Madame must laugh and protest against this inhuman sarcasm. For the great painter, despite his austerity, had a masterfully admiring way with women that derived from the serpent in Eden. “Here, then, to prove it no sarcasm, is my contribution to the cause,” he says, and places a sou in the pledge’s fat hand. But Ned went his way uninfluenced of sardonic counsels. “When this horror relaxes,” he thought, “in the spring I will go back to Méricourt. I shall be able then, perhaps, to paint a Madonna with a human soul.” The spring came; the ice melted on the Seine; but it did not melt in the breasts of an electorate hardened by suffering, consolidated in the very “winter of its discontent.” But now at least Ned could sometimes watch from his window without dread of having his soul harrowed by the desolation and misery of its prospect--could watch the fire of the sun burning up a little and a little more each day with the rekindled fuel of hope. Now it happened that, thus observing, he was many times aware of M. David mingling with the throng below; going with it or against it; strolling, his hands behind his back, with the air of an architect who cons the effect of his own shaping work. This may have been a fancy; yet it was one that dwelt insistently with the onlooker, that haunted and disturbed him with presentiment of evil as month succeeded month and the vision fitfully repeated itself. What attraction so spasmodically drew the man to this quarter of the town? Not Mr Murk himself, for now the little regard of each for each was severed by some trifling outspokenness on the part of the Englishman, and the painter had long ceased of his visits to the fruiterer’s shop in the Rue Beautreillis. Ned, for some unexplainable reason, was troubled. Once he was aware of M. David, moved from his accustomed deliberation, walking very rapidly in the wake of a man who sped, unconscious of the chase, before him. Ned identified the stranger as he turned off down a by-street. It was Reveillon, the prosperous paper merchant he had happened on on the day of the balloon ascent. “M. l’Académicien follows the man like his shadow,” he thought, pondering. This was in April, when the shadows, indeed, were beginning to strengthen in darkness. Then one morning he started awake to the sound of huge uproar in the streets.