Luckily, however, his friends at Gruchy succeeded after awhile in sending him back again to Cherbourg, where he began to study under another master, Langlois, and to have hopes once more for his artistic future, now that he was free at last to pursue it in his own way.  At this time, he read a great deal—­Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron, Goethe’s “Faust,” Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand; in fact, all the great works he could lay his hands upon.  Peasant as he was, he gave himself, half unconsciously, a noble education.  Very soon, it became apparent that the Cherbourg masters could do nothing more for him, and that, if he really wished to perfect himself in art, he must go to Paris.  In France, the national interest felt in painting is far greater and more general than in England.  Nothing is commoner than for towns or departments to grant pensions (or as we should call them, scholarships) to promising lads who wish to study art in Paris.  Young Millet had attracted so much attention at Cherbourg, that the Council General of the Department of the Manche voted him a present of six hundred francs (about 24 pounds) to start him on the way; and the town of Cherbourg promised him an annual grant of four hundred francs more (about 16 pounds).  So up to Paris Millet went, and there was duly enrolled as a student at the Government “School of Fine-Arts.”

Those student days in Paris were days of hunger and cold, very often, which Millet bore with the steady endurance of a Norman peasant boy.  But they were also days of something worse to him—­of effort misdirected, and of constant struggling against a system for which he was not fitted.  In fact, Millet was an original genius, whereas the teachers at the School of Fine Arts were careful and methodical rule-of-thumb martinets.  They wished to train Millet into the ordinary pattern, which he could not follow; and in the end, he left the school, and attached himself to the studio of Paul Delaroche, then the greatest painter of historical pictures in all Paris.  But even Delaroche, though an artist of deep feeling and power, did not fully understand his young Norman pupil.  He himself used to paint historical pictures in the grand style, full of richness and beauty; but his subjects were almost always chosen from the lives of kings or queens, and treated with corresponding calmness and dignity.  “The Young Princes in the Tower,” “The Execution of Marie Antoinette,” “The Death of Queen Elizabeth,” “Cromwell viewing the Body of Charles I.”—­these were the kind of pictures on which Delaroche loved to employ himself.  Millet, on the other hand, though also full of dignity and pathos, together with an earnestness far surpassing Delaroche’s, did not care for these lofty subjects.  It was the dignity and pathos of labour that moved him most; the silent, weary, noble lives of the uncomplaining peasants, amongst whom his own days had been mostly passed.  Delaroche could not make him out at all; he was such a curious, incomprehensible, odd young fellow!  “There, go your own way, if you will,” the great master said to him at last; “for my part, I can make nothing of you.”