Confessions of a Young Man | Page 9

Venus and the does. M. Sevres caught me looking at it; and hoping his mistress might appear I prolonged the conversation till a tardy sense of the value of his time forced me to bring it to a close; and as I passed down the green garden with him I scanned hopefully every nook, fancying I should see her reading, and that she would raise her eyes as I passed.
Looking back through the years it seems to me that I did catch sight of a white dress behind a trellis. But that dress might have been his daughter's, even his wife's. I only know that I did not discover M. Sevres's mistress that day nor any other day. I never saw him again. Now the earth is over him, as Rossetti would say, and all the reveries that the photographs had inspired resulted in nothing, mere childish sensualities.
I returned to Engin with my taciturn valet; but he showed no enthusiasm on the subject of Engin. I saw he was sighing after beef, beer and a wife, and was but little disposed to settle in this French suburb. We were both very much alone in Paris. In the evenings I allowed him to smoke his clay in my room, and in an astounding brogue he counselled me to return to my mother. But I would not listen, and one day on the Boulevards I was stricken with the art of Jules Lefebvre. True it is that I saw it was wanting in that tender grace which I am forced to admit even now, saturated though I now am with the ?|sthetics of different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work; but at the time I am writing of my nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional attractiveness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slender hips and hands, and I accepted Jules Lefebvre wholly and unconditionally. He hesitated, however, when I asked to be taken as a private pupil, but he wrote out the address of a studio where he gave instruction every Tuesday morning. This was even more to my taste, for I had an instinctive liking for Frenchmen, and was anxious to see as much of them as possible.
The studio was perched high up in the Passage des Panoramas. There I found M. Julien, a typical meridional--the large stomach, the dark eyes, crafty and watchful; the seductively mendacious manner, the sensual mind. We made friends at once--he consciously making use of me, I unconsciously making use of him. To him my forty francs, a month's subscription, were a godsend, nor were my invitations to dinner and to the theatre to be disdained. I was curious, odd, quaint. To be sure, it was a little tiresome to have to put up with a talkative person, whose knowledge of the French language had been acquired in three months, but the dinners were good. No doubt Julien reasoned so; I did not reason at all. I felt this crafty, clever man of the world was necessary to me. I had never met such a man before, and all my curiosity was awake. He spoke of art and literature, of the world and the flesh; he told me of the books he had read, he narrated thrilling incidents in his own life; and the moral reflections with which he sprinkled his conversation I thought very striking. Like every young man of twenty, I was on the look-out for something to set up that would do duty for an ideal. The world was to me, at this time, what a toy-shop had been fifteen years before: everything was spick and span, and every illusion was set out straight and smart in new paint and gilding. But Julien kept me at a distance, and the rare occasions when he favoured me with his society only served to prepare my mind for the friendship which awaited me, and which was destined to absorb some years of my life.
In the studio there were some eighteen or twenty young men, and among these there were some four or five from whom I could learn; there were also some eight or nine young English girls. We sat round in a circle and drew from the model. And this reversal of all the world's opinions and prejudices was to me singularly delightful; I loved the sense of unreality that the exceptional nature of our life in this studio conveyed. Besides, the women themselves were young and interesting, and were, therefore, one of the charms of the place, giving, as they did, that sense of sex which is so subtle a mental pleasure, and which is, in its outward aspect, so interesting to the eye--the gowns, the hair lifted, showing the neck; the earrings, the sleeves open at the