work? Still shaking, he relapsed into silence, and stared at the
canvas with an ardent fixed gaze that blazed with all the horrible
agony born of his powerlessness. He could no longer produce anything
clear or life-like; the woman's breast was growing pasty with heavy
colouring; that flesh which, in his fancy, ought to have glowed, was
simply becoming grimy; he could not even succeed in getting a correct
focus. What on earth was the matter with his brain that he heard it
bursting asunder, as it were, amidst his vain efforts? Was he losing
his sight that he was no longer able to see correctly? Were his hands
no longer his own that they refused to obey him? And thus he went on
winding himself up, irritated by the strange hereditary lesion which
sometimes so greatly assisted his creative powers, but at others
reduced him to a state of sterile despair, such as to make him forget
the first elements of drawing. Ah, to feel giddy with vertiginous
nausea, and yet to remain there full of a furious passion to create,
when the power to do so fled with everything else, when everything
seemed to founder around him--the pride of work, the dreamt-of glory,
the whole of his existence!

'Look here, old boy,' said Sandoz at last, 'we don't want to worry
you, but it's half-past six, and we are starving. Be reasonable, and
come down with us.'

Claude was cleaning a corner of his palette. Then he emptied some more
tubes on it, and, in a voice like thunder, replied with one single
word, 'No.'

For the next ten minutes nobody spoke; the painter, beside himself,
wrestled with his picture, whilst his friends remained anxious at this
attack, which they did not know how to allay. Then, as there came a