CHAPTER I.
GARNIER.
The rapin of Paris is the sparrow of the artistic temple, but he is much more besides. For one thing, he is sometimes an eagle in disguise. He laughs as he paints, and plays dominoes with fantastic gravity. He is generally ugly, but he loves Beauty, and draws her in all postures, even immodest ones. Sometimes he becomes literary, and publishes a journal the size of a prayer-book, in which he has written nonsense and which lives for three months. In this way, I suppose, he takes a vague sort of revenge for all the nonsense that has been written about him.
I do not think you will find in Europe a more foul-minded person than the rapin, or a more joyous, or a more lovable, or a more pitiable. And though he is certainly the most consequential creature in the world, he is the greatest knocker-down of pedestals. Delacroix declared he could smell corruption in the air of Paris. I think he must have smelt the rapin. Yet out of this dung spring the fairest flowers of art.
Toto, forsaking his world for a space, had cast in his lot with this creation, and Célestin, like an angel made blind by love, followed him. Dodor had no voice in the matter, yet he endeavored to put it in as he swung in his cage from the nail in the wall.
“Oh!” sighed Célestin next morning as she sat beside Toto on the couch opposite the stove. “Am I on earth still, or can it be that we are in heaven?”
In one day she had become a woman without ceasing to be an angel, and Dodor sang as if to assure her of the fact, whilst Toto kissed her, and a beam of sun through the top light touched the tulip.
That was their morning, spent amidst the great flowers of the chintz-covered couch, whilst time passed over them like a butterfly with blue wings, and Paris grumbled through the top light like a jealous monster.
In the afternoon Toto, in his blouse, settled his painting things and rearranged drapery, whilst his companion, whose fingers could not be still, turned the morning, gone now forever, into a hat. She murmured to the hat as she made it, telling it of her happiness—a most adorable soliloquy lost to the world forever, for Toto was too busy to note it down. Then, when the structure was finished, she held it out on her finger-tip for admiration. It blushed there as if ashamed of its beauty and happiness. And Toto said “It is beautiful,” in an abstracted voice, for he was hunting for a palette-knife.
They dined at a little restaurant near the Palais Bourbon, and spent their evening at the Porte St. Martin Theater, where a bloody drama was enacted, which caused Célestin to weep deliciously and shiver.
This was their honeymoon, for next day work began in earnest, and Toto started for Melmenotte’s studio, a large bleak room filled with canvases and diligent students, a naked woman, large and solid and sitting on a throne, in their midst.