idling at present.'

He spoke the truth. Since the three inseparables had realised their
dream of meeting together in Paris, which they were bent upon
conquering, their life had been terribly hard. They had tried to renew
the long walks of old. On certain Sunday mornings they had started on
foot from the Fontainebleau gate, had scoured the copses of Verrieres,
gone as far as the Bievre, crossed the woods of Meudon and Bellevue,
and returned home by way of Grenelle. But they taxed Paris with
spoiling their legs; they scarcely ever left the pavement now,
entirely taken up as they were with their struggle for fortune and
fame.

From Monday morning till Saturday night Sandoz sat fuming and fretting
at the municipal building of the fifth Arrondissement in a dark corner
of the registry office for births, rooted to his stool by the thought
of his mother, whom his salary of a hundred and fifty francs a month
helped in some fashion to keep. Dubuche, anxious to pay his parents
the interest of the money placed on his head, was ever on the look-out
for some petty jobs among architects, outside his studies at the
School of Arts. As for Claude, thanks to his thousand francs a year,
he had his full liberty; but the latter days of each month were
terrible enough, especially if he had to share the fag-end of his
allowance. Luckily he was beginning to sell a little; disposing of
tiny canvases, at the rate of ten and twelve francs a-piece, to Papa
Malgras, a wary picture dealer. After all, he preferred starvation to
turning his art into mere commerce by manufacturing portraits of
tradesmen and their wives; concocting conventional religious pictures
or daubing blinds for restaurants or sign-boards for accoucheuses.
When first he had returned to Paris, he had rented a very large studio