ut to no avail.
Why?

There was a reason. Bohemian as was the artist during the last decade
of his life, he did not always haunt low cafes and drink absinthe. His
beginnings were as romantic as a page of Balzac. He was born a
gentleman _a la main gauche_. His father was the doctor and private
secretary of Lady Stanhope. Charles Lewis Meryon was an English
physician, who, falling in love with a ballet dancer at the Opera,
Pierre Narcisse Chaspoux, persuaded her that it would be less selfish
on her part if she would not bind him to her legally. November
23,1821, a sickly, nervous, and wizened son was born to the pair and
baptised with his father's name, who, being an alien, generously
conceded that much. There his interest ceased. On the mother fell the
burden of the boy's education. At five he was sent to school at Passy
and later went to the south of France. In 1837 he entered the Brest
naval school, and 1839 saw him going on his maiden voyage. This first
trip was marred by the black sorrow that fell upon him when informed
of his illegitimate birth. "I was mad from the time I was told of my
birth," he wrote, and until madness supervened he suffered from a
"wounded imagination." He was morbid, shy, and irritable, and his
energy--the explosive energy of this frail youth was amazing; because
he had been refused the use of a ship boat he wasted three months
digging out a canoe from a log of wood. Like Paul Gauguin, he saw many
countries, and his eyes were trained to form, though not colour--he
suffered from Daltonism--for when he began to paint he discovered he
was totally colour-blind. The visible world for him existed as a
contrapuntal net-work of lines, silhouettes, contours, or heavy dark
masses. When a sailor he sketched. Meryon tells of the drawing of a
little fungus he found in Akaroa. "Distorted in form and pinched and
puny from its birth, I could not but pity it; it seemed to me so
entirely typical of the inclemency and at the same time of the
whimsicality of an incomplete and sickly creation that I could not
deny it a place in my _souvenirs de voyage_, and so I drew it
carefully." This bit of fungus was to him a symbol of his own gnarled
existence.

Tiring of ship life, he finally decided to study art. He had seen New
Zealand, Australia, Italy, New Caledonia, and if his splendid
plate--No. 22 in M. Burty's list--is evidence, he must have visited
San Francisco. Baudelaire, in L'Art Romantique, speaks of this
pe