I wandered through the galleries of the Louvre like one newly gifted with sight.  I haunted the Venus of Milo and the Diane Chasseresse like another Pygmalion.  The more I admired, the more I found to admire.  The more I comprehended, the more I found there remained for me to comprehend.  I recognised in art the Sphinx whose enigma is never solved.  I learned, for the first time, that poetry may be committed to imperishable marble, and steeped in unfading colors.  By degrees, as I followed in the footsteps of great thinkers, my insight became keener and my perceptions more refined.  The symbolism of art evolved itself, as it were, from below the surface; and instead of beholding in paintings and statues mere studies of outward beauty, I came to know them as exponents of thought—­as efforts after ideal truth—­as aspirations which, because of their divineness, can never be wholly expressed; but whose suggestiveness is more eloquent than all the eloquence of words.

Thus a great change came upon my life—­imperceptibly at first, and by gradual degrees; but deeply and surely.  To apply myself to the study of medicine became daily more difficult and more distasteful to me.  The boisterous pleasures of the Quartier Latin lost their charm for me.  Day by day I gave myself up more and more passionately to the cultivation of my taste for poetry and art.  I filled my little sitting-room with casts after the antique.  I bought some good engravings for my walls, and hung up a copy of the Madonna di San Sisto above the table at which I wrote and read.  All day long, wherever I might be—­at the hospital, in the lecture-room, in the laboratory—­I kept looking longingly forward to the quiet evening by-and-by when, with shaded lamp and curtained window, I should again take up the studies of the night before.

Thus new aims opened out before me, and my thoughts flowed into channels ever wider and deeper.  Already the first effervescence of youth seemed to have died off the surface of my life, as the “beaded bubbles” die off the surface of champagne.  I had tried society, and wearied of it.  I had tried Bohemia, and found it almost as empty as the Chaussee d’Autin.  And now that life which from boyhood I had ever looked upon as the happiest on earth, the life of the student, was mine.  Could I have devoted it wholly and undividedly to those pursuits which were fast becoming to me as the life of my life, I would not have exchanged my lot for all the wealth of the Rothschilds.  Somewhat indolent, perhaps, by nature, indifferent to achieve, ambitious only to acquire, I asked nothing better than a life given up to the worship of all that is beautiful in art, to the acquisition of knowledge, and to the development of taste.  Would the time ever come when I might realize my dream?  Ah! who could tell?  In the meanwhile ... well, in the meanwhile, here was Paris—­here were books, museums, galleries, schools, golden opportunities which, once past, might never come again.  So I reasoned; so time went on; so I lived, plodding on by day in the Ecole de Medecine, but, when evening came, resuming my studies at the leaf turned down the night before, and, like the visionary in “The Pilgrims of the Rhine,” taking up my dream-life at the point where I had been last awakened.