I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long!  As soon as I was free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become an artist in M. Gleyre’s studio.  Then I went to Antwerp, where there is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student.  It was all delightful, but misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye—­perhaps it was the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved by having to do a double share of the work.

And then in time I came to England and drew for Punch, thus fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at University College—­though not quite in the sense they anticipated.

[Illustration:  THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE

THE NEW GOVERNESS (through her pretty nose).  “Waall—­I come right slick away from Ne’York City, an’ I ain’t had much time for foolin’ around in Europe—­you bet!  So I can’t fix up your Gals in the Eu-ropean languages, no-how!”

BELGRAVIAN MAMMA:  (who knows there’s a Duke or two still left in the Matrimonial Market).  “Oh, that’s of no consequence.  I want my Daughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity—­and the Idioms, and all that.  Now I’m sure you will do admirably!”—­ Punch, December 1, 1888.]

I will not attempt a description of my work—­it is so recent and has been so widely circulated that it should be unnecessary to do so.  If you do not remember it, it is that it is not worth remembering; if you do, I can only entreat you to be to my faults a little blind, and to my virtues very kind!

I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve up to the readers of Punch whatever I have culled with the bodily eye, after cooking it a little in the brain.  My raw material requires more elaborate working than Leech’s.  He dealt more in flowers and fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively—­from the lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory radish. I deal in vegetables, I suppose.  Little that I ever find seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and deserve to do so.  I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans, Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then, so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I first picked them in the social garden.  And they do not recognise themselves!  Or even each other!

And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style.  Oh that I could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato!  He is the cordon bleu par excellence.  The people I meet seem to me more interesting than funny—­so interesting that I am well content to draw them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very transparent disguise—­and without any attempt at caricature.  The better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.