I knew no other. Day after day I walked up and down the Boulevards,
studying the photographs of the _salon_ pictures, thinking of what my
next move should be. I had never forgotten my father showing me, one day
when he was shaving, three photographs from pictures. They were by an
artist called Sevres. My father liked the slenderer figure, but I liked
the corpulent--the Venus standing at the corner of a wood, pouring wine
into a goblet, while Cupid, from behind her satin-enveloped knees, drew
his bow and shot the doves that flew from glistening poplar trees. The
beauty of this woman, and what her beauty must be in the life of the
painter, had inspired many a reverie, and I had concluded--this
conclusion being of all others most sympathetic to me--that she was his
very beautiful mistress, that they lived in a picturesque pavilion in
the midst of a shady garden full of birds and tall flowers. I had often
imagined her walking there at mid-day, dressed in white muslin with wide
sleeves open to the elbow, scattering grain from a silver plate to the
proud pigeons that strutted about her slippered feet and fluttered to
her dove-like hand. I had dreamed of seeing that woman as I rode
racehorses on wild Irish plains, of being loved by her; in London I had
dreamed of becoming Sevres's pupil.

What coming and going, what inquiries, what difficulties arose! At last
I was advised to go to the Exposition aux Champs Elysée and seek his
address in the catalogue. I did so, and while the _concierge_ copied out
the address for me, I chased his tame magpie that hopped about one of
the angles of the great building. The reader smiles. I was a childish
boy of one-and-twenty who knew nothing, and to whom the world was
astonishingly new. Doubtless before my soul was given to me it had been
plunged deep in Lethe, and so an almost virgin man I stood in front of a
virgin world.