‘I say, why does that herbalist woman next door always stand on her doorstep? What an ugly mug she’s got!’ They all laughed, except Mahoudeau, who seemed very much embarrassed. ‘Jory, the King of Blunderers,’ declared Sandoz, shaking hands with the new comer. ‘Why? What? Is Mahoudeau interested in her? I didn’t know,’ resumed Jory, when he had at length grasped the situation. ‘Well, well, what does it matter? When everything’s said, they are all irresistible.’ ‘As for you,’ the sculptor rejoined, ‘I can see you have tumbled on your lady-love’s finger-nails again. She has dug a bit out of your cheek!’ They all burst out laughing anew, while Jory, in his turn, reddened. In fact, his face was scratched: there were even two deep gashes across it. The son of a magistrate of Plassans, whom he had driven half-crazy by his dissolute conduct, he had crowned everything by running away with a music-hall singer under the pretext of going to Paris to follow the literary profession. During the six months that they had been camping together in a shady hotel of the Quartier Latin, the girl had almost flayed him alive each time she caught him paying attention to anybody else of her sex. And, as this often happened, he always had some fresh scar to show--a bloody nose, a torn ear, or a damaged eye, swollen and blackened. At last they all began to talk, with the exception of Chaîne, who went on painting with the determined expression of an ox at the plough. Jory had at once gone into ecstasies over the roughly indicated figure of the vintaging girl. He worshipped a massive style of beauty. His first writings in his native town had been some Parnassian sonnets celebrating the copious charms of a handsome pork-butcheress. In Paris--where he had fallen in with the whole band of Plassans--he had taken to art criticism, and, for a livelihood, he wrote articles for twenty francs apiece in a small, slashing paper called ‘The Drummer.’ Indeed, one of these articles, a study on a picture by Claude exhibited at Papa Malgras’s, had just caused a tremendous scandal; for Jory had therein run down all the painters whom the public appreciated to extol his friend, whom he set up as the leader of a new school, the school of the ‘open air.’ Very practical at heart, he did not care in reality a rap about anything that did not conduce to his own pleasures; he simply repeated the theories he heard enunciated by his friends. ‘I say, Mahoudeau,’ he now exclaimed, ‘you shall have an article; I’ll launch that woman of yours. What limbs, my boys! She’s magnificent!’ Then suddenly changing the conversation: ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘my miserly father has apologised. He is afraid I shall drag his name through the mud, so he sends me a hundred francs a month now. I am paying my debts.’ ‘Debts! you are too careful to have any,’ muttered Sandoz, with a smile.