Oh! the circumstances connected with it were quite simple . . . . but when I shall have told you them you will understand how it is that the most innocent round game causes me that same little chill of horror that a man who had unintentionally killed some one while cleaning his weapon would feel when passing a shooting-gallery. It was the very year that I was admitted as a member of the club, in 1875, and that was also the year of my first success at the Salon. . . . ."
"Your Ophelia among the Flowers? Don't I remember it? I can see before me now the cluster of pink roses beside the blonde tresses, roses that were so delicately, tenderly pink, and then over the heart those black roses, as if they had been dipped in blood. Who owns that picture now?"
"An American," said the painter with a sigh, "and he paid forty thousand francs for it, while I sold it at the time for fifteen hundred. Ah! in those days I was not the lucky artist of whom your alter ego Claude Latcher unkindly said; 'Happy Frémiot! his occupation consists in looking all day long at a bunch of lilacs which brings him in ten thousand francs.'—Between you and me he would have done as well to select some other person than an old friend as the subject of his witticisms. But if I mention money," he continued, touching me on the arm to keep me from answering him and defending my old friend Claude, "believe me that it is not with any idea of making a merit of my commercial value. No; I only speak of it because those fifteen hundred francs have something to do with my adventure. You must consider that I had never had such a sum in my posses-
