His name was Julien Tanguy.  He was born in 1825 at Pledran, in the north of France.  He was a plasterer when he married.  The young couple, accustomed to hardships of all kinds, left Saint-Brieuc for Paris.  This was in 1860.  After various vicissitudes the man became a colour grinder in the house of Edouard, Rue Clauzel.  The position was meagre.  The Tanguys moved up in the social scale by accepting the job of concierge somewhere on the Butte Montmartre.  This gave Pere Tanguy liberty, his wife looking after the house.  He went into business on his own account, vending colours in the quarter and the suburbs.  He traversed the country from Argenteuil to Barbizon, from Ecouen to Sarcelle.  He met Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, all youthful and confident and boiling over with admiration for Corot, Courbet, and Millet.  They patronised the honest, pleasant pedlar of colours and brushes, and when they didn’t have the money he trusted them.  It was his prime quality that he trusted people.  He cared not enough for money, as his too often suffering wife averred, and his heart, always on his sleeve, he was an easy mark for the designing.  This supreme simplicity led him into joining the Communists in 1871, and then he had a nasty adventure.  One day, while dreaming on sentry duty, a band from Versailles suddenly descended upon the outposts.  Pere Tanguy lost his head.  He could not fire on a fellow-being, and he threw away his musket.  For this act of “treachery” he was sentenced to serve two years in the galleys at Brest.  Released by friendly intervention he had still to remain without Paris for two years more.  Finally, entering his beloved quarter he resumed his tranquil occupation, and hearing that the Maison Edouard had been moved from the Rue Clauzel he rented a little shop, where he sold material to artists, bought pictures, and entertained in his humble manner any friend or luckless devil who happened that way.  Cezanne and Vignon were his best customers.  Guillemin, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Oller, Messurer, Augustin, Signac, De Lautrec, symbolists of the Pont-Aven school, neo-impressionists, and the young fumistes of schools as yet unborn, revolutionaries with one shirt to their back, swearing at the official Salon and also swearing by the brotherhood of man (with a capital), assembled in this dingy old shop.  Tanguy was a rallying point.  He was full of the milk of human kindness, and robbed himself to give a worthless fellow with a hard-luck story some of the sous that should have gone to his wife.  Fortunately she was a philosopher as well as an admirable housekeeper.  If the rent was paid and there was some soup-meat for dinner she was content.  More she could not expect from a man who gave away with both hands.  But—­and here is the curious part of this narrative of M. Bernard’s—­Tanguy was the only person in Paris who bought and owned pictures by Cezanne.  He had dozens of his canvases stacked away in the rear of his establishment—­Cezanne