In six months it was gone.
They were penniless.
The mother sold her wedding-ring and the brooch her husband had given her before they were married.
Then the furniture went to the pawnbroker's, piece by piece.
One day Ary came bounding up the stairs, three steps at a time. He burst into the room and tossed into his mother's lap fifty francs.
When he got his breath he explained that he had sold his first picture.
Ary, the elder boy, was eighteen; Henri, the younger, was thirteen. "It was just like a play, you see," said Ary Scheffer, long years afterward. "When things get desperate enough they have to mend—they must. The pictures I painted were pretty bad, but I really believe they were equal to many that commanded large prices, and I succeeded in bringing a few buyers around to my views. Genius may starve in a garret, if alone; but the genius that would let its best friends starve, too, being too modest to press its claims, is a little lacking somewhere."
Young Scheffer worked away at any subject he thought would sell. He painted just as his teacher, Guerin, told him, and Guerin painted just like his idol, David, or as nearly as he could.
Art had gotten into a fixed groove; laws had been laid down as to what was classic and what not. Conservatism was at the helm.
Art, literature, philosophy, science, even religion, have their periods of infancy, youth, manhood and decay. And there comes a time to every school, and every sect, when it ceases to progress. When it says, "There now, this is perfection, and he who seeks to improve on it is anathema," it is dead, and should be buried. But schools and sects and creeds die hard. Creeds never can be changed: they simply become obsolete and are forgotten; they turn to dust and are blown away on the free winds of heaven.