As soon as Teresa had removed the tablecloth my eyes went to a bulky volume, The Brothers Karamasov, and, determined to break the back of the story, I threw myself into an armchair, saying: If I read fifty pages every evening I shall soon get through it. And I read on and on through the fifty pages that my conscience had stipulated for, and might have read to a hundred if the endless corridors down which I had been wandering and the great halls through which I had passed had not suddenly seemed to dissolve into vapour. A talent, I said, that appeals to the young men of today. The pigmy admires the giant, however loosely his frame may be put together, and our young writers lift their pale etiolated faces to Dostoievsky. We've had enough of art, is their cry, give us Nature, and this book fulfils all their aspirations. It is impersonal and vague as Nature, I said, returning to the consideration of the book, finding myself obliged to admit that I could detect a dribble of outline in Aloysha, as much as may be detected in the ikons on the walls. A man of genius without doubt, on a different plane from our miserable writers of fiction, but inferior to his own countrymen, to one at least, Turgenev, and on the whole inferior to Balzac. Some rough spots there may be in Balzac, some rocks, but rocks are better than marsh, and my thoughts went to the philosophical studies, to Louis Lambert, Seraphita, Jesus Christ in Flanders. These books affected me times past, but to read them again would be to run the risk of a great disillusion. So why read them? As I took a cigar from the box my thought returned to Paris, and I remembered that in about a year I had begun to pine for London, for the English language, English food, for my mother's house in Alfred Place. Close by it I had rented a studio, in Cromwell Mews, and Millais used to come to see me there, and Jim of course came and talked to me of his compositions; but his influence was a declining one, for in London Lewis was always by me in spirit controlling me, exciting in me a desire to be loved for myself, prompting the conviction that for a young man to go to Cremorne Gardens or the Argyle Rooms, armed with a couple of sovereigns, was merely to procure for himself a sensual gratification hardly on a higher level than that which schoolboys indulge in. But if he go there with only a few cab fares in his pocket he will be obliged to reconsider himself physically, and those negligences in dress which were the despair of his parents will vanish, his boots will begin to improve in shape and quality, a pin will appear in his necktie, or maybe he will wear his scarf in a ring, his shoulders will take a finer turn, and his head will be upreared above them proudly. And if he would be loved for himself he must cultivate an interesting attitude of mind, he must be able to slough himself at will (his outer skin, I should have said), and take part in wider humanity, in dreams, hopes, aspirations and ideals not strictly his own, only his through sympathy with the lives of others.

The only one who knew me in the days of the Cremorne and Argyle Rooms is dear Edward, and it always interests me to hear him say that I began myself out of nothing, developing from the mere sponge to the vertebrate and upward. I should have liked another simile, for Nature has never interested me as much as Art, perhaps I should never have paid any attention to Nature if it hadn't been for Art. I would have preferred Edward to have said that I was at once the sculptor and the block of marble of my own destiny, and that every failure to win a mistress in the Cremorne Gardens was a chipping away of the vague material that concealed the statue. But the simile would perhaps not have been so correct, for to say that a man is at once the sculptor and the block of marble means that he is a conscious artist, and I was not that in those days; I worked unconsciously. Yes, Edward is right; I developed upward from the sponge, returning to Paris about eighteen months later a sort of minor Lewis, having not only imbibed a good deal of his mind, but even fashioned myself so closely to his likeness that Julian, who caught sight of me on the boulevard soon after my return, thought for a moment that I was Lewis.

On arriving at the Gare du Nord, the first thing to do was to find Lewis, for without him the evening would never wear away; but the concierge told me that Monsieur Hawkins had left, and that he did not know his present address.... Julian took his coffee every evening at the Café Vivienne, but never came before eight; I waited till half past, and then bethought myself of Alphonsine's. Monsieur Hawkins and Madame Alice had not dined there for some weeks. Alphonsine did not know their address; the dinner seemed worse than usual, and the chatter of the women more tedious. At last somebody said that she thought Marie Pellegrin knew Madame Alice's address, but Marie was not at Alphonsine's that evening.... She came in, however, a little later, and told me that Madame Alice was living in the Rue Duphot, No 14, an appartement au rez-de-chaussée, and away I went. Madame was at home, but she had a gentleman dining with her.

Monsieur Hawkins.

Yes, the servant answered timidly, and I burst in.

Lewis was glad to see me, and Alice welcomed me with hard empty laughter. Was she glad to see me back again? Or did she fear that painting would distract Lewis's attention from her? However this may be, she welcomed me, and was certainly pleased at my admiration of the fine suite of apartments that I found her in. Yes, I have been going ahead, she said, leading me through the windows into a strip of garden where tall trees were trained up a high wall. She liked my question, Who is the fellow who pays for all this? and I heard the name of Phillipar for the first time, a great name it was then in the Parisian financial world. After going bankrupt for a dozen millions or more, he bought an island in the Mediterranean, and it was he or one of his associates that kept Alice, never coming to see her oftener than once a week, and then only in the afternoon.

So when you hear the servant whisper, Monsieur est ici, you'll just skip round to the café and wait.

And I shall find Lewis there, I added.

The remark did not please him, for he was trying to carry off the life he was leading with great airs; and when I went to him a few days after, seriously alarmed for his artistic future, saying that I had heard in the studio that he had not been there for months, he answered that I had a fixed income, but he had only four hundred francs a month from his mother, and it was not easy to abstract Julian's fees, one hundred francs a month, from four. He had counted upon selling the landscape which we were looking at—a flowering glade in the woods of Ville d'Avray; but the customer had been called away to South America suddenly. He would come back, but in the meantime.... The picture was not finished; he would like to have done some more to it, but he was so hard up he could not afford the train fare; and my heart melting at the thought of so much genius wasted for the sake of a train fare, I went away with him to Ville d'Avray, and we found motives and painters in the woods, and strayed under flowering boughs, and returned with two pictures in time for dinner in the Rue Duphot, and a great deal of art talk that was continued during and after dinner till Alice said:

You two have been away all day in the woods, and have no doubt had a very pleasant time, but where do I come in? you come back here merely to talk painting, and she flounced out of the room, leaving us wondering at her ill temper and how long she would remain away. She appeared in the doorway ten minutes after, and turning on her heel, said, I don't know what you two are going to do; I am going to the Bois. And you, Lewis, what are you going to do? I asked, and as Lewis did not dare tell her that he would prefer to spend the evening lounging in her drawing-room, we had to accompany her to the Cascade and sit with her in the café till midnight watching the celebrated courtesans arriving and departing in their carriages. So-and-so is now with So-and-so; he gives her a hundred thousand francs a year et elle le trompe tout le temps avec le petit chose. She was interested in these details, and not unnaturally, for she was now very nearly in the front rank, and to keep her there we had to take her out every evening. If we did not go to a theatre we went to a music-hall; the Folies Bergères was coming into fashion at that time, and we were often there till it was time to go to the Mabile. A tedious place of amusement the Mabile always was to my thinking, and the dinner that had cost over eighty francs, and the box at the Folies Bergères which had broken into a second hundred-franc note, did not cause me as many pangs of conscience as the five-franc entrance-fee. Ladies entered the Mabile free, and Alice sometimes paid for Lewis, but very often before she had time to slip five francs into his hand some friends engaged her in conversation, and then he would beseech me to lend him the money, and it angered me to see him fling the coin down with the air of un grand seigneur. Half an hour is the longest time that anybody remains in the garden, and as we walked round the estrade in silence, I often thought of my poor Ballintubber tenants.

I wonder how much longer Alice intends to keep me waiting?

Sometimes she joined us, sometimes she went away with her aristocratic connections, and as we walked home Lewis would rail against her, swearing that he would never see her again, turning a deaf ear to my pleading. Now it amused me to plead for her, and to soothe him I agreed that she should not have left his arm as abruptly as she had done; but her position was a difficult one, torn between love and necessity. He would answer that he wasn't going to be made a fool of before all Paris, and it delighted me to see him put on the grand air, though if I had been Alice's amant de coeur I should like to have been treated frankly as a ponce, one that has to make way for the miché qui happe le pot, as in Villon's ballade. To be an amant de coeur as Lewis was, en cachette, would have filled me with shame, my instinct being always to be ashamed of nothing but to be ashamed, and it was from the day that Lewis confessed himself ashamed of the rôle he was playing that he lost caste in my eyes. I began to catch myself wondering how it was that he did not scruple about wasting all his life with Alice; he seemed to have abandoned painting altogether, and it was with some unwillingness that I followed them one night to a masked ball dressed in the fantastic costume of Valentine in Le Petit Faust. Was it at Perren's I met la belle Hollandaise? I think it was at Perren's, the great cours de danse, where on week-days young girls from the Faubourg St Germain learnt their first steps, and on Sunday nights all the demi-mondaines assembled—Léonie Leblanc, Cora Pearl, Blanche d'Antigny, Margaret Byron, Hortense Schneider, Julia Baron, and how many others? It was at Perren's that I met her, and not at the commoner bal in the Rue Vivienne; she was sitting by Cora Pearl watching me, attracted no doubt at first by the red and yellow tights that I wore, and recognising in her eyes a quiet look of invitation, I summoned up all my courage and crossed the ballroom to inquire if she would dance with me; which she did, passing into my arms with a delightful motion, making me feel her presence without any vulgar thrusting of her body upon me. The music ceased, and she said: You're with friends? Then my heart misgave me, and I answered: Would you like to be introduced? She said she would, and it was plain that Alice was jealous of my new friend; like myself, she believed that it could not be me, but Lewis, that she sought; but as soon as she was assured that this was not so, her attitude toward la belle Hollandaise became friendlier, and we four at the close of the bal drove to a fashionable restaurant, and afterward to the Rue Duphot, Alice proposing a grand bivouac, for she did not care to sleep in her bed while her guests slept upon the floor. But we would not accept her bed; and my heart again misgave me, thinking that the evening, like many an evening before, would prove platonic ... for me. As if reading my thought la belle Hollandaise asked me at what moment in the evening I had begun to love her.

When you kissed me.

But I haven't kissed you at all yet, she said. Wait a little while. And leaning her cheek against mine, she whispered strange incomprehensible things in a low, quiet voice that drove me mad, her eyes, curious and enigmatic, fixed on me, her pointed face lifted to mine, her chin enticing, and her soft brown hair brushing my cheek. I can recall the sweet moment when she drew her bracelets from her wrists. But cannot call to mind any part of her undressing, only that she was always beside me, curled serpent-like, a serpent of old Nile, for a woman can coil like one, and during the night I often cried out in terror, awakening Lewis and Alice, who lay asleep in the rich imperial bed.... She must have kissed me in the morning and gone to Alice's bathroom and dressed and done her hair, but I remember none of these things, only that we once stood before a large picture by Diaz in her house in the Avenue Victor Hugo. In those days I prefaced my love affairs with a copy of Mademoiselle de Maupin; I held one in my hand with a famous passage marked for her to read, and can still hear her telling me that she had been offered three hundred thousand francs to go to Russia. But if you go I shall never see you again. I don't know whether I shall go or not. I don't know what's going to happen to me, were the last words of la belle Hollandaise, the last words she addressed to me, and if I relate the incident of our meeting it is because we never forget her who reveals sensuality to us. She is now as old as the fair helm-maker, but on that memorable night Alice and Lewis seemed perfunctory lovers. A few evenings later he offered Alice to me, for they had outlived their love for each other, and were now seeking to maintain it in excess and orgy. Her face wore an odd smile when he proposed her to me, so the thought may have come to her rather than to him, the instinct of every woman being to turn to him who has witnessed her love as soon as she wearies of her lover. So if she had begun to weary of her lover about this time, we may acquit her of any deep plan to involve me in a quarrel with my cousin when on my coming to invite her out to dinner, she answered that she would dine with me, but she was not yet dressed and I should have to wait in the drawing-room till she had had her bath, unless indeed I did not mind following her into the cabinet de toilette—a proposal gladly accepted, for I did not doubt that I should discover in her a more beautiful model than any that had posed in Julian's studio, even if her breasts were too large for a nymph's. On stepping out of her bath she dried herself in many picturesque attitudes whilst we talked of her perfections, the length of her leg from the ankle to the knee, and the spring of her hips. But of love not a word was spoken, for I was not certain that Lewis might not have hidden himself behind a curtain between the tester and the ceiling unbeknown to her.

She would not believe me at first, he said three months later, after telling me that he had left Alice for good; she would not believe me at first, and all she could find to say to persuade me to remain was: You couldn't leave such a pretty pair of breasts! Soon after, I heard from him that the rupture was confirmed by Alice herself, who had passed him in her carriage in the Champs Élysées. She had looked the other way, and there was such scorn in her face that he had vowed he would prove to her that in losing her he had not lost everything. A few days after, he introduced me to a pretty blonde Swede, a woman who was well thought of, but with hardly a tithe of Alice's reputation. I never heard from Lewis why he left her, but one day a carriage drew up by the pavement on which I was walking. The glass was let down, and the Swede told me that she had been obliged to send Lewis away because she found a voiture de remise indispensable.

Les voitures de remise et les amants de coeur sont la ruine des femmes, she said; comme combinaison, c'est aux pommes. And the wisdom of this second-rate light-o'-love, begotten no doubt of many experiences, called my thoughts back to Alice, who, since she had thrown out her amant de coeur, was rapidly becoming one of the celebrated demi-mondaines in Paris. Whilst she went up in the world Lewis sank lower, attaching himself to women who could barely afford him three hundred francs a month, the price of a grisette in the Quartier Latin; the occasional bank-note that his mother used to send him she could afford no longer; his sister was a great expense, and he came to me one day to tell me that he had decided to earn his own living.

Vanderkirko, you know whom I mean, he said, has a small china factory, and he has agreed to take me as an apprentice. I am going to live with him in the Avenue d'Italie près de la barrière.

But you'll see nobody. You'll be exiled.

I am weary of the life I have been leading; and you'll come and see me sometimes, though it is a long way off.

I'll come every Sunday, I answered, and a few Sundays later I found him and Vanderkirko building a wall.

So you've come at last! and he took me into the house and showed me some of his first attempts at painting china, and interested me in the manufacture, in la cuisson au petit et au grand feu.

Vanderkirko was an ex-Communist, and Lewis told me how a door had opened at the last moment when the Government troops were at his heels. He had rushed through it, and through the house, and he was now married et très rangé, and that was why he had refused my invitation to dine and to go to Constant's afterwards. Lewis advised me that the restaurants in the quarter n'étaient pas trop fameux, but we could get some simple food au coin de la rue de la Gaieté, and afterwards at Constant's he would introduce me to some very dangerous criminals, and he talked to me of the thieves he knew and the robberies they planned and were planning; he talked to me about their mistresses, exciting my imagination, for their nicknames were odd and picturesque. If he be not the lover of a great demi-mondaine, he likes to live among thieves and ponces, I thought; one extreme or the other of society for him. A somewhat unreal person. But, why is one person more unreal than another? I asked myself, deciding that a man without a point of view always conveys the impression of unreality. The long street that we used to walk up together rose in my vision, and Lewis growing more confidential from lamp-post to lamp-post, telling me that it was not idleness, as I supposed, that had kept him out of Julian's studio, nor was it because he had no money to pay the fees—Julian would have let him work for nothing—but he could not accept favours from Julian. The tone of his voice in which he said this surprised me, and then becoming still more confidential, he said that he could not go to Julian's studio because his sister was Julian's mistress. I don't know why I should have been so surprised, but I was surprised that such a thing should have happened and that he should have told me; and, very much concerned, I begged of him to tell me how it had all come about. Apparently in the simplest way. He had introduced her to Julian, and—my memory has dropped a stitch, something and something. He had called at her hotel, and the concierge had told him that Madame had gone away to the country, and the next time they met he asked her where she had been; she answered that she had been to the country with Julian. But you didn't come back that night. Where did you sleep? With Fatty, she had answered coolly. He did not think it right, and he did not think it wrong, that his sister should live as it pleased her; he was always un peu veule de nature, without a point of view; and returning from the coal-box, for the fire had sunk very low, I picked up the thread of my thoughts again. He had told me that it was on account of debts he had given up work at the studio, and I remembered that he had confessed to owing Renouf one hundred francs; Julian had lent him fifty, he had had a bit off Chadwick, he had borrowed from Julian's bonne, and it was this last debt that had convinced him that sooner or later he would have to earn his own living. And my heart warmed once more toward this handsome fellow who could take the rough with the smooth, and was as light-hearted in the Avenue d'Italie as in the Rue Duphot, and I praised him to Julian as we drank our coffee at the corner table, until one night, after listening in silence, Julian asked if it had not occurred to me that in losing Lewis Art had suffered a great loss. Lewis's defection from the studio had never struck me in quite so serious a light before, and I asked Julian if he thought that a great genius was being wasted at the Barrière d'Italie. As if he did not hear me, Julian said that casual loans of money were no use, and that it would be better for me not to see Lewis any more unless I could do something definite for him.

Why shouldn't you invite him to live with you for a year, eighteen months?—two years will be sufficient.

But I live in the Hôtel de Russie.

The proper thing for you to do is to take an appartement give him a room and let him be certain of his breakfast and his dinner, and pay for his washing. His mother will send him a little pocket-money, and he can work at my studio.

But the studio fees?

Of course I couldn't take your money.

Julian had caught me, and feeling that I lacked courage to say No, and bear the blame of allowing a great genius to wither unknown down by the Barrière d'Italie, I wrote to Lewis telling him of Julian's proposal to me, and next day he came up to thank me and to assure me that he would try to justify the confidence that we placed in him. He did not give me time to consider the wisdom of the sacrifice I was making, and very wisely, but set out at once to find an appartement that would suit us, coming next day to me with the joyful tidings that he had seen one in the Passage des Panoramas in the Galerie Feydeau. But I don't think I could live in the Passage des Panoramas, and I begged him to look out for another appartement.

But this one is on the first floor, he urged; we shan't have to go up many stairs, and we shall only have to run round the galleries to Julian's studio. That will save us getting up half an hour earlier in the morning and walking through the wet streets. We shall never see the sky nor feel the wind blowing, and I looked up at the glass roofing through which trickled a dim sordid twilight. The sky and wind are well enough out of doors, he said, but once we are within doors the more we are within the better. I have seen other appartements, but nothing as suitable to our convenience. You are going to work, aren't you? And if you are, nothing else matters.

It was with such specious argument that I was inveigled into my prison, and more or less feebly I agreed to forgo light and air for eighteen months or two years.