eople in his "long atelier"--"including a
lot of French who _say_ (but I don't believe it) that they know
English"--to whom Dickens, by special entreaty, read his _Cricket on
the Hearth_.

That was at the close of November. January came, and the end of the
sittings was supposed to be at hand. "The nightmare portrait is nearly
done; and Scheffer promises that an interminable sitting next Saturday,
beginning at 10 o'clock in the morning, shall finish it. It is a fine
spirited head, painted at his very best, and with a very easy and
natural appearance in it. But it does not look to me at all like, nor
does it strike me that if I saw it in a gallery I should suppose myself
to be the original. It is always possible that I don't know my own face.
It is going to be engraved here, in two sizes and ways--the mere head
and the whole thing." A fortnight later, the interminable sitting came.
"Imagine me if you please with No. 5 on my head and hands, sitting to
Scheffer yesterday four hours! At this stage of a story, no one can
conceive how it distresses me." Still this was not the last. March had
come before the portrait was done. "Scheffer finished yesterday; and
Collins, who has a good eye for pictures, says that there is no man
living who could do the painting about the eyes. As a work of art I see
in it spirit combined with perfect ease, and yet I don't see myself. So
I come to the conclusion that I never _do_ see myself. I shall be very
curious to know the effect of it upon you." March had then begun; and at
its close Dickens, who had meanwhile been in England, thus wrote: "I
have not seen Scheffer since I came back, but he told Catherine a few
days ago that he was not satisfied with the likeness after all, and
thought he must do more to it. My own impression of it, you remember?"
In these few words he anticipated the impression made upon myself. I was
not satisfied with it. The picture had much merit, but not as a
portrait. From its very resemblance in the eyes and mouth one derived
the sense of a general unlikeness. But the work of the artist's brother,
Henri Scheffer, painted from the same sittings, was in all ways greatly
inferior.

Before Dickens left Paris in May he had sent over two descriptions that
the reader most anxious to follow him to a new scene would perhaps be
sorry to lose. A Duchess was murdered in the Champs Elysees. "The murder
over the way (the third or fourth event of that nature in the Champs
Elysees s