with the sum of eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum, he had
in some degree forgotten the miseries and privations of his childhood
and his family amid the other privations and miseries which are never
lacking to "rapins," whose whole fortune consists of intrepid
vocation. Later, the cares of fame and those of success were other
causes of forgetfulness.

If you have followed the capricious and meandering course of these
studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinner's pupil, one of
the heroes of "A Start in Life" (Scenes from Private Life), and his
brief apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter,
emulator of the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more
the shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he
owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de
Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the
house of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute
and an officer of the Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has
an income of twenty thousand francs from the Funds, his pictures sell
for their weight in gold, and (what seems to him more extraordinary
than the invitations he receives occasionally to court balls) his name
and fame, mentioned so often for the last sixteen years by the press
of Europe, has at last penetrated to the valley of the Eastern
Pyrenees, where vegetate three veritable Loras: his father, his eldest
brother, and an old paternal aunt, Mademoiselle Urraca y Lora.

In the maternal line the painter has no relation left except a cousin,
the nephew of his mother, residing in a small manufacturing town in
the department. This cousin was the first to bethink himself of Leon.
But it was not until 1840 that Leon de Lora received a letter from
Monsieur Sylvestre Palafox-Castal-Gazonal (called simply Gazonal) to