‘The most surprising thing is that her trunk wasn’t hurt!’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Christine, in amazement.
‘Why, Mahoudeau’s girl,’ he answered.
At this she shook nervously, turned and buried her face in the pillow; and he was quite surprised on hearing her burst into sobs.
‘What! you are crying?’ he exclaimed.
She was choking, sobbing with heart-rending violence.
‘Come, what’s the matter with you?—I’ve said nothing to you. Come, darling, what’s the matter?’
But, while he was speaking, the cause of her great grief dawned upon him. No doubt, on a day like that, he ought to have shown more affection; but his neglect was unintentional enough; he had not even given the matter a thought. She surely knew him, said he; he became a downright brute when he was at work. Then he bent over and embraced her. But it was as if something irreparable had taken place, as if something had for ever snapped, leaving a void between them. The formality of marriage seemed to have killed love.
IX
AS Claude could not paint his huge picture in the small studio of the Rue de Douai, he made up his mind to rent some shed that would be spacious enough, elsewhere; and strolling one day on the heights of Montmartre, he found what he wanted half way down the slope of the Rue Tourlaque, a street that descends abruptly behind the cemetery, and whence one overlooks Clichy as far as the marshes of Gennevilliers. It had been a dyer’s drying shed, and was nearly fifty feet long and more than thirty broad, with walls of board and plaster admitting the wind from every point of the compass. The place was let to him for three hundred francs. Summer was at hand; he would soon work off his picture and then quit.