Confessions of a Young Man | Page 8

and the miserable carriages, and the tall, haggard
city. Pale, sloppy, yellow houses; an oppressive absence of colour; a
peculiar bleakness in the streets. The ménagère hurries down the
asphalte to market; a dreadful garçon de café, with a napkin tied
round his throat, moves about some chairs, so decrepit and so solitary
that it seems impossible to imagine a human being sitting there. Where
are the Boulevards? where are the Champs Elysées? 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 Elysée 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