Though henceforward the ecclesiastical element, as an active factor, disappeared out of Hearn's life, he seems to have been pursued by a sort of half-insane fear of the possibility of Jesuitical revenge. The church, he declared, was inexorable and cruel; he preferred, therefore, not to place himself within the domain of her sway, holding aloof, as far as possible, from Roman Catholic circles in New Orleans, and renouncing the idea of a visit to the Spanish island of Manila.
It is easy to imagine the intellectual eagerness and curiosity—appanage of his artistic nature—with which Hearn must have entered Paris. Paris, where, as he says, "talent is mediocrity; art, a frenzied endeavour to express the Inexpressible; human endeavour, a spasmodic straining to clutch the Unattainable."
A few weeks would have sufficed to enable him to collect vital memories—memories to be used so often afterwards in his literary work.
It was the period just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris, under the Empire, had reached her zenith of talent and luxury. A strange mixture of frivolity and earnestness characterised the world of art. Theophile Gautier was writing his "Mdlle. de Maupin," while Victor Hugo was thundering forth his arraignment of Napoleon Buonaparte, and writing epics to Liberty. Hearn tells of French artists who made what they called "coffee pictures" by emptying the dregs of their coffee upon a sheet of soft paper after dinner at the Chat Noir, and by the suggestions of the shapes of the stains pictures were inspired and developed, according to the artistic capacity of the painter. Meanwhile, in his humble home in Brittany, François Millet, in poverty and solitude, was living face to face with Nature and producing "The Sowers" and "The Angelus."
Yet, even amongst the most dissipated members of this Parisian world of Bohemia, one principle was established and followed, and this principle it was that made it so invaluable a school for a nature such as Hearn's. Never was the artistic vocation to be abandoned for any other, however lucrative, not even when art remained blind and deaf to her worshippers. However forlorn the hope of ultimate success, it was the artist's duty to offer up burnt sacrifices on the altar of the divinity.
It is not to be wondered at that the boy was infected by the theory that ruled supreme of "art for art's sake." Art, not for the sake of the moral it might preach or the call on higher spiritual sentiments but for itself. This axiom it was that permeated the sinister perfection of Baudelaire, the verbal beauty of Flaubert, and the picturesqueness of Gautier. For a young craftsman still struggling with the manipulation of his material the "Impressionist school," as it was called, presented exceptional fascinations; and no doubt in that very slender outfit, which he tells us he carried in the emigrant train between New York and Cincinnati, some volumes of these French romantics were packed away. He could hardly have obtained them in the America of that day. The shelves of the Cincinnati Free Library might hold Henry James's "Essays" in praise of the modern French literary school, but the circulation of the originals would certainly not have been countenanced by the directors.
It is not impossible that, when in Paris, Lafcadio came across Robert Louis Stevenson. The year that he was born in the Ionian Islands, Stevenson was born amidst the fogs and mists of Edinburgh. He was the same age, therefore, as the little Irishman, and was in Paris at about the same time. Whistler, "the Laird" and Du Maurier were both also frequenting the Quartier, the latter collecting those impressions which he afterwards recounted in "Trilby"—"Trilby" of which Lafcadio writes later with the delight and appreciation of things experienced and felt.
In 1869 Lafcadio Hearn received a sum of money from those in Ireland who had taken the control of his life into their hands, and he was directed to leave Europe for Cincinnati in the United States of America. There he was consigned to the care of Mr. Cullinane, Henry Molyneux's brother-in-law.
It was characteristic that Hearn apparently did not attempt to propitiate or approach his grand-aunt, Mrs. Brenane, though he must have well known that by not doing so he forfeited all chance of any inheritance she might still have left to bestow upon him.