When the doors were unlocked each morning he was waiting on the steps; and he did not leave in the afternoon until the attendant warned him it was time to go.

He lingered long before the “Raffaellos” and stood in the “Rubens Gallery” dumb with wonder and admiration.

There were various people copying pictures here and there.  He watched them furtively, and after seeing one young man working at an easel in a certain place for a week, he approached and talked with him.

Jean Francois told his history and the young man listened patiently.  He advised that it would be foolish to go back to Gruchy at once.  The youth should go to some master and show what he could do—­remain and study for a little while at least; in fact, he himself would take him to Delaroche.  Things looked brighter; and arrangements were made to meet on the morrow and go interview the master.

Delaroche was found and proved kindly.  He examined the two sketches that Jean Francois submitted, asked a few questions, and graciously led the new applicant into the atelier, where a score of young men were sketching, and set him to work.

The letter written by Jean to the good old grandmother that night hinted at great plans for the future, and told of love, and of hope that was dauntless.

* * * * *

Twelve years were spent by Jean Francois in Paris—­years of biting poverty and grim endurance:  the sport and prey of Fate:  the butt and byword of the fashionable, artistic world.

Jean Francois did not belong in Paris:  how can robins build nests in omnibuses?

He was at war with his environment; and the stern Puritan bias of his nature refused to conform to the free and easy ways of the gay metropolis.  He sighed for a sight of the sea, and longed for the fields and homely companionship that Normandy held in store.

So we find him renouncing Paris life and going back to his own.

The grandmother greeted him as one who had won, but his father and mother, and he, himself, called it failure.

He started to work in the fields and fell fainting to the earth.

“He has been starved,” said the village doctor.  But when hunger had been appeased and strength came back, ambition, too, returned.

He would be an artist yet.

A commission for a group of family portraits came from a rich family at
Cherbourg.  Gladly he hastened thence to do the work.

While in Cherbourg he found lodgings in the household of a widow who had a daughter.  The widow courted the fine young painter-man—­courted him for the daughter.  The daughter married him.  A strong, simple man, unversed in the sophistry of society, loves the first woman he meets, provided, of course, she shows toward him a bit of soft, feminine sympathy.  This accounts for the ease with which very young men so often fall in love with middle-aged women.  The woman does the courting; the man idealizes, and endows the woman with all the virtues his imagination can conjure forth.  Love is a matter of propinquity.