sleepless
night, made a living picture which stamped itself deeply on his
receptive mind. A man of the people himself, born to toil and inured
to it from babyhood, this constant scene of toiling and struggling
humanity touched the deepest chord in his whole nature, so that some of
the most beautiful and noble of his early pictures are really
reminiscences of his first student days at Cherbourg. But after he had
spent a year in Mouchel's studio, sad news came to him from Gruchy.
His father was dying, and Francois was only just in time to see him
before he passed away. If the family was to be kept together at all,
Francois must return from his easel and palette, and take once more to
guiding the plough. With that earnest resolution which never forsook
him, Millet decided to accept the inevitable. He went back home once
more, and gave up his longings for art in order to till the ground for
his fatherless sisters.

Luckily, however, his friends at Gruchy succeeded after awhile in
sending him back again to Cherbourg, where he began to study under
another master, Langlois, and to have hopes once more for his artistic
future, now that he was free at last to pursue it in his own way. At
this time, he read a great deal--Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron,
Goethe's "Faust," Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand; in fact, all the great
works he could lay his hands upon. Peasant as he was, he gave himself,
half unconsciously, a noble education. Very soon, it became apparent
that the Cherbourg masters could do nothing more for him, and that, if
he really wished to perfect himself in art, he must go to Paris. In
France, the national interest felt in painting is far greater and more
general than in England. Nothing is commoner than for towns or
departments to grant pensions (or as we should call them, scholarships)
to promising lads who wish to study art in Paris. Young Millet had
attracted so much attention at Cherbourg, that the Council General of
the Department of the Manche voted him a present of six hundred francs
(about 24 pounds) to start him on the way; and the town of Cherbourg
promised him an annual grant of four hundred francs more (about 16
pounds). So up to Paris Millet went, and there was duly enrolled as a
student at the Government "School of Fine-Arts."

Those student days in Paris were days of hunger and cold, very often,
which Millet bore with the steady endurance of a Norman peasant boy.
But they were also days of