So, shortly after, Millet and his friend Marolle set up a studio for themselves in the Rue de l’Est in Paris.  The precise occasion of their going was this.  Millet was anxious to obtain the Grand Prize of Rome annually offered to the younger artists, and Delaroche definitely told him that his own influence would be used on behalf of another pupil.  After this, the young Norman felt that he could do better by following out his own genius in his own fashion.  At the Rue de l’Est, he continued to study hard, but he also devoted a large part of his time to painting cheap portraits—­ what artists call “pot-boilers;” mere hasty works dashed off anyhow to earn his daily livelihood.  For these pictures he got about ten to fifteen francs apiece,—­in English money from eight to twelve shillings.  They were painted in a theatrical style, which Millet himself detested—­all pink cheeks, and red lips, and blue satin, and lace collars; whereas his own natural style was one of great austerity and a certain earnest sombreness the exact reverse of the common Parisian taste to which he ministered.  However, he had to please his patrons—­and, like a sensible man, he went on producing these cheap daubs to any extent required, for a living, while he endeavoured to perfect himself meanwhile for the higher art he was meditating for the future.  In the great galleries of the Louvre at Paris he found abundant models which he could study in the works of the old masters; and there, poring over Michael Angelo and Mantegna, he could recompense himself a little in his spare hours for the time he was obliged to waste on pinky-white faces and taffeta gowns.  To an artist by nature there is nothing harder than working perforce against the bent of one’s own innate and instinctive feelings.

In 1840, Millet found his life in Paris still so hard that he seemed for a time inclined to give up the attempt, and returned to Greville, where he painted a marine subject of the sort that was dearest to his heart—­a group of sailors mending a sail.  Shortly after, however, he was back in Paris—­the record of these years of hard struggle is not very clear—­with his wife, a Cherbourg girl whom he had imprudently married while still barely able to support himself in the utmost poverty.  It was not till 1844 that the hard-working painter at last achieved his first success.  It was with a picture of a milkwoman, one of his own favourite peasant subjects; and the poetry and sympathy which he had thrown into so commonplace a theme attracted the attention of many critics among the cultivated Parisian world of art.  The “Milkwoman” was exhibited at the Salon (the great annual exhibition of works of art in Paris, like that of the Royal Academy in London, but on a far larger scale); and several good judges of art began immediately to inquire, “Who is Jean Francois Millet?” Hunting his address out, a party of friendly critics presented themselves at his lodgings, only to learn that Madame Millet had just died, and that her husband, half in despair, had gone back again once more to his native Norman hills and valleys.