Cherbourg, though not yet at that time a great naval port, as it
afterwards became, was a busy harbour and fishing town, where the young
artist saw a great deal of a kind of life with which he possessed an
immense sympathy. The hard work of the fishermen putting out to sea on
stormy evenings, or toiling with their nets ashore after a sleepless
night, made a living picture which stamped itself deeply on his
receptive mind. A man of the people himself, born to toil and inured to
it from babyhood, this constant scene of toiling and struggling humanity
touched the deepest chord in his whole nature, so that some of the most
beautiful and noble of his early pictures are really reminiscences of
his first student days at Cherbourg. But after he had spent a year in
Mouchel's studio, sad news came to him from Gruchy. His father was
dying, and Francois was only just in time to see him before he passed
away. If the family was to be kept together at all, Francois must return
from his easel and palette, and take once more to guiding the plough.
With that earnest resolution which never forsook him, Millet decided to
accept the inevitable. He went back home once more, and gave up his
longings for art in order to till the ground for his fatherless sisters.

Luckily, however, his friends at Gruchy succeeded after awhile in
sending him back again to Cherbourg, where he began to study under
another master, Langlois, and to have hopes once more for his artistic
future, now that he was free at last to pursue it in his own way. At
this time, he read a great deal--Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron,
Goethe's "Faust," Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand; in fact, all the great
works he could lay his hands upon. Peasant as he was, he gave himself,
half unconsciously, a noble education. Very soon, it became apparent
that the Cherbourg masters could do nothing more for him, and that, if
he really wished to perfect himself in art, he must go to Paris. In