Houdon seized both of Cartaret’s hands and pressed them fondly.
“My friend,” said Houdon magnanimously, “we shall permit ourselves to say no more about it. What sings your sublime poet, Henri Wadsworth Longchap? ‘I shall allow the decomposed past to bury her dead.’—Or do I mistake: was it Whitman, hein?”
He gestured his way to Cartaret’s easel, much as if the air were water and he were swimming there. He praised extravagantly the picture that Cartaret now knew to be bad. Finally he began to potter about the room with a pretense of admiring the place and looking at its other canvases, but all the while conveying the feeling that he was apprising the financial status of its occupant. Cartaret saw him drawing nearer and nearer to the two canvases that, their faces toward the wall, bore the likeness of the Lady of the Rose.
“I am just going out,” said Cartaret. He hurried to his visitor and took the fellow’s arm. “I must take that picture on the easel to the rue St. André des Arts. Will you come along?”
Houdon seemed suspicious of this sudden friendliness. He cast a curious glance at the canvases he had been about to examine, but his choice was obviously Hobson’s.
“Gladly,” he flourished. “To my cher ami Fourget, is it? But I know him well. Perhaps my influence may assist you.”
“Perhaps,” said Cartaret. He doubted it, but he hoped that something would assist him.
He held the picture, still wet of course, exposed for all the world of the Quarter to see, hurried Houdon past the landing and could have sworn that the composer’s eyes lingered at the sacred door.
“But it is an infamy,” said Houdon, when they had walked as far down the Boul’ Miche’ as the Musée Cluny—“it is an infamy to sell at once such a superb work to such a little cow of a dealer. Why then?”
“Because I must,” said Cartaret.