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Updated: May 26, 2025
'Let's go to Mahoudeau's. They at once turned into the Rue du Cherche-Midi. There, at a few steps from the boulevard, Mahoudeau, a sculptor, had rented the shop of a fruiterer who had failed in business, and he had installed his studio therein, contenting himself with covering the windows with a layer of whitening.
This statue embodied Mahoudeau's old dream, unrealised until now from lack of means it was an upright figure of that bathing girl of whom more than a dozen small models had been knocking about his place for years.
It was thus that Christine, who in reality was very affected despite her pretended indifference, heard her husband and his friends excite themselves for three mortal hours about Mahoudeau's unfortunate statue. Since the others had been made acquainted with the story, they kept harping on every particular of it.
With his hands behind his back, quite absorbed, he bent his wrinkled face every now and then over the plaster. 'Hallo, it's you? he said, as they held out their hands to him. 'I was just looking at our friend Mahoudeau's figure, which they have at least had the intelligence to admit, and to put in a good position. Then, breaking off: 'Have you been upstairs? he asked.
They were Chaine's three masterpieces, which now followed him from fair to fair, from one end of Paris to the other. The 'Woman taken in Adultery' in the centre, the copy of the Mantegna on the left, and Mahoudeau's stove on the right.
But his displeasure increased on seeing that Christine's eyes were wide open. He felt inclined to complain of it. However, after some random remarks, he suddenly exclaimed: 'The most surprising thing is that her trunk wasn't hurt! 'What do you mean? asked Christine, in amazement. 'Why, Mahoudeau's girl, he answered.
We'll go to the municipal offices all together. Once outside, Claude hurried along in the nipping cold which loaded his moustache with icicles. Mahoudeau's studio was at the end of a conglomeration of tenements 'rents, so to say and he had to cross a number of small gardens, white with rime, and showing the bleak, stiff melancholy of cemeteries.
In this way, on the second day of his arrival, he dropped in at Mahoudeau's at eight o'clock in the morning, in the chill, grey November dawn which had barely risen. However, the shop in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, which the sculptor still occupied, was open, and Mahoudeau himself, half asleep, with a white face, was shivering as he took down the shutters. Ah! it's you.
That exclamation summed up all the astonishment that the affair caused him, all the recollections that occurred to him of Mahoudeau's shop. That Jory, why, he could still hear him talking about Mathilde in an abominable manner; and yet he had married her! It was really stupid for a fellow to speak badly of a woman, for he never knew if he might not end by marrying her some day or other!
The figure seemed to exhale a perfume, that grace which nothing can give, but which flowers where it lists, stubborn, invincible, perennial grace, springing still and ever from Mahoudeau's thick fingers, which were so ignorant of their special aptitude that they had long treated this very grace with derision. Sandoz could not help smiling.
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