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Rh working days curiously shortened in consequence. He had been renowned as one of the finest talkers, upon art, famed for his burning eloquence when he praised the great painters of the past, and for his scathing wit when he ridiculed the little painters of the present; for he had even thus early fallen to that stage in the idler's career, when a man's chief consolation is to undervalue contemporaneous merit. He had lived and enjoyed his life in those days, had spent his money faster than he earned it, and had fallen into the ranks of failure, to be supported by the toil of his wife and her children, to be the family log, the family disease. They were all very patient, those children of his. They worked for him and admired him, believed in him almost. They admired the great genius he might have been if he had only worked. They valued him for potentialities of greatness of which he talked sometimes, in his dreamy way; as if those idle aspirings had been actual achievements.

The shabby old salon, with its dark-red paper, stained and faded with age, was glorified by some of M. Tillet's pictures, painted before his slothful hand had begun to lose its cunning. There hung the portrait of a beautiful duchess, exquisitely painted—a lovely head, an ideal neck and shoulders, in white satin and brown fur, like an old Venetian picture. The head had been successful, but shoulders, arms, and draperies were still unfinished. The picture had been a commission, an offering from the Duchess to her distinguished father, a Minister of State, on his fête. But the fête had come and gone, and the portrait was not ready. Time had been conceded, and more time, and still the draperies remained unfinished, and still the picture was not fit to leave the painter's studio. Finally the commission had been cancelled. Some lesser genius had painted the Duchess, briskly, punctually, readily, out of hand. These meaner souls can go in harness. And the meaner soul received the seven thousand francs which were to have been paid to M. Tillet, and the painter had his unfinished picture, as a kind of pendant to his incomplete life. Happily, those trustful sons and daughters of his were very proud of that unfinished portrait, and of the four or five sketches for genre pictures, never painted, which adorned the family salon. There was not another man in France who could paint like their father, they said, or who had such talent in composition. Meissonier would have been nowhere in the race if Eugène Tillet had but stuck to his easel.

Trottier and Tillet began to talk, and the sons went on with their work in a free-and-easy manner, while Madame and the daughters waited upon their guests. Poor Hilda had been so unnerved by this unexpected encounter with a friend of her brother's that she could only falter the feeblest replies to Marcelline and Mathilde, who tried to make themselves at home with her.