The painter began to jump about, cracking his fingers.
"Well, monseigneur, I have found out a way."
Then he went more calmly:
"Have you got five francs about you?"
M. Saval replied:
"Why, yes."
The artist said:
"Well! you'll go and buy for me five francs' worth of wax candles while I go and see the cooper."
And he pushed the notary in his evening coat into the street. At the end of five minutes, they had returned one of them with the wax candles, and the other with the hoop of a cask. Then Romantin plunged his hand into a cupboard, and drew forth twenty empty bottles, which he fixed in the form of a crown around the hoop.
He then came down, and went to borrow a ladder from the door-keeper, after having explained that he had obtained the favors of the old woman by painting the portrait of her cat exhibited on the easel.