WORMS-CLAVELIN had insisted on his old friend, Georges Frémont, staying to déjeuner. Frémont, an inspector of fine art, was going on circuit through the department. When they had first met in the painters’ studios at Montmartre, Frémont was young and Worms-Clavelin very young. They had not a single idea in common, and they had no points of agreement at all. Frémont loved to contradict, and Worms-Clavelin put up with it; Frémont was fluent and violent in speech, Worms-Clavelin always yielded to his vehemence and spoke but little. For a time they were comrades, and then life separated them. But every time that they happened to meet, they once more became intimate and quarrelled zestfully. For Georges Frémont, middle-aged, portly, beribboned, well-to-do, still retained something of his youthful fire. This morning, sitting between Madame Worms-Clavelin in a morning gown and M. Worms-Clavelin in a breakfast137 jacket, he was telling his hostess how he had discovered in the garrets at the museum, where it had been buried in dust and rubbish, a little wooden figure in the purest style of French art. It was a Saint Catherine habited in the garb of a townswoman of the fifteenth century, a tiny figure with wonderful delicacy of expression and with such a thoughtful, honest look that he felt the tears rise to his eyes as he dusted her. M. Worms-Clavelin inquired if it were a statue or a picture, and Georges Frémont, glancing at him with a look of kindly scorn, said gently:  
“Worms, don’t try to understand what I am saying to your wife! You are utterly incapable of conceiving the Beautiful in any form whatever. Harmonious lines and noble thoughts will always be written in an unknown tongue as far as you are concerned.”
 
M. Worms-Clavelin shrugged his shoulders:
 
“Shut up, you old communard!” said he.
 
Georges Frémont actually was an old communard. A Parisian, the son of a furniture maker in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and a pupil at the Beaux-Arts, he was twenty at the time of the German invasion, and had enlisted in a regiment of francs-tireurs who never saw service. For this slight Frémont had never forgiven Trochu. At the time of the capitulation he was one of the most excited,138 and shouted with the rest that Paris had been betrayed. But he was no fool, and really meant that Paris had been badly defended, which was true enough, of course. He was for war to the knife. When the Commune was proclaimed, he declared for it. On the proposition of one of his father’s old workmen, a certain citizen Charlier, delegate for the Beaux-Arts, he was appointed assistant sub-director of the Museum of the Louvre. It was an honorary appointment and he performed his duties booted, with cartridges in his belt, and on his head a Tyrolese hat adorned with cock feathers. At the beginning of the siege the canvases had been rolled up, put into packing-cases and carried away to warehouses from which he never succeeded in unearthing them. The only duty that remained to him was to smoke his pipe in galleries that had been transformed into guard-rooms and to gossip with the National Guard, to whom he denounced Badinguet for having destroyed the Rubens pictures by a cleaning process which had removed the glaze. He based his grounds for this accusation on the authority of a newspaper article, backed up by M. Vitet’s opinion. The federalists sat on the benches and listened to him, with their guns between their legs, whilst they drank their pints of wine in the palace precincts, for it was warm weather. When, however,139 the people of Versailles forced their way into Paris by the broken-down Porte du Point-du-Jour and the cannonade approached the Tuileries, Georges Frémont was much distressed to see the National Guard of the federalists rolling casks of petroleum into the Apollo gallery. It was with great difficulty that he at length succeeded in dissuading them from saturating the wainscoting to make it blaze. Then, giving them money for drink, he got rid of them. After they had gone, he managed, with the assistance of the Bonapartist guards, to roll these dangerous casks to the foot of the staircase and to push them as far as the bank of the Seine. When the colonel of the federalists was informed of this, he suspected Frémont of betraying the popular cause and ordered him to be shot. But as soon as the Versailles mob was approaching and the smoke of the blazing Tuileries rising into the air, Frémont fled, cheek by jowl with the squad that had been ordered out to execute him. Two days later, being denounced to the Versailles party, he was a fugitive from the military tribunal for having taken part in a rebellion against the established Government. And it was perfectly certain that the Versailles party was in direct succession, since having followed the Empire on September 4th, 1870, it had adopted and retained the recognised procedure of the preceding Government,140 whilst the Commune, which had never succeeded in establishing those telegraphic communications that are absolutely essential to a recognised government, found itself undone and destroyed—and, in fact, very much in the wrong. Besides, the Commune was the outcome of a revolution carried out in face of the enemy, and this the Versailles administration could never forgive, for its origin recalled their own. It was for this reason that a captain of the winning side, being employed in shooting rebels in the neighbourhood of the Louvre, ordered his men to search for Frémont and shoot him. At last, after remaining in hiding for a fortnight with citizen Charlier, a member of the Commune, under a roof in the Place de la Bastille, Frémont left Paris in a smock-frock, with a whip in his hand, behind a market-gardener’s cart. And whilst a court-martial at Versailles was condemning him to death, he was earning his livelihood in London by drawing up a complete catalogue of Rowlandson’s works for a rich City amateur. Being an intelligent, industrious and honourable man, he soon became well known and respected among the English artists. He loved art passionately, but politics scarcely interested him at all. He remained friendly towards the Commune through loyalty alone and in order to avoid the shame of141 deserting vanquished friends. But he dressed well and moved in good society. He worked strenuously and, at the same time, knew how to profit by his work. His Dictionnaire des monogrammes not only established his reputation, but brought him in some money. After the amnesty had been passed and the last fluttering rags of civil strife had blown away, there landed at Boulogne, after Gambetta’s motion, a certain gentleman, haughty and smiling, yet not unsociable. He was youngish, but a little worn by work, and with a few grey hairs; he was correctly dressed in a travelling costume and carried a portmanteau packed with sketches and manuscripts. Establishing himself in modest style at Montmartre, Georges Fr&eacu............