Confessions of a Young Man | Page 8

the Boulevards? where are the Champs Elys??es? I asked myself; and feeling bound to apologise for the appearance of the city, I explained to my valet that we were passing through some by-streets, and returned to the study of a French vocabulary. Nevertheless, when the time came to formulate a demand for rooms, hot water, and a fire, I broke down, and the proprietress of the hotel, who spoke English, had to be sent for.
My plans, so far as I had any, were to enter the Beaux Arts--Cabanel's studio for preference; for I had then an intense and profound admiration for that painter's work. I did not think much of the application I was told I should have to make at the Embassy; my thoughts were fixed on the master, and my one desire was to see him. To see him was easy, to speak to him was another matter, and I had to wait three weeks until I could hold a conversation in French. How I achieved this feat I cannot say. I never opened a book, I know, nor is it agreeable to think what my language must have been like--like nothing ever heard under God's sky before, probably. It was, however, sufficient to waste a good hour of the painter's time. I told him of my artistic sympathies, what pictures I had seen of his in London, and how much pleased I was with those then in his studio. He went through the ordeal without flinching. He said he would be glad to have me as a pupil....
But life in the Beaux Arts is rough, coarse, and rowdy. The model sits only three times a week: the other days we worked from the plaster cast; and to be there by seven o'clock in the morning required so painful an effort of will, that I glanced in terror down the dim and grey perspective of early risings that awaited me; then, demoralised by the lassitude of Sunday, I told my valet on Monday morning to leave the room, that I would return to the Beaux Arts no more. I felt humiliated at my own weakness, for much hope had been centred in that academy; and I knew no other. Day after day I walked up and down the Boulevards, studying the photographs of the salon pictures, thinking of what my next move should be. I had never forgotten my father showing me, one day when he was shaving, three photographs from pictures. They were by an artist called Sevres. My father liked the slenderer figure, but I liked the corpulent--the Venus standing at the corner of a wood, pouring wine into a goblet, while Cupid, from behind her satin-enveloped knees, drew his bow and shot the doves that flew from glistening poplar trees. The beauty of this woman, and what her beauty must be in the life of the painter, had inspired many a reverie, and I had concluded--this conclusion being of all others most sympathetic to me--that she was his very beautiful mistress, that they lived in a picturesque pavilion in the midst of a shady garden full of birds and tall flowers. I had often imagined her walking there at mid-day, dressed in white muslin with wide sleeves open to the elbow, scattering grain from a silver plate to the proud pigeons that strutted about her slippered feet and fluttered to her dove-like hand. I had dreamed of seeing that woman as I rode racehorses on wild Irish plains, of being loved by her; in London I had dreamed of becoming Sevres's pupil.
What coming and going, what inquiries, what difficulties arose! At last I was advised to go to the Exposition aux Champs Elys??e and seek his address in the catalogue. I did so, and while the concierge copied out the address for me, I chased his tame magpie that hopped about one of the angles of the great building. The reader smiles. I was a childish boy of one-and-twenty who knew nothing, and to whom the world was astonishingly new. Doubtless before my soul was given to me it had been plunged deep in Lethe, and so an almost virgin man I stood in front of a virgin world.
Engin is not far from Paris, and the French country seemed to me like a fairy-book. Tall green poplars and green river banks, and a little lake reflecting the foliage and the stems of sapling oak and pine, just as in the pictures. The driver pointed with his whip, and I saw a high garden wall shadowed with young trees, and a tall loose iron gate. As I walked up the gravel path I looked for the beautiful mistress, who, dressed in muslin, with sleeves open at the elbow, should feed pigeons from a silver plate of