admit even now, saturated though I now am with the æsthetics of
different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work; but at the time I am
writing of my nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional
attractiveness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slender
hips and hands, and I accepted Jules Lefebvre wholly and
unconditionally. He hesitated, however, when I asked to be taken as a
private pupil, but he wrote out the address of a studio where he gave
instruction every Tuesday morning. This was even more to my taste, for I
had an instinctive liking for Frenchmen, and was anxious to see as much
of them as possible.

The studio was perched high up in the Passage des Panoramas. There I
found M. Julien, a typical meridional--the large stomach, the dark eyes,
crafty and watchful; the seductively mendacious manner, the sensual
mind. We made friends at once--he consciously making use of me, I
unconsciously making use of him. To him my forty francs, a month's
subscription, were a godsend, nor were my invitations to dinner and to
the theatre to be disdained. I was curious, odd, quaint. To be sure, it
was a little tiresome to have to put up with a talkative person, whose
knowledge of the French language had been acquired in three months, but
the dinners were good. No doubt Julien reasoned so; I did not reason at
all. I felt this crafty, clever man of the world was necessary to me. I
had never met such a man before, and all my curiosity was awake. He
spoke of art and literature, of the world and the flesh; he told me of
the books he had read, he narrated thrilling incidents in his own life;
and the moral reflections with which he sprinkled his conversation I
thought very striking. Like every young man of twenty, I was on the
look-out for something to set up that would do duty for an ideal. The
world was to me, at this time, what a toy-shop had been fifteen years
before: everything was spick and span, and every illusion was set out