France, the national interest felt in painting is far greater and more
general than in England. Nothing is commoner than for towns or
departments to grant pensions (or as we should call them, scholarships)
to promising lads who wish to study art in Paris. Young Millet had
attracted so much attention at Cherbourg, that the Council General of
the Department of the Manche voted him a present of six hundred francs
(about L24) to start him on the way; and the town of Cherbourg promised
him an annual grant of four hundred francs more (about L16). So up to
Paris Millet went, and there was duly enrolled as a student at the
Government "School of Fine Arts."

Those student days in Paris were days of hunger and cold, very often,
which Millet bore with the steady endurance of a Norman peasant boy. But
they were also days of something worse to him--of effort misdirected,
and of constant struggling against a system for which he was not fitted.
In fact, Millet was an original genius, whereas the teachers at the
School of Fine Arts were careful and methodical rule-of-thumb martinets.
They wished to train Millet into the ordinary pattern, which he could
not follow; and in the end, he left the school, and attached himself to
the studio of Paul Delaroche, then the greatest painter of historical
pictures in all Paris. But even Delaroche, though an artist of deep
feeling and power, did not fully understand his young Norman pupil. He
himself used to paint historical pictures in the grand style, full of
richness and beauty; but his subjects were almost always chosen from the
lives of kings or queens, and treated with corresponding calmness and
dignity. "The Young Princes in the Tower," "The Execution of Marie
Antoinette," "The Death of Queen Elizabeth," "Cromwell viewing the Body
of Charles I."--these were the kind of pictures on which Delaroche loved
to employ himself. Millet, on the other hand, though also full of
dignity and pathos, together with an earnestness far surpassing