I remember being very much impressed with the shore of Ireland which showed once through the fog, looking so like a large emerald that I immediately saw where the island got its name. This dark, dark green, soaked in rain, was very extraordinary.
A brief stop at Liverpool, where a pretty barmaid drew me a tankard of stout that was the nearest thing to God’s nectar I ever tasted; then on to London; directly to Paris; the Hotel de Londres and—Julian’s!
Off the Passage de Panorama, which is just off the Boulevard, is the Galerie Montmartre. Here, up one flight of stairs, over a public cabinet d’aisance, in the dingiest place imaginable, was the Académie Julian. The room was dirty and dark, despite the skylight above; at one end a platform, and near it a soiled bit of drapery behind which the women models stripped. On a hot July day, what with paints, dirty Frenchmen, stuffy air, nude models, and the place below, this room stank worse than anything I can think of. Not much calculation for comfort, but possibly an enormous inspiration for genius.
Julian had his office below, but was not there with any regularity, generally coming in to loaf or to see new girls. He was a Hercules and quite a romantic figure, about whom there were many stories. They say he was the Masked Man who used to wrestle on the stage and at county fairs. This hulking fellow had been rather a good painter and had become a most successful business man. Born an Italian peasant, he had spent the early years of his life as a goatherd. To me he always looked exactly like a great big orangutan. The three hundred francs a year he received from each one of us seemed a small sum; but the models were paid only a few cents a day, the rental of the studio must have been negligible, and such men as Lefebvre, Boulanger, Bougereau, Tony Fleury, and after him Tony Robert Fleury, gave their instruction gratuitously. So it was not such a bad business deal after all.
One of the older students was the massier, or boss. He chose the model for the week or had one voted upon from the crowd of poor devils who lined the stairway every Monday morning in hopes of a job. This day we grabbed our places; first come, first served. If anyone came into the room, other than Julian or an ancien (old student), there were hurled at him paint tubes, stools, cigar butts, oaths, and comments upon his appearance and clothing. This was a tradition of the school and had to be lived up to.
Some of the pupils were old men with gray hair who had been there fifteen or twenty years, still working away, I suppose, like some men who stay in prison after their terms are up, having got used to the place. One day a tall Englishman—I think he called himself Vernon—turned up. He was about fifty-five years old, hollow cheeked, with sad eyes looking out from under great brows. He came every day and worked hard, but his painting was not very good. He always made a pretty model’s legs look like twisted rope. One morning he called me over to criticize his drawing, and I asked him why he was doing this. He told me he was an art lover, owned a great many pictures, and thought he would get a far greater appreciation of them by doing the actual work. He stayed about two months and some time after we learned that he was Lord Dufferin, who had just come from the post of Governor-General of Canada and was on his way to St. Petersburg. Imagine the shame of a certain pupil from England who had constantly boasted in a truly British manner (and, indeed, in “Mr. Vernon’s” very presence) of his close friendship with Lord Dufferin!
But all the students were not old. Most of them were quite young, and some very unsophisticated. I remember a blond fellow, green, and straight from the country, who had received a hundred francs a month from the citizens of his home town to complete his art education. One day he came running into the studio, breathless, stammering out a most amazing story. He had been staring in a jeweler’s window when a beautiful woman, “an angel,” approached him, saying:
“Who art thou?”
“Your servant.”
She took him by the arm to her barouche, and he drove with her to a magnificent house on the Champs Élysées. There servants took charge of him and arrayed him in fine clothing. The details of the next three days were very vague, but he lived in a dream. One of the things he did was to drive with her into the country at 4 A.M. to drink milk fresh from the cows. It was another story of Diana and Endymion, but all he could say was: