This was but their second meeting.  They had found themselves together once before in that same room.  Charles Santerre, already famous as a novelist, a young master popular in Parisian drawing-rooms, had a fine brow, caressing brown eyes, and a large red mouth which his moustache and beard, cut in the Assyrian style and carefully curled, helped to conceal.  He had made his way, thanks to women, whose society he sought under pretext of studying them, but whom he was resolved to use as instruments of fortune.  As a matter of calculation and principle he had remained a bachelor and generally installed himself in the nests of others.  In literature feminine frailty was his stock subject he had made it his specialty to depict scenes of guilty love amid elegant, refined surroundings.  At first he had no illusions as to the literary value of his works; he had simply chosen, in a deliberate way, what he deemed to be a pleasant and lucrative trade.  But, duped by his successes, he had allowed pride to persuade him that he was really a writer.  And nowadays he posed as the painter of an expiring society, professing the greatest pessimism, and basing a new religion on the annihilation of human passion, which annihilation would insure the final happiness of the world.

“Seguin will be here in a moment,” he resumed in an amiable way.  “It occurred to me to take him and his wife to dine at a restaurant this evening, before going to a certain first performance where there will probably be some fisticuffs and a rumpus to-night.”

Mathieu then for the first time noticed that Santerre was in evening dress.  They continued chatting for a moment, and the novelist called attention to a new pewter treasure among Seguin’s collection.  It represented a long, thin woman, stretched full-length, with her hair streaming around her.  She seemed to be sobbing as she lay there, and Santerre declared the conception to be a masterpiece.  The figure symbolized the end of woman, reduced to despair and solitude when man should finally have made up his mind to have nothing further to do with her.  It was the novelist who, in literary and artistic matters, helped on the insanity which was gradually springing up in the Seguins’ home.

However, Seguin himself now made his appearance.  He was of the same age as Santerre, but was taller and slimmer, with fair hair, an aquiline nose, gray eyes, and thin lips shaded by a slight moustache.  He also was in evening dress.

“Ah! well, my dear fellow,” said he with the slight lisp which he affected, “Valentine is determined to put on a new gown.  So we must be patient; we shall have an hour to wait.”

Then, on catching sight of Mathieu, he began to apologize, evincing much politeness and striving to accentuate his air of frigid distinction.  When the young man, whom he called his amiable tenant, had acquainted him with the motive of his visit—­the leak in the zinc roof of the little pavilion at Janville—­he at once consented to let the local plumber do any necessary soldering.  But when, after fresh explanations, he understood that the roofing was so worn and damaged that it required to be changed entirely, he suddenly departed from his lofty affability and began to protest, declaring that he could not possibly expend in such repairs a sum which would exceed the whole annual rental of six hundred francs.