We all know the great grey and melancholy Gare du Nord, at half-past six in the morning; 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 menagere hurries down the asphalte to market; a dreadful garcon de cafe, 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 Elysees?  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, and was stricken by the art of Jules Lefevre.  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 aesthetics 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 Lefevre 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.