"He says, if you don't both of you pay up the arrears by midday on Sunday next, he'll seize your goods, and turn you into the street."
"Ah, I always said he was the nicest man I knew!" observed Müller, gravely. "Anything else, Madame Duphôt?"
"Only this, Monsieur Müller--that if you didn't go quietly, he'd take your windows out of the frames and your doors off the hinges."
"_Comment_! He bade you give me that message, the miserable old son of a spider! _Quatre-vingt mille plats de diables aux truffes_! Take my windows out of the frames, indeed! Let him try, Madame Duphôt--that's all--let him try!"
And with this, Müller, in a towering rage, led the way upstairs, muttering volleys of the most extraordinary and eccentric oaths of his own invention, and leaving the little old _portière_ grinning maliciously in the hall.
"Whether I can, or can't, it seems I must," he replied, kicking open the door of his studio as viciously as if it were the corporeal frame of Monsieur Richard. "The only question is--how? At the present moment, I haven't five francs in the till."
"Nor have I more than twenty. How much is it?"
"Haven't the Tapottes paid for any of their ancestors yet?"
"Confound it!--yes; they've paid for a Marshal of France and a Farmer General, which are all I've yet finished and sent home. But there was the washerwoman, and the _traiteur_, and the artist's colorman, and, _enfin_, the devil to pay--and the money's gone, somehow!"
"I've only just cleared myself from a lot of debts," I said, ruefully, "and I daren't ask either my father or Dr. Chéron for an advance just at present. What is to be done?"
"Oh, I don't know. I must raise the money somehow. I must sell something--there's my copy of Titian's 'Pietro Aretino.' It's worth eighty francs, if only for a sign. And there's a Madonna and Child after Andrea del Sarto, worth a fortune to any enterprising sage-femme with artistic proclivities. I'll try what Nebuchadnezzar will do for me."
"And who, in the name of all that's Israelitish, is Nebuchadnezzar?"
"Nebuchadnezzar, my dear Arbuthnot, is a worthy Shylock of my acquaintance--a gentleman well known to Bohemia--one who buys and sells whatever is purchasable and saleable on the face of the globe, from a ship of war to a comic paragraph in the _Charivari_. He deals in bric-à-brac, sermons, government sinecures, pugs, false hair, light literature, patent medicines, and the fine arts. He lives in the Place des Victoires. Would you like to be introduced to him?"