ve his faith in customers who will eat heartily and drink
of the best, borrow money to buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver
for a year. A colour merchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue
must be given to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of
animals, should find himself alone. And no sooner are these first
difficulties overcome than fresh perils spring up upon the other side;
and the bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate. This is the
crucial moment for the colony. If these intruders gain a footing, they
not only banish freedom and amenity; pretty soon, by means of their long
purses, they will have undone the education of the innkeeper; prices
will rise and credit shorten; and the poor painter must fare farther on
and find another hamlet. "Not here, O Apollo!" will become his song.
Thus Trouville and, the other day, St. Raphael were lost to the arts.
Curious and not always edifying are the shifts that the French student
uses to defend his lair; like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken
the waters of his chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a
purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him licence. Where his own purse and
credit are not threatened, he will do the honours of his village
generously. Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may
seek expression; science is respected; even the idler, if he prove, as
he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at home.
And when that essentially modern creature, the English or American
girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns as if into a
drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himself defenceless; he
submitted or he fled. His French respectability, quite as precise as
ours, though covering different provinces of life, recoiled aghast
before the innovation. But the girls were painters; there was nothing to
be done; and Barbizon, when I last saw it and for the time at least,
was practically ceded to the fair invader. Paterfamilias, on the other
hand, the common tourist, the holiday shopman, and the cheap young
gentleman upon the spree, he hounded from his villages with every
circumstance of contumely.

This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist. The lads
are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they
are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too
much occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matte