knife. From that moment, having become a rustic genius, an embryo
great man for this local connoisseur, who happened to be a member of
the museum committee, he had been helped by him, adulated and driven
crazy with hopes; but he had successively failed in everything--his
studies and competitions--thus missing the town's purse. Nevertheless,
he had started for Paris, after worrying his father, a wretched
peasant, into premature payment of his heritage, a thousand francs, on
which he reckoned to live for a twelvemonth while awaiting the
promised victory. The thousand francs had lasted eighteen months.
Then, as he had only twenty francs left, he had taken up his quarters
with his friend, Mahoudeau. They both slept in the same bed, in the
dark back shop; they both in turn cut slices from the same loaves of
bread--of which they bought sufficient for a fortnight at a time, so
that it might get very hard, and that they might thus be able to eat
but little of it.

'I say, Chaine,' continued Sandoz, 'your stove is really very exact.'

Chaine, without answering, gave a chuckle of triumph which lighted up
his face like a sunbeam. By a crowning stroke of imbecility, and to
make his misfortunes perfect, his protector's advice had thrown him
into painting, in spite of the real taste that he showed for wood
carving. And he painted like a whitewasher, mixing his colours as a
hodman mixes his mortar, and managing to make the clearest and
brightest of them quite muddy. His triumph consisted, however, in
combining exactness with awkwardness; he displayed all the naive
minuteness of the primitive painters; in fact, his mind, barely raised
from the clods, delighted in petty details. The stove, with its
perspective all awry, was tame and precise, and in colour as dingy as
mire.