"In answer to his 'Entrez' I pushed open his door and found him in a sculptor's blouse cowering over a small sheet-iron stove on which some food was being cooked. He raised his head, straightened his back, and came toward me--a small, shrunken man now, prematurely old, his two burning eyes looking out from under his ledge of a forehead like coals beneath a half-burnt log, a shock of iron-gray hair sticking straight up from his scalp as would a brush. About his nose, up his cheeks, around his mouth, and especially across his throat, which was free of a cravat, ran pasty wrinkles, like those on a piece of uncooked tripe. Only half-starved men who have lived on greasy soups and scraps from the kitchens have these complexions. "I describe him thus carefully to you because that first glance of his scarred face had told me his life's story. It is the same with every man who suffers. "He talked of his work, of the conspiracies that had followed him all his career, shutting him out of his just rewards, while less brilliant men snatched the prizes which should have been his; of his hopes for the future; of the great competition soon to come off at Rheims, in which he would compete--not that he had yet put his idea into clay--that was always a mere question of detail with him. Then, as if by the merest accident--something he had quite forgotten, but which he thought might interest me--he told me, with a quickening of his glance and the first smile I had seen cross his pasty face, of a certain statue of his, 'a Masterpiece,' which a great connoisseur had bought for his garden, and which faced one of the open spaces of Paris. I could see it any day I walked that way--indeed, if I did not mind, he would go with me--he had been housed all the morning and needed the air. "I pleaded an excuse and left him, for I knew all about this masterpiece which had been bought by a tradesman and planted in his garden among groups of cast-iron dogs and spouting dolphins, the hedge in front cut low enough for passers-by to see the entire collection. Hardly a day elapsed that the poor fellow did not walk by, drinking in the beauty of his work, comforting himself with the effect it produced on the plain people who stopped to admire. Sometimes he would accost them and bring the conversation round to the sculptor, and then abruptly take his leave, they staring at him as he bowed his thanks. "The following year I again looked him up; his poverty and his courage appealed to me; besides, I intended to help him. When I knocked at his door he did not cry 'Entrez'--he kept still, as if he had not heard me or was out. When I pushed the door open he turned, looked at me for an instant, and resumed his work. Again my eyes took him in--thinner, dryer, less nourished. He was casting the little images you buy from a board carried on a vendor's back.