Confessions of a Young Man | Page 9

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 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
æsthetics 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