“Well, you’re perhaps right,” replied Claude, shaking his head; “I’m an egotist. I can’t even say that I paint for the good of my country; for, in the first place, my sketches frighten everybody, and then, when I’m busy painting, I think about nothing but the pleasure I take in it. When I’m painting, it is as though I were tickling myself; it makes me laugh all over my body. Well, I can’t help it, you know; it’s my nature to be like that; and you can’t expect me to go and drown myself in consequence. Besides, France can get on very well without me, as my aunt Lisa says. And—may I be quite frank with you?—if I like you it’s because you seem to me to follow politics just as I follow painting. You titillate yourself, my good friend.” Then, as Florent protested, he continued: “Yes, yes; you are an artist in your own way; you dream of politics, and I’ll wager you spend hours here at night gazing at the stars and imagining they are the voting-papers of infinity. And then you titillate yourself with your ideas of truth and justice; and this is so evidently the case that those ideas of yours cause just as much alarm to commonplace middle-class folks as my sketches do. Between ourselves, now, do you imagine that if you were Robine I should take any pleasure in your friendship? Ah, no, my friend, you are a great poet!” Then he began to joke on the subject, saying that politics caused him no trouble, and that he had got accustomed to hear people discussing them in beer shops and studios. This led him to speak of a café in the Rue Vauvilliers; the café on the ground-floor of the house where La Sarriette lodged. This smoky place, with its torn, velvet-cushioned seats, and marble table-tops discoloured by the drippings from coffee-cups, was the chief resort of the young people of the markets. Monsieur Jules reigned there over a company of porters, apprentices, and gentlemen in white blouses and velvet caps. Two curling “Newgate knockers” were glued against his temples; and to keep his neck white he had it scraped with a razor every Saturday at a hair-dresser’s in the Rue des Deux Ecus. At the café he gave the tone to his associates, especially when he played billiards with studied airs and graces, showing off his figure to the best advantage. After the game the company would begin to chat. They were a very reactionary set, taking a delight in the doings of “society.” For his part, Monsieur Jules read the lighter boulevardian newspapers, and knew the performers at the smaller theatres, talked familiarly of the celebrities of the day, and could always tell whether the piece first performed the previous evening had been a success or a failure. He had a weakness, however, for politics. His ideal man was Morny, as he curtly called him. He read the reports of the discussions of the Corps Législatif, and laughed with glee over the slightest words that fell from Morny’s lips. Ah, Morny was the man to sit upon your rascally republicans! And he would