anese albums, casts, a mess of odd and useless things. Near a book case filled with old magazines in a corner there was a pile of pasteboard, canvas, torn sketches with the stretchers sticking through. A shattered sofa creaking with a sound like that of a piano out of tune, whenever one tried to sit on it, two rickety arm chairs, a looking glass without a frame constituted the only luxury of the studio illumined by trembling sunlight. In the winter, on days when Lirat had a model posing for him in the studio, he used to light his little cast iron stove whose chimney, crooked into several large bends, supported by iron wire and covered with rust, rose in a serpentine fashion in the middle of the room, before losing itself in the roof through an opening, all too large. On other days, even during the coldest nights, he substituted for the heat of the stove an old coat of astracan fur, worn out, bald and scabby, which he put on with real pleasure.
Lirat took a childish pride in this dilapidated studio, and he boasted of its bareness as other painters do of their embroidered plush and tapestries, invariably historical in origin. Nay, he even wanted it to be still less attractive, he wanted its floor to be the bare ground. "It is in my studio that I learn who my best friends are," he would often say, "they always come again, the others stay away. That's very convenient." Very few came more than once.
The young woman was attractively seated in her chair, her bust slightly bent forward, her hands buried in her muff; from time to time she would take out an embroidered handkerchief and bring it slowly to her mouth which I could not see because of the thick border of the veil which hid it, but which I surmised was very beautiful, very red and exquisitely shaped. In her whole figure, elegant and refined, about which, in spite of the smile which rendered it so
