Fortunately his apartment was easy to heat. It consisted simply of a
hall, a tiny sitting-room, a minute bedroom, and a large enough
bathroom. It was on the fifth floor, facing a sufficiently airy court.
Rent, eight hundred francs.

It was furnished without luxury. The little sitting-room Durtal had
converted into a study, hiding the walls behind black wood bookcases
crammed with books. In front of the window were a great table, a leather
armchair, and a few straight chairs. He had removed the glass from the
mantelpiece, and in the panel, just over the mantelshelf, which was
covered with an old fabric, he had nailed an antique painting on wood,
representing a hermit kneeling beside a cardinal's hat and purple cloak,
beneath a hut of boughs. The colours of the landscape background had
faded, the blues to grey, the whites to russet, the greens to black, and
time had darkened the shadows to a burnt-onion hue. Along the edges of
the picture, almost against the black oak frame, a continuous narrative
unfolded in unintelligible episodes, intruding one upon the other,
portraying Lilliputian figures, in houses of dwarfs. Here the Saint,
whose name Durtal had sought in vain, crossed a curly, wooden sea in a
sailboat; there he marched through a village as big as a fingernail;
then he disappeared into the shadows of the painting and was discovered
higher up in a grotto in the Orient, surrounded by dromedaries and
bales of merchandise; again he was lost from sight, and after another
game of hide-and-seek he emerged, smaller than ever, quite alone, with a
staff in his hand and a knapsack on his back, mounting toward a strange,
unfinished cathedral.

It was a picture by an unknown painter, an old Dutchman, who had perhaps
visited certain of the Italian masters, for he had appropriated colours