A man, perhaps not so well known as the Barbizon painters, but certainly much more interesting than the majority of them, was Professor Lainey. He looked an old man when I knew him, white haired and a chatterbox. For years he had taught drawing in the schools of Fontainebleau.
In his youth Professor Lainey had hoped to become an actor and had joined a class to study for the stage. Among the pupils was a little Jewess, fourteen years old, plain looking and poorly dressed, and as it was his fate to take the same omnibus with her, politeness demanded that he escort her to her door. This he hated to do, as she was a most hopeless-looking creature and he was cad enough to be ashamed to be seen with her. One day in class, the teacher asked her to deliver a line of Racine, and said:
“Shall I give it as I was told to, or as it should be rendered?”
Very amused, he replied: “Mademoiselle will be good enough to give it first as she has been told to give it, and afterward the class will be delighted to hear her improvement.”
She obeyed, and Professor Lainey added: “For the first time I understood Racine.”
Continuing, he said: “I saw no more of her until I was an art student in Paris. One night I went to the Théâtre Français, and there upon the stage appeared the little Jewess of my class. She was none other then the divine Sarah!”
Poor, plain, and of a despised race, even as a child her brain had begun to work. Like Christ, as a boy before the elders, she told them, not they her.
Professor Lainey had been in Fontainebleau during the Franco-Prussian War and remembered the invasion of Barbizon. The franc-tireurs (citizen troops), of which he was a member, were a constant bother to the Germans. One of their pranks was to stretch a wire across the road, just the height of a rider, and they finally succeeded in decapitating an orderly. The Germans decided that some one must hang for it, and, being unable to find the guilty one, they chose a dozen men and told them to draw lots. Not liking to kill one of the prominent citizens with whom they had been playing cards all winter in quite a friendly manner, they put on the list a man whom we call a “natural,” then winked and walked away. But they reckoned without the French nature. These men refused to sacrifice the poor half-wit, and said:
“Hang all or any one of us. We will not choose.”
France is still covered with the evidences of monarchs, and one of the best reasons why kings no longer rule and the Third Empire went to pieces still remains in Fontainebleau Forest. In walking about, one has to use the utmost care, as one is constantly catching his foot and taking a “header.” All around, underneath the brush and now entirely covered by it, are paths of asphalt, miles and miles of them, literally riddling the whole woods. These were laid by her generous spouse so that the Empress Eugènie could follow the boar hunt in her Parisian shoes and not wet her feet on the grass!