painting with first-class professors, and they assured me she had a
talent. I was delighted to believe it, and when I went into society I
used to carry her pictures with me in a portfolio and hand them round
to the company. I remember, once, a lady thought I was offering them for
sale, and I took it very ill. We don't know what we may come to! Then
came my dark days, and my explosion with Madame Nioche. Noemie had no
more twenty-franc lessons; but in the course of time, when she grew
older, and it became highly expedient that she should do something that
would help to keep us alive, she bethought herself of her palette
and brushes. Some of our friends in the quartier pronounced the idea
fantastic: they recommended her to try bonnet making, to get a situation
in a shop, or--if she was more ambitious--to advertise for a place of
dame de compagnie. She did advertise, and an old lady wrote her a letter
and bade her come and see her. The old lady liked her, and offered her
her living and six hundred francs a year; but Noemie discovered that
she passed her life in her arm-chair and had only two visitors, her
confessor and her nephew: the confessor very strict, and the nephew
a man of fifty, with a broken nose and a government clerkship of two
thousand francs. She threw her old lady over, bought a paint-box, a
canvas, and a new dress, and went and set up her easel in the Louvre.
There in one place and another, she has passed the last two years; I
can't say it has made us millionaires. But Noemie tells me that Rome was
not built in a day, that she is making great progress, that I must leave
her to her own devices. The fact is, without prejudice to her genius,
that she has no idea of burying herself alive. She likes to see the
world, and to be seen. She says, herself, that she can't work in
the dark. With her appearance it is very natural. Only, I can't help
worrying and trembling and wondering what may happen to her there all
alone, day after day, amid all that coming and going of strangers. I
can't be always at her side. I go with her in the morning, and I come to