He was painting the portrait of some rich man's daughter at the time, and her family took a patronizing interest in him, and said it was a pity that he did not go out more into society and get commissions. They asked me to tell him to be more careful about his dress, and to suggest to him not to wear a high hat with a sack-coat. I told them to leave him alone, and not to worry about his clothes, or to suggest his running after people who had pretty daughters and money enough to have them painted. These people would run after him soon enough, if he went on as he had begun.
"'I HAVE ONE PICTURE IN THE SALON'"
When I saw him on the boulevards the next summer he had to reintroduce himself; he was very smartly dressed, in a cheap way, and he was sipping silly little sweet juices in front of a café. He was flushed and nervous and tired looking, and rattled off a list of the fashionable people who were then in Paris as correctly as a Galignani reporter could have done it.
"How's art?" I asked.
"Oh, very well," he replied. "I had a picture in the Salon last year, and another was commended at Munich, and I had another one at the Fair. That's pretty good for my first two years abroad, isn't it?"
The next year I saw him several times with various young women in the court-yard of the Grand Hôtel, than which there is probably no place in all Paris less Parisian. They seemed to be models in street dress, and were as easy to distinguish as a naval officer in citizen's clothes. He stopped me once again before I left Paris, and invited me to his studio to breakfast. I asked him what he had to show me there.