He had hardly told me of this visit, so disturbing to me, in his joking way, when the servant said that two ladies were waiting for me in the studio. God! how my heart beat when I was about to enter the presence of the woman I had sworn to avoid! How my heart beats even now at my vivid and precise recollection of this meeting long ago! I believe that I can see the two of them, mother and daughter, in the crude light of that bright January day which filled, by means of the large glass bay, the studio with a cold pale light. Madam Favier, more placid and smiling than ever, walked from canvas to canvas, looking at them with her great laughing eyes. She would suddenly ask me what was the net cost of a picture, and what did it fetch, with as much simplicity as if it were a question of a dress or a curio. Camille sat down opposite a copy of “L’Allégorie du Printemps,” which I had made in Florence so lovingly. In the long and supple dancers of the divine Sandro, who lent with tender grace their blonde and dreamy though bitter faces, the little Blue Duchess could recognize her sisters. She did not see them, absorbed as she was in a memory, the nature of which I could easily guess, seeing that she had not acted the previous evening, and had found a way to spend that free evening with Jacques, thanks to a complaisant cousin. It hurt me to detect around her tender, almost blood-shot eyes a pearly halo of lassitude, and on her mouth tremors which told of happiness. But what made me feel worse still was that Jacques, directly he came in, copied the photographs I had used to make my dream-picture of her—that chimerical picture of my week of folly, which happily I had put aside and well concealed; and at the moment Camille was greeting me with a slightly embarrassed smile, he displayed those instructive pictures and said maliciously— “You can see, mademoiselle, that if Vincent has not been to see you again as he promised, he has not forgotten you.” “It was to better prepare the studies for my future picture,” I stammered. “The great painter Lenbach does so.” “Who contradicted you?” Molan went on even more maliciously. “Oh! you have not picked out the best ones,” the mother interrupted as she showed her daughter the photograph I loved best. “You see,” she said, “that in spite of your prohibition, this picture which is such a bad likeness of you is still being sold. Come, now, is it anything like her? I ask you to decide the point, M. La Croix.” “I was three years younger,” Camille said, “and he did not know me then.” Taking the photograph she looked at it in her turn. Then putting it by the side of her face so that I could see the model and the portrait at the same time, she asked me: “Have I changed very much?”