One day Claude, who, so far, had not opened his door to his friends, condescended to admit Sandoz. The latter tumbled upon a study with a deal of dash in it, thrown off without a model, and again admirable in colour. The subject had remained the same--the Port St. Nicolas on the left, the swimming-baths on the right, the Seine and Cité in the background. But Sandoz was amazed at perceiving, instead of the boat sculled by a waterman, another large skiff taking up the whole centre of the composition--a skiff occupied by three women. One, in a bathing costume, was rowing; another sat over the edge with her legs dangling in the water, her costume partially unfastened, showing her bare shoulder; while the third stood erect and nude at the prow, so bright in tone that she seemed effulgent, like the sun. ‘Why, what an idea!’ muttered Sandoz. ‘What are those women doing there?’ ‘Why, they are bathing,’ Claude quietly answered. ‘Don’t you see that they have come out of the swimming-baths? It supplies me with a motive for the nude; it’s a real find, eh? Does it shock you?’ His old friend, who knew him well by now, dreaded lest he should give him cause for discouragement. ‘I? Oh, no! Only I am afraid that the public will again fail to understand. That nude woman in the very midst of Paris--it’s improbable.’ Claude looked naively surprised. ‘Ah! you think so? Well, so much the worse. What’s the odds, as long as the woman is well painted? Besides, I need something like that to get my courage up.’ On the following occasions, Sandoz gently reverted to the strangeness of the composition, pleading, as was his nature, the cause of outraged logic. How could a modern painter who prided himself on painting merely what was real--how could he so bastardise his work as to introduce fanciful things into it? It would have been so easy to choose another subject, in which the nude would have been necessary. But Claude became obstinate, and resorted to lame and violent explanations, for he would not avow his real motive: an idea which had come to him and which he would have been at a loss to express clearly. It was, however, a longing for some secret symbolism. A recrudescence of romanticism made him see an incarnation of Paris in that nude figure; he pictured the city bare and impassioned, resplendent with the beauty of woman. Before the pressing objections of his friend he pretended to be shaken in his resolutions. ‘Well, I’ll see; I’ll dress my old woman later on, since she worries you,’ he said. ‘But meanwhile I shall do her like that. You understand, she amuses me.’ He never reverted to the subject again, remaining silently obstinate, merely shrugging his shoulders and smiling with embarrassment whenever any allusion betrayed the general astonishment which was felt at the sight of that Venus emerging triumphantly from the froth of the Seine amidst all the omnibuses on the quays and the lightermen working at the Port of St. Nicolas.