There was a reason.  Bohemian as was the artist during the last decade of his life, he did not always haunt low cafes and drink absinthe.  His beginnings were as romantic as a page of Balzac.  He was born a gentleman a la main gauche.  His father was the doctor and private secretary of Lady Stanhope.  Charles Lewis Meryon was an English physician, who, falling in love with a ballet dancer at the Opera, Pierre Narcisse Chaspoux, persuaded her that it would be less selfish on her part if she would not bind him to her legally.  November 23,1821, a sickly, nervous, and wizened son was born to the pair and baptised with his father’s name, who, being an alien, generously conceded that much.  There his interest ceased.  On the mother fell the burden of the boy’s education.  At five he was sent to school at Passy and later went to the south of France.  In 1837 he entered the Brest naval school, and 1839 saw him going on his maiden voyage.  This first trip was marred by the black sorrow that fell upon him when informed of his illegitimate birth.  “I was mad from the time I was told of my birth,” he wrote, and until madness supervened he suffered from a “wounded imagination.”  He was morbid, shy, and irritable, and his energy—­the explosive energy of this frail youth was amazing; because he had been refused the use of a ship boat he wasted three months digging out a canoe from a log of wood.  Like Paul Gauguin, he saw many countries, and his eyes were trained to form, though not colour—­he suffered from Daltonism—­for when he began to paint he discovered he was totally colour-blind.  The visible world for him existed as a contrapuntal net-work of lines, silhouettes, contours, or heavy dark masses.  When a sailor he sketched.  Meryon tells of the drawing of a little fungus he found in Akaroa.  “Distorted in form and pinched and puny from its birth, I could not but pity it; it seemed to me so entirely typical of the inclemency and at the same time of the whimsicality of an incomplete and sickly creation that I could not deny it a place in my souvenirs de voyage, and so I drew it carefully.”  This bit of fungus was to him a symbol of his own gnarled existence.

Tiring of ship life, he finally decided to study art.  He had seen New Zealand, Australia, Italy, New Caledonia, and if his splendid plate—­No. 22 in M. Burty’s list—­is evidence, he must have visited San Francisco.  Baudelaire, in L’Art Romantique, speaks of this perspective of San Francisco as being Meryon’s most masterly design.  In 1846 he quit seafaring.  He was in mediocre health, and though from a cadet he had attained the rank of lieutenant it was doubtful if he would ever rise higher.  His mother had left him four thousand dollars, so he went over to the Latin Quarter and began to study painting.  That he was unfitted for, and meeting Eugene Blery he became interested in etching.  A Dutch seventeenth-century etcher and draughtsman, Reiner Zeeman by name, attracted him.  He copied, too, Ducereau and Nicolle.