h Millet himself detested--all pink cheeks, and red lips,
and blue satin, and lace collars; whereas his own natural style was one
of great austerity and a certain earnest sombreness the exact reverse
of the common Parisian taste to which he ministered. However, he had
to please his patrons--and, like a sensible man, he went on producing
these cheap daubs to any extent required, for a living, while he
endeavoured to perfect himself meanwhile for the higher art he was
meditating for the future. In the great galleries of the Louvre at
Paris he found abundant models which he could study in the works of the
old masters; and there, poring over Michael Angelo and Mantegna, he
could recompense himself a little in his spare hours for the time he
was obliged to waste on pinky-white faces and taffeta gowns. To an
artist by nature there is nothing harder than working perforce against
the bent of one's own innate and instinctive feelings.

In 1840, Millet found his life in Paris still so hard that he seemed
for a time inclined to give up the attempt, and returned to Greville,
where he painted a marine subject of the sort that was dearest to his
heart--a group of sailors mending a sail. Shortly after, however, he
was back in Paris--the record of these years of hard struggle is not
very clear--with his wife, a Cherbourg girl whom he had imprudently
married while still barely able to support himself in the utmost
poverty. It was not till 1844 that the hard-working painter at last
achieved his first success. It was with a picture of a milkwoman, one
of his own favourite peasant subjects; and the poetry and sympathy
which he had thrown into so commonplace a theme attracted the attention
of many critics among the cultivated Parisian world of art. The
"Milkwoman" was exhibited at the Salon (the great annual exhibition of
works of art in Paris, like that of the Royal Academy in London, but on
a far larger scale); and several good judges of art began immediately
to inquire, "Who is Jean Francois Millet?" Hunting his address out, a
party of friendly critics presented themselves at his lodgings, only to
learn that Madame Millet had just died, and that her husband, half in
despair, had gone back again once more to his native Norman hills and
valleys.

But Millet was the last man on earth to sit down quietly with his hands
folded, waiting for something or other to turn up. At Cherbourg, he
set to work once more, no doubt painting more