"Well, monseigneur, I have found out a way." Then he went more calmly: "Have you got five francs about you?" M. Saval replied: "Why, yes." The artist said: "Well! you'll go and buy for me five francs' worth of wax candles while I go and see the cooper." And he pushed the notary in his evening coat into the street. At the end of five minutes, they had returned one of them with the wax candles, and the other with the hoop of a cask. Then Romantin plunged his hand into a cupboard, and drew forth twenty empty bottles, which he fixed in the form of a crown around the hoop. He then came down, and went to borrow a ladder from the door-keeper, after having explained that he had obtained the favors of the old woman by painting the portrait of her cat exhibited on the easel. When he mounted the ladder, he said to M. Saval: "Are you active?" The other, without understanding, answered: "Why, yes." "Well, you just climb up there, and fasten this chandelier for me to the ring of the ceiling. Then, you must put a wax candle in each bottle, and light it. I tell you I have a genius for lighting up. But off with your coat, damn it! You are just like a Jeames." The door was opened brutally. A woman appeared, with her eyes flashing, and remained standing on the threshold. Romantin gazed at her with a look of terror. She waited some seconds, crossing her arms over her breast, and then, in a shrill, vibrating, exasperated voice, said: "Ha! you sniveler, is this the way you leave me?" Romantin made no reply. She went on: "Ha! you scoundrel! You are again doing the swell, while you pack me off to the country. You'll soon see the way I'll settle your jollification. Yes, I'm going to receive your friends." She grew warmer: "I'm going to slap their faces with the bottles and the wax candles...." Romantin uttered one soft word: "Mathilde...." But she did not pay any attention to him; she went on: "Wait a little my fine fellow! wait a little!" Romantin went over to her, and tried to take her by the hands: "Mathilde...." But she was now fairly under way; and on she went, emptying the vials of her wrath with strong words and reproaches. They flowed out of her mouth, like a stream sweeping a heap of filth along with it. The words hurled out, seemed struggling for exit. She stuttered, stammered, yelled, suddenly recovering her voice to cast forth an insult or a curse. He seized her hands without her having even noticed it. She did not seem to see anything, so much occupied was she in holding forth and relieving her heart. And suddenly she began to weep. The tears flowed from her eyes without making her stem the tide of her complaints. But her words had taken a howling, shrieking tone; they were a continuous cry interrupted by sobbings. She commenced afresh twice or three times, till she stopped as if something were choking her, and at last she ceased with a regular flood of tears.