walks, sitting on benches,
leaning over parapets, and longing to tell people who he was, his
age, how little money he'd got, what lots of friends he had in
England, what a nice little English girl he knew, whose portrait he
didn't know how to paint--any idiotic nonsense that came into his
head, so at least he might talk about something or somebody that
interested him.

There is no city like Paris, no crowd like a Parisian crowd, to make
you feel your solitude if you are alone in its midst!

At night he read French novels in bed and drank eau sucree and
smoked till he was sleepy; then he cunningly put out his light, and
lit it again in a quarter of an hour or so, and exploded what
remained of the invading hordes as they came crawling down the wall
from above. Their numbers were reduced at last; they were
disappearing. Then he put out his candle for good, and went to sleep
happy--having at least scored for once in the twenty-four hours.
Mort aux punaises!

Twice he went to the Opera Comique, and saw _Richard Coeur de Lion_
and _le Pre aux Clercs_ from the gallery, and was disappointed, and
couldn't understand why _he_ shouldn't sing as well as that--he
thought he could sing much better, poor fellow! he had a delightful
voice, and charm, and the sense of tune and rhythm, and could please
quite wonderfully--but he had no technical knowledge whatever, and
couldn't be depended upon to sing a song twice the same! He trusted
to the inspiration of the moment--like an amateur.

Of course he had to be very economical, even about candle ends, and
almost liked such economy for a change; but he got sick of his
loneliness, beyond expression--he was a fish out of water.

Then he took it into his head to go and copy a picture at the
Louvre--an old master; in this he felt he could not go wrong. He
obtained the necessary permission, bought a canvas six feet high,
and sat himself before a picture by Nicolas Poussin, I think: a
group of angelic women carrying another woman though the air up to
heaven.

They were not very much to his taste, but more so than any others.
His chief notion about women in pictures was that they should be
very beautiful--since they cannot make themselves agreeable in any
other way; and they are not always so in the works of the great
masters. At least, _he_ thought not. These are matters of taste, of
course.

He had no notion of how to divide his canvas into squares--a device
by which one makes it easie