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282 it wholly resided in the movement which he had tried to illustrate to Marbol.

Despairing of making himself understood, he dragged the painter by force to the farm where the capital pose had manifested itself. They stood lying in wait toward evening, but after having vainly watched for the model, Laurent inquired for him from the farm people.

They could hardly recognize their equal, or at least one of themselves, from the exalted portrait that he drew of the fellow.

"Oh, yes! It's 'Curly,'" said one of the women with an hypocritical indifference,—for she must have closely known and admired her fellow-workman. "The master dismissed him a week ago, and we don't know where he has hired himself out."

"To have such a mime under one's eyes and discharge him!" cried Laurent with an indignation of which the materialistic laborers understood nothing.

Marbol tried to persuade his friend that they would again find the same attitude, the same practised play of muscles in other subjects of the same type as the unique discharged hand. And, in order to acquiesce in Paridael's mania and compensate him for the deplorable loss, they watched the return of many gangs of workmen. But, at the awaited moment, their appearance, their pose and their awkward gestures were but a parody, a pale counterfeit, an almost stupid and pitiful symbol of the posture of "Curly." Marbol would have been satisfied with them and even took his pad from his pocket in order to note down this characteristic moment of farm-labor, but Laurent would not let him begin the sketch, and, when Marbol teased