In that first hour of passion and hope, Claude, usually so harassed by doubts, believed in his genius.  He no longer experienced any of those crises, the anguish of which had driven him for days into the streets in quest of his vanished courage.  A fever stiffened him, he worked on with the blind obstinacy of an artist who dives into his entrails, to drag therefrom the fruit that tortures him.  His long rest in the country had endowed him with singular freshness of visual perception, and joyous delight in execution; he seemed to have been born anew to his art, and endowed with a facility and balance of power he had never hitherto possessed.  He also felt certain of progress, and experienced great satisfaction at some successful bits of work, in which his former sterile efforts at last culminated.  As he had said at Bennecourt, he had got hold of his ‘open air,’ that carolling gaiety of tints which astonished his comrades when they came to see him.  They all admired, convinced that he would only have to show his work to take a very high place with it, such was its individuality of style, for the first time showing nature flooded with real light, amid all the play of reflections and the constant variations of colours.

Thus, for three years, Claude struggled on, without weakening, spurred to further efforts by each rebuff, abandoning nought of his ideas, but marching straight before him, with all the vigour of faith.

During the first year he went forth amid the December snows to place himself for four hours a day behind the heights of Montmartre, at the corner of a patch of waste land whence as a background he painted some miserable, low, tumble-down buildings, overtopped by factory chimneys, whilst in the foreground, amidst the snow, he set a girl and a ragged street rough devouring stolen apples.  His obstinacy in painting from nature greatly complicated his work, and gave rise to almost insuperable difficulties.  However, he finished this picture out of doors; he merely cleaned and touched it up a bit in his studio.  When the canvas was placed beneath the wan daylight of the glazed roof, he himself was startled by its brutality.  It showed like a scene beheld through a doorway open on the street.  The snow blinded one.  The two figures, of a muddy grey in tint, stood out, lamentable.  He at once felt that such a picture would not be accepted, but he did not try to soften it; he sent it to the Salon, all the same.  After swearing that he would never again try to exhibit, he now held the view that one should always present something to the hanging committee if merely to accentuate its wrong-doing.  Besides, he admitted the utility of the Salon, the only battlefield on which an artist might come to the fore at one stroke.  The hanging committee refused his picture.