the Lycee Charlemagne,
where he had Taine and About for fellow-collegians. This early success,
combined with the most untiring industry and steady, almost passionate,
devotion to his work, is one of the most remarkable biographical facts
on record. A year later the elder Dore died, and his widow came to Paris
to reside with her two sons, the chief expenses of the _menage_ being
supported by Gustave, then little more than sixteen years of age.
Between the years 1850 and 1870 he is said to have made by his pencil
seven millions of francs,--almost a million and a half of dollars.
Besides this enormous activity, a supreme and jealous ambition induced
him to undertake not only every piece of work offered, from
Bible-illustrations to a comic almanac, but whatever his brain or his
fancy could conceive as possible for artist to achieve. Inspiration
seized him at each new idea, bold and striking images, fantastic
fancies, all the splendors of a magnificent or grotesque ideal. His work
was a delirium; in a single morning he has been known to throw off
twenty blocks which brought him ten thousand francs. He was, however,
perpetually discontented, disgusted with his vocation, and envious of
successful painters. He had almost a convulsion one day on hearing that
Meissonier had received two hundred thousand francs for a single
painting. "What!" he exclaimed; "a thing like that? Now, look at me. I
can paint; I know I could paint better than Meissonier, at any rate.
Have I ever been paid two hundred thousand francs for anything? No; and
I never shall be. The fact is that no one understands me. I shall live
and die misunderstood, or never comprehended at all,--which is worse."
Fired by emulation, he shut himself up to create masterpieces which
should surpass Meissonier and paralyze the world; and in a short time he
showed his friend Lacroix twelve colossal canvases on which he had
painted revolting realistic pictures which he called the "Abominations
of Paris." "What do you think of Meissonier now?" he asked.

He longed ardently to be a painter, and was never at peace with critical
Paris while it refused him the name of painter and called him only a
designer. London was dearer to his heart from the fact that there were
enshrined in the Dore Gallery and made one of the sights of the town his
stupendous canvases imaging forth his conceptions of Scripture subjects.
What he might have done as a painter had he studied at any early age
under