“Really, you know,” he said to Florent, as they came away, “all that you have been saying inside there doesn’t interest me in the least.  It may be very clever, but, for my own part, I see nothing in it.  Still, you’ve got a splendid fellow there, that blessed Robine.  He’s as deep as a well.  I’ll come with you again some other time, but it won’t be for politics.  I shall make sketches of Logre and Gavard, so as to put them with Robine in a picture which I was thinking about while you were discussing the question of—­what do you call it? eh?  Oh, the question of the two Chambers.  Just fancy, now, a picture of Gavard and Logre and Robine talking politics, entrenched behind their glasses of beer!  It would be the success of the Salon, my dear fellow, an overwhelming success, a genuine modern picture!”

Florent was grieved by the artist’s political scepticism; so he took him up to his bedroom, and kept him on the narrow balcony in front of the bluish mass of the markets, till two o’clock in the morning, lecturing him, and telling him that he was no man to show himself so indifferent to the happiness of his country.

“Well, you’re perhaps right,” replied Claude, shaking his head; “I’m an egotist.  I can’t even say that I paint for the good of my country; for, in the first place, my sketches frighten everybody, and then, when I’m busy painting, I think about nothing but the pleasure I take in it.  When I’m painting, it is as though I were tickling myself; it makes me laugh all over my body.  Well, I can’t help it, you know; it’s my nature to be like that; and you can’t expect me to go and drown myself in consequence.  Besides, France can get on very well without me, as my aunt Lisa says.  And—­may I be quite frank with you?—­if I like you it’s because you seem to me to follow politics just as I follow painting.  You titillate yourself, my good friend.”

Then, as Florent protested, he continued: 

“Yes, yes; you are an artist in your own way; you dream of politics, and I’ll wager you spend hours here at night gazing at the stars and imagining they are the voting-papers of infinity.  And then you titillate yourself with your ideas of truth and justice; and this is so evidently the case that those ideas of yours cause just as much alarm to commonplace middle-class folks as my sketches do.  Between ourselves, now, do you imagine that if you were Robine I should take any pleasure in your friendship?  Ah, no, my friend, you are a great poet!”

Then he began to joke on the subject, saying that politics caused him no trouble, and that he had got accustomed to hear people discussing them in beer shops and studios.  This led him to speak of a cafe in the Rue Vauvilliers; the cafe on the ground-floor of the house where La Sarriette lodged.  This smoky place, with its torn, velvet-cushioned seats, and marble table-tops discoloured by the drippings from coffee-cups, was the chief resort of the young people of the markets.  Monsieur Jules reigned