“I don’t want to sell it.”
“Poof! We shall not haggle. Tell Fourget what you had thought of asking. Do not be modest. Tell me—and I will give you half.”
He kept it up as long as he could; he tried at last to buy the least of the preliminary sketches of the Rose-Lady; he offered what, to Cartaret, were dazzling prices; but Cartaret was not to be shaken: these experiments were not for sale.
Fourget was first disappointed, then puzzled. His enthusiasm had been genuine; but could it be possible that Dieudonné was mistaken? Was Cartaret not starving? The old man was beginning to button his coat when a new idea struck him.
“Who was your model?” he asked abruptly.
“I—I had none,” Cartaret stammered.
“Ah!”—Fourget peered hard at him through those glistening spectacles. “You painted them from memory?”
“Yes.” Cartaret felt his face redden. “From imagination, I mean.”
Then Fourget understood. Perhaps he had merely the typical Frenchman’s love of romance, which ceases only with the typical Frenchman’s life; or perhaps he remembered his own youth in Besançon, when he, too, had wanted to be an artist and when, among the vines on the hillside, little Rosalie smiled at him and kissed his ambition away—little Rosalie Poullot, dust and ashes these twenty years in the Cimetière du Mont Parnasse....
He turned to a pile of pot-boilers. He took one almost at random.