The days were fulfilled. The child was born.
The heir was a girl.
Raymond Bonheur cursed wildly and tousled his hair like a bouffe artist. He swore he had been tricked, trapped, seduced, undone. He would have bought strong drink, but he had no money, and credit, like hope, was gone.
The little mother cried.
But the baby grew, although it wasn't a very big baby. They named her Rosa, because the initial was the same as Raymond, but they always called her Rosalie.
Then in a year another baby came, and that was a boy. In two years another, but Raymond never forgave his wife that first offense. He continued to struggle, trying various styles of pictures and ever hoping he would yet hit on what the public desired. Mr. Vanderbilt had not yet made his famous remark about the public, and how could Raymond plagiarize it in advance?
At last he got money enough to get to Paris—ah, yes, Paris, Paris, there talent is appreciated!
In Paris another baby was born—it was looked upon as a calamity. The poor little mother of the four little shivering Bonheurs ceased to struggle. She lay quite still, and they covered her face with a white sheet and talked in whispers, and walked on tiptoe, for she was dead.
When an artist can not succeed, he begins to teach art—that is, he shows others how. Raymond Bonheur put his four children out among kinsmen in four different places, and became drawing-master in a private school. Rosa Bonheur was ten years old: a pug-nosed, square-faced little girl in a linsey-woolsey dress, wooden shoon, with a yellow braid hanging down her back tied with a shoestring. She could draw—all children can draw—and the first things children draw are animals.