Yet, were Toto out when he called at the atelier, he would lay his troubles on the back of Célestin, always sure of attention and commiseration. And smoking his eternal cigarettes, he would pour into her ear the horrors of life, the futility of Pelisson, the detestable nature of De Brie, and the villainy of De Nani. Sometimes Toto, returning after one of these séances had lasted an hour or so, would find Célestin looking almost old, and with tears in her heavenly eyes. “I have been telling her a society fairy tale,” would say Gaillard. CHAPTER IV. BOURGEOIS—BANKER—PRINCE. It was now June, and lately Toto had become subject to moods, or, to speak more correctly, fits of moodiness. He had now for a month or more been living face to face with Art, and the prolonged interview with that lady was bearing fruit in his manners and customs. Three weeks ago he would not have cared very much had Paris known of his mode of life and ridiculed him for it. Cocksure, and blinded by the _fata Morgana_ of success, he would have shaken his palette in the face of Paris; but Art had changed all that. “Art is not a wanton, to be hired for a night,” said Garnier one day in answer to a remark of Toto’s. “_Mon Dieu!_ no; she is like that woman in the Bible whose courting took seven years, and then again seven years, and seven years again. Work, and don’t think, work and don’t think.” Easy advice to give. Toto was now continually thinking. He was in a worse Bastille than that from which Latude made his escape, for he had devised his own bondhouse, and the prison a man makes for himself is of all prisons, perhaps, the most difficult to leave. He dreaded now meeting anyone that he knew, and in the street going to and from the studio glanced about him with the eyes of a frightened hare. As yet no one knew of his folly but Gaillard, Helen Powers, and his mother, but, indeed, that audience, together with his self-respect, were quite enough to keep him performing a little while longer. Then there was Célestin. The unutterable contentment and bliss of Célestin with her new life filled the heart of Toto sometimes now with a vague sort of terror. She seemed to think that this sort of thing was to go on forever. Her love for him, expressed in a thousand different ways, seemed to spring from infinity itself, and love like this is to the beloved either a blessing beyond all blessings or a curse. To Toto just now it was not a blessing. Of course, by a cab to the Nord, or the L’Ouest, or the Orleans railway, and a ticket to anywhere, and a few months’ absence, he could have put everything to rights. Paris, like a cold gray sea, would have washed over Célestin and Dodor, washed away the furniture of the atelier, washed away his memory from the _rapins_ at Melmenotte’s, and obliterated all traces. Paris, whose motto is “I have forgotten,” would not trouble even to repeat those funereal and final words over this small escapade.