“Oh, the middle of the day!” cried Toto in a voice of tragedy as he took the poet’s arm half an hour later and lounged out of the café. “What a frightful institution it is! I would like to be born into a world where the days had no middles.”
“You are right; it is a most inartistic flaw in the scheme of things. The night has no such blunder; that is why I love it. The night always reminds me of the exquisite masterpiece of some forgotten painter in the gallery of some bourgeois millionaire. Every twelve hours we slip into the exquisite poem of darkness, and then out again into this villainous prose. Pah! if I had the key of the meter that feeds our great chandelier, men would have a three-hours’ day; it is quite long enough.”
“Quite. I am going to look at my new rooms; will you come? We will take a cab.”
They drove to the Rue de Perpignan; it was a long street situated in what remains of the Latin Quarter. Gaillard shivered at the everyday appearance of the place. He had never been in it before; the name, floating loose in his head, had attached itself to the name of Fanfoullard; he wished now that he had never imagined the fan-painter.
“It is a great way from everywhere, do you not think, Désiré? Why put the Seine between one’s self and civilization? One can hide one’s self just as easily a hundred yards from the Rue St. Honoré as a hundred miles.”
Toto made no answer, but led the way upstairs.
The atelier was certainly large enough; men were at work settling the stove; another man was mending the top light. The place was almost studiously bare; a tulip in the bud in a red-tile pot stood on a table; an old guitar hung on the wall; there was a throne and drapery, an easel, or, at least, three. Some of these things had belonged to the last tenant. The tulip in the pot had, however, only just arrived. It suited the surroundings, which were those of an ordinary atelier; yet there was something about the place suggestive of a scene in a theater. Perhaps it was the guitar. But one felt the hand of Henri Murger over it all.
“This,” said Toto, touching a nail in the wall, “is for Dodor’s cage.”
Gaillard’s heel struck against the handle of a little frying-pan that protruded from a bundle.
“We will have our meals sent in, but it is useful sometimes to be able to cook at home—sausages and things. You must come and teach us how to make coffee.”