Six or eight years later Nadeje was entered as a pupil at the Conservatoire, and Paul, under the tuition of Bouguereau, exhibited at the Salon a portrait of a child which won an honorable mention and made him known.
Paul had grown up into a handsome young fellow, well built and strong. With his dark complexion, fine black eyes, and silky beard in its first growth, it was easy to guess that he would be successful among the women. But under this outward show of strength the young painter had a character lacking in energy and originality. Lazy and effeminate, he was entirely under the rule of his mother, and above all, of his sister-in-law, Mme. Frantz Meyrin. She was the autocrat of the household. She governed them all, her husband—a good fellow, who was untiring in his work as a teacher and player—as well as Paul, whose rare and feeble attempts at self-emancipation she repressed. The violinist's wife was proud and weak about her daughter alone, in favor of whose future everything had to give way.
Through a psychological phenomenon which, becoming commoner from day to day, is a mark of our practical epoch, all in this family of artistes, for Mme. Meyrin herself was an excellent musician—was tradesman-like and prosaic—manners, dispositions, tastes, aspirations. Success was only success with them when it brought in plenty of money. It mattered nothing to Mme. Meyrin whether her husband had executed a piece of music in a masterly manner, or Paul had drawn with skill a child's head. How much had been paid for them? That was the only question, as well too, unhappily, for Frantz and his brother as for the mistress of the household.
While devoting themselves to their work at the time of doing it, the musician and the painter did not linger long in these regions of high art after they had laid aside the one his violin, the other his brush. They did not work without taste, but they worked in the most prosaic acceptation of the word, hastening in a sense to finish the task that the material wants of life put upon them.
Their mode of life had its natural results in the matter of friendships and acquaintances. Though justice was done to his talents and modesty and tact, Frantz got no higher than being a paid musician at the houses where he played. As much from economy as through her indifference to society, Mme. Meyrin held few receptions. She gave in the course of a winter three or four musical matinées, to show off her husband's pupils, and especially her daughter.
As for the friends of the family, they numbered a dozen at most—some countrymen of theirs, a few musicians, Armand Dumesnil, an old actor at the Odéon, and a young woman, Mme. Daubrel, the heroine of a very painful story.
Married when quite young to a man in a large way of business as an export agent, an honest fellow, Marthe Daubrel, who was of a romantic turn of mind and was often left alone by her husband, had listened to the madrigals of a third-class writer. Thanks to her romantic imagination and her inexperience, she had yielded to him, was about to become a mother, and had confessed everything to her husband, who, instead of taking a violent revenge, appealed to the law, a judicial separation being decreed on his petition. He returned her dowry to his adulterous wife, and emigrated, taking with him the son she had borne to him before her fall.
Within three months' time Mme. Daubrel was delivered of a daughter, who lived but a few weeks. Her illusions dispelled, she broke off all intercourse with her seducer, returned to her mother, and, gentle and resigned, speaking of her husband only with the greatest respect, determined to expiate the past by conduct irreproachable at all points. She lived isolated, and saw scarcely anybody but the Meyrins. She had been one of the first pupils of Mme. Frantz when she, on first coming to Paris, had to give lessons on the pianoforte to increase the resources of the family. With an indulgence one would scarcely have looked for in her, Mme. Meyrin excused, pitied the poor woman, and liked her very much.
As for Paul, his natural idleness, his want of backbone, the surroundings he lived amid, all had a bad influence on his talents. It was to be feared that he would never rise to higher work than that which had at first occupied him; that he would remain a painter, in a pleasing fashion, of women and children, and faithful to his blue and pink colors.
However, he made headway, and chiefly in the Russian colony.