talked to her as to a child. I have carved for her a tulip out of a turnip, and I never guessed who she was, when it was plain before me written all over her——”

“You are wrong,” said Toto in a troubled voice. “She is not a Princess; I wish she were. Listen, my friend, and I will tell you all. I want your advice.”

He told the little story of his meeting with CÉlestin, everything; he sketched rapidly a portrait of his mother; then he paused to let the tale sink in, and Garnier rubbed his chin.

“But what made you do all this?” asked the painter at last. “You could have painted at home.”

“I don’t know; I was so sick of it all. I wanted a change, I wanted to do for myself; it seemed so jolly to have an atelier, and live in a blouse and work; then, besides—I can’t explain exactly, but I felt as if I wanted to grow: a lot of people had deceived me. They did not mean it, I suppose, but they praised my work; besides, I felt that they were laughing at me behind my back.”

He told the story of De Nani, and the truth that had escaped from him in drink; he felt no shame in confiding his troubles to Garnier. All great-minded people have this in common. They resemble priests; we confess to them openly what we would not whisper to little minds.

“Ah, well,” said Garnier, “there are rogues in every trade, and that old man is a rogue. Mon Dieu! I am not straitlaced; but there are two things I cannot stand by and see: an old man drunk, and an old man following a woman. Do not think of him, but tell me now, what does it feel like to be a Prince? Oh, I should like to be a Prince just for an hour! I would dress myself in ermine and walk down the Rue de Rivoli. Ah! you are laughing, but I would. I would call my servants and give them orders, just to hear them call me M. le Prince. I would call at Melmenotte’s, and walk about the atelier trailing my skirts. Mon Dieu! yes, I should like to be a Prince just for an hour.”

“And then?”

“Oh, I would kick off my togs and come back and be an artist. Just as you will kick off your togs and go back to be a Prince; one always returns to one’s trade.”

“You think I will go back to be a Prince?”

“Why, of course.”

“Would you advise me to?”

“Why, of course, when you are tired of your atelier you will put on your crown.”

“I have no crown,” said Toto; “but I will no doubt return and put on a tall hat. What troubles me is CÉlestin.”

“Ah! CÉlestin!”

“She does not know who I am.”

Garnier frowned slightly.

“She would not have loved me, I think, if I had told her, poor child! She has a great awe of titled people; she makes hats for them. She will never do that again, anyhow.”

“Still,” said Garnier, “you ought to have told her.”

“Why? I don’t see why.”

“You have told me, yet you would hide what I know from that angel of light. That is not as it should be. Take it as a man. How would you like Mlle. CÉlestin to deceive you? The thing is impossible, but, still——”

“Perhaps you are right; and I wish I had never met her.”

Garnier frowned again.

“You do not love her, then?”

“Oh, yes; I do. It is not that, but my mother, and all the people I know. Not that I care a button—not a button; let them all go to the devil.”

“Ah, now you speak like a man! And will you tell CÉlestin all that you have told to me?”

“I will. I will tell her this evening.”

But when evening came, and he sat alone with CÉlestin on the couch in the lamplight, and when he took her hand saying “I want to tell you something; I ought to have told it to you before,” the words dried up; he could not tell her of his position in the world; besides, he knew her inevitable answer, “What matter, so long as we love each other?” It always came when difficulties arose—if the beef was understewed or the wine sour, if the cats kept them awake or if the door of Dodor’s cage got jammed.

“CÉlestin, I ought to have told you before; but do you know that, though we live here in this atelier and are happy enough, God knows—do you know that I am—awfully poor?”

“What matter? What does anything matter, so long as we love each other?” sighed CÉlestin.

“I will tell you all about myself some day,” said Toto. “I have not told you I have a mother.”

“Ah, how I would love to see her! How happy, that is, to have a mother! As for me, I never had a mother.”

“Perhaps it is just as well you had not.”

“I will tell you,” said CÉlestin: “we will share your mother. I will take one-half of her heart, and you will have the other, like those ogres in that fairy tale of dear M. Gaillard’s.”

“Thanks,” said Toto; “you may have it all.”

CHAPTER V.
THE SHOWER.

“Dodor, we are very poor,” said CÉlestin next morning. She had taken the lark from its cage, and was holding the little warm, brown body to her breast.

Toto had gone out to slink about the streets in a miserable state of mind. He was deadly tired of his atelier—Art had pulled his ears; yet he was ashamed to go home. Besides, how about CÉlestin?

He felt like a child who had stolen a fiddle, unable to play on it, tired of it, afraid to return it, and wavering for a moment ere he throws it into the nearest ditch. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

“So,” continued CÉlestin, putting the lark back in its cage, “I am going to make some money.”

Her head was full of echoes begotten of Toto’s words last night, “I am very poor,” and plans begotten of the echoes. She had all her life been well-to-do; by some special provision of God’s, instead of her seeking work, work had always stolen to seek her fingers; the winds had blown tulle and artificial roses across her path; Mme. HÜmmel had supplied her with foundations, and art had done the rest.

So it was a new sensation to hear the wolf scratch at the door, rather fearful, yet almost pleasurable: for was not Toto with her, and so long as they loved each other what did anything matter?

She had three hats finished—four, in fact, but only three for sale. For the fourth was the one she had made that morning,—the morning of the honeymoon,—and it was not for sale. She could not think of allowing another woman to wear it, so she put it on her head, determining to wear it herself.

She had on a dress of lilac-colored nun’s cloth. She made the three hats up in a parcel, and then drew on a pair of lilac-colored gloves.

“How grand Mme. HÜmmel will think I have become!” said CÉlestin, as she departed.

Even the old Rue de Perpignan looked young this morning. It was a blissful and dreamy day; heavy showers had fallen in the early morning, leaving a perfume in the air, faint, as if from the gardens of Paradise.

She reached Verral’s in the Rue St. HonorÉ without any surprising adventure, and entered by the side door that leads to the workrooms. These lay behind the showrooms, the buzz and murmur of which penetrated the thin partitions dividing the one from the other. The atmosphere was warm and filled with that oppressive smell which comes from millinery in a mass. Size, varnish, and glue contributed their odors, whilst the air vibrated with the whir of sewing machines from the rooms above.

“Ah, the little CÉlestin!” cried Mme. HÜmmel, a stout Alsatian in black silk, and with a good-natured face.

“I sent a girl to the Rue de Babylone only last week to see if you were dead, and they said you were married. Bad child not to have told me! I was frightened. I could not sleep at night, saying to myself, ‘Where is that CÉlestin?’ So you have brought me some hats?”

She led the way to her private room, and looked at the hats, and praised them a little: for it does not do to lavish praise on employees; they are apt to wax fat on it and kick for higher prices, as Mme. HÜmmel had learnt in the course of her experience.

Then she ran away to get some money, and CÉlestin stood by the table, on which lay feathers, patterns of silk, and those pompons which, according to Gaillard, were the mainstay and support of the mysterious AngÉlique.

“This is for the work,” said Mme. HÜmmel, paying the stipulated amount, “and this is for yourself. It is a wedding gift. Poor child! are you happy?”

“Oh, very happy!” said CÉlestin, putting the napoleon just given to her for a wedding gift into her glove, and the six francs into her purse. “Happier than I can tell. How good it is of you! A whole napoleon! I never thought—I——”

“No, do not thank me. You are a good child, and I am sure you will make him happy. You must bring him to see me some Saturday. I will lecture him for you. And is he dark or fair? and what is his name?”

“He is dark, and his name is DÉsirÉ.”

“And his other name?”

“I don’t know,” said CÉlestin. “He told me once, and I have forgotten. How stupid it is of me!”

Mme. HÜmmel smothered a little laugh.

“So you do not know his surname? Mon Dieu! what a droll child you are!”

“I don’t remember it. My head will not hold names; it is like a sieve. I am very silly.” And CÉlestin, blushing and shaking the good woman by the hand, departed, whilst Madame cried after her, “Be sure and bring him some Saturday for me to lecture him,” little thinking that this young man with the forgettable surname was Toto, son of Verral’s best customer, Mme. la Princesse de Cammora.

CÉlestin walked away, so lost in her napoleon that she did not notice the clouds hurrying up from the southwest. Like everything fortunate, the napoleon was a gift from the good God. Toto was one of these gifts, or, rather, the chief of them; and as she made her way along the busy street, she cast her eyes up several times as if returning thanks through the brim of her hat to those favored angels, her guardians.

A thought had crossed her mind. She would get a money-box for Toto and save up for him, for what would happen if she were to die, and he were left like the artist in that terrible play at the Porte St. Martin? Already, in fancy, she was supporting him by her hats whilst he pursued his beautiful art to fame.

But if she were to die? Her lips trembled. Those two children of hers, Toto and Dodor! They crossed her imagination together, feckless creatures, one so like the other in character, either jumping about on their perches, or moping, irresponsible, and terribly in need of someone to tidy their cages, talk to them, and love them.

She was passing a frightful criticism on Toto, but she did not know it. Perhaps the only people who criticise us justly are the people who love us, for our perfections and imperfections are to them all one country, and of that country perhaps our imperfections are the fairest part.

Just as she reached the middle of the Place de la Concorde the clouds burst. It was like a huge shower bath, of which the string had suddenly been pulled. In a second the Madeleine and Rue Royale on one hand, and the big letters announcing the Chamber of Deputies on the other, were veiled by sheets of rain.

CÉlestin awoke suddenly from her painful, half-pleasurable reverie, to find herself drenched. She had no umbrella, and her friends the omnibuses were not near, so she ran through sheets of rain, till her hat was ruined, and then she hid in a doorway, panting, and with her hand to her breast. The shower spent itself in ten minutes, and the day smiled out again brighter than ever. So she pursued her way to the Rue de Perpignan, wet to the skin, and rejecting the idea of an omnibus because of the expense for one thing, and, besides, she was wet already, and it was safer to walk and keep warm.

When she reached the atelier she found Toto carefully drying himself at the stove. He, too, had been caught by the rain, but not so badly.

She insisted upon his taking off his coat, and whilst it was drying she talked to him and laughed to cheer him up. Then she spread the cloth on the table, for it was time for dÉjeuner, and lastly she went to the bedroom, like a prudent person, and changed her things. But the beautiful hat was ruined beyond redemption, and as she gazed at it she gave a little shiver.

That evening, when the lamp was lit, she told Toto all about Mme. HÜmmel, the selling of the hats, the gift of the napoleon, and the desire of the forewoman to see him and lecture him.

Toto listened half unconsciously. He was already revolving in his mind plans of escape from his cage. He had fixed upon Gaillard as the man of all others to help him, but he had not seen Gaillard now for four days.

As CÉlestin finished her story—she was sitting upon the floor, her head resting against Toto’s knee—a shudder ran through her, and her teeth chattered.

“Why,” cried Toto, “what is this? What makes you shiver so?”

“I don’t know,” said CÉlestin, half laughing. “I did not do it on purpose;” and again the rigor seized her, as if someone were shaking her by the shoulder. “I will go to bed,” she said, rising to her feet. “My head swims.”

“I hope she is not going to be ill,” thought the Prince to himself. “And I do wish Gaillard would come. What can have happened to him?”