He was at war with his environment; and the stern Puritan bias of his nature refused to conform to the free and easy ways of the gay metropolis. He sighed for a sight of the sea, and longed for the fields and homely companionship that Normandy held in store.
So we find him renouncing Paris life and going back to his own.
The grandmother greeted him as one who had won, but his father and mother, and he, himself, called it failure.
He started to work in the fields and fell fainting to the earth.
"He has been starved," said the village doctor. But when hunger had been appeased and strength came back, ambition, too, returned.
He would be an artist yet.
A commission for a group of family portraits came from a rich family at Cherbourg. Gladly he hastened thence to do the work.
While in Cherbourg he found lodgings in the household of a widow who had a daughter. The widow courted the fine young painter-man—courted him for the daughter. The daughter married him. A strong, simple man, unversed in the sophistry of society, loves the first woman he meets, provided, of course, she shows toward him a bit of soft, feminine sympathy. This accounts for the ease with which very young men so often fall in love with middle-aged women. The woman does the courting; the man idealizes, and endows the woman with all the virtues his imagination can conjure forth. Love is a matter of propinquity.
The wife of Jean Francois was neutral salts. She desired, no doubt, to do what was right and best, but she had no insight into her husband's needs, and was incapable of guessing his latent genius.
As for the new wife's mother and kinsmen, they regarded Jean Francois as simply lazy, and thought to crowd him into useful industry. He could paint houses or wagons, and, then, didn't the shipyard folks employ painters?