He was the son of a peasant, and the descendant of a long line of peasants, who lived on the coast of Normandy—­plain, toiling peasants whose lives were deeply rooted into the rocky soil that gave them scanty sustenance.  If they ever journeyed it was as sailors—­going out with the tide—­and if they did not come back it was only because those who go down to the sea in ships sometimes never do.

And now this first-born of the peasant flock was going to leave his native village of Gruchy.

He was clad in a new suit of clothes, spun, woven, cut and sewed by the hands of his grandmother.

He was going away, and his belongings were all packed in a sailor’s canvas bag; but he was not going to sea.

Great had been the preparations for this journey.

The family was very poor:  the father a day-laborer and farmer; the mother worked in the fields, and as the children grew up they too worked in the fields; and after a high tide the whole family hurried to the seashore to gather up the “varech,” and carry it home for fertilizer, so that the rocky hillside might next Summer laugh a harvest.

And while the father and the mother toiled in the fields, or gathered the varech, or fished for shrimps, the old grandmother looked after the children at home.  The grandmother in such homes is the real mother of the flock:  the mother who bore the children has no time to manifest mother-love; it is the grandmother who nurses the stone-bruises, picks out the slivers, kisses away the sorrows, gladdens young hearts by her simple stories, and rocks in her strong, old arms the babe, as she croons and quavers a song of love and duty.

And so the old grandmother had seen “her baby” grow to a man, and with her own hands she had made his clothes, and all the savings of her years had been sewed into a belt and given to the boy.

And now he was going away.

He was going away—­going because she and she alone had urged it.  She had argued and pleaded, and when she won the village priest over to her side, and Father Lebrisseau in his turn had won several influential men—­why, it must be!

The boy could draw:  he could draw so well that he some day would be a great artist—­Langlois, the drawing-master at Cherbourg, ten miles away, said so.

What if they were only poor peasants and there never had been a painter in the family!  There would be now.  So the priest had contributed from his own purse; and the Councilmen of Cherbourg had promised to help; and the grandmother had some silver of her own.

Jean Francois Millet was going to Paris to study to be an artist.

Tears rained down the wrinkled, leathery cheeks of the old grandmother; the mother stood by dazed and dumb, nursing a six-months-old babe; children of various ages hung to the skirts of mother and grandmother, tearful and mystified; the father leaned on the gate, smoking a pipe, displaying a stolidity he did not feel.