“Oh come,” said Durtal, discouraged, looking at his watch, “I’ve simply got to get up and go to work on Gilles de Rais,” and with a bound he sprang into his trousers.  The cat, rising suddenly, galloped across the counterpane and rolled itself up into the warm covers, without waiting an instant longer.

“How cold it is!” and Durtal slipped on a knit jacket and went into the other room to start a fire.  “I shall freeze!” he murmured.

Fortunately his apartment was easy to heat.  It consisted simply of a hall, a tiny sitting-room, a minute bedroom, and a large enough bathroom.  It was on the fifth floor, facing a sufficiently airy court.  Rent, eight hundred francs.

It was furnished without luxury.  The little sitting-room Durtal had converted into a study, hiding the walls behind black wood bookcases crammed with books.  In front of the window were a great table, a leather armchair, and a few straight chairs.  He had removed the glass from the mantelpiece, and in the panel, just over the mantelshelf, which was covered with an old fabric, he had nailed an antique painting on wood, representing a hermit kneeling beside a cardinal’s hat and purple cloak, beneath a hut of boughs.  The colours of the landscape background had faded, the blues to grey, the whites to russet, the greens to black, and time had darkened the shadows to a burnt-onion hue.  Along the edges of the picture, almost against the black oak frame, a continuous narrative unfolded in unintelligible episodes, intruding one upon the other, portraying Lilliputian figures, in houses of dwarfs.  Here the Saint, whose name Durtal had sought in vain, crossed a curly, wooden sea in a sailboat; there he marched through a village as big as a fingernail; then he disappeared into the shadows of the painting and was discovered higher up in a grotto in the Orient, surrounded by dromedaries and bales of merchandise; again he was lost from sight, and after another game of hide-and-seek he emerged, smaller than ever, quite alone, with a staff in his hand and a knapsack on his back, mounting toward a strange, unfinished cathedral.

It was a picture by an unknown painter, an old Dutchman, who had perhaps visited certain of the Italian masters, for he had appropriated colours and processes peculiar to them.

The bedroom contained a big bed, a chest of drawers waist-high, and some easy chairs.  On the mantel were an antique clock and copper candlesticks.  On the wall there was a fine photograph of a Botticelli in the Berlin museum, representing a plump and penitent Virgin who was like a housewife in tears.  She was surrounded by gentleman-, lady-, and little-boy-angels.  The languishing young men held spliced wax tapers that were like bits of rope; the coquettish hoydens had flowers stuck in their long hair; and the mischievous cherub-pages looked rapturously at the infant Jesus, who stood beside the Virgin and held out his hands in benediction.