Again: "I have just returned from the Salon. We remained a long time
seated on a bench before the picture. It attracted a good deal of
attention, and I smiled to myself at the thought that no one would ever
imagine the elegantly dressed young girl seated before it, showing the
tips of her little boots, to be the artist. Ah, all this is a great deal
better than last year! Have I achieved a success, in the true, serious
meaning of the word? I almost think so."

The picture was called the "Meeting," and shows seven gamins talking
together before a wooden fence at the corner of a street. François Coppée
wrote of it: "It is a _chef d'oeuvre_, I maintain. The faces and the
attitudes of the children are strikingly real. The glimpse of meagre
landscape expresses the sadness of the poorer neighborhoods."


Previous to this time, her picture of two boys, called "Jean and
Jacques," had been reproduced in the Russian _Illustration_, and she now
received many requests for permission to photograph and reproduce her
"Meeting," and connoisseurs made requests to be admitted to her studio.
All this gratified her while it also surprised. She was at work on a
picture called "Spring," for which she went to Sèvres, to paint in the
open.

Naturally she hoped for a Salon medal, and her friends encouraged her
wish--but alas! she was cruelly disappointed. Many thought her unfairly
treated, but it was remembered that the year before she had publicly
spoken of the committee as "idiots"!

People now wished to buy her pictures and in many ways she realized that