"For more than half a century this brilliant group of men and women sustained the world of ideas and poetry," said Dumas, in his "Mémoires," "and I, too," he continued, "have reached the same plane ... unaided by intrigue or coterie, and using none other than my own work as the stepping-stone in my pathway." Dumas cannot be said to have been niggardly with his praise of the work of others. He said of a sonnet of Arnault's--"La Feuille"--that it was a masterpiece which an André Chénier, a Lamartine, or a Hugo might have envied, and that for himself, not knowing what his "literary brothers" might have done, he would have given for it "any one of his dramas." It was into the office of Arnault, who was chief of a department in the Université, that Béranger took up his labours as a copying-clerk,--as did Dumas in later years,--and it was while here that Béranger produced his first ballad, the "Roi d'Yvetot." In 1851 Millet was at his height, if one considers what he had already achieved by his "great agrarian poems," as they have been called. Gautier called them "Georgics in paint," and such they undoubtedly were. Millet would hardly be called a Parisian; he was not of the life of the city, but rather of that of the countryside, by his having settled down at Barbizon in 1849, and practically never left it except to go to Paris on business. His life has been referred to as one of "sublime monotony," but it was hardly that. It was a life devoted to the telling of a splendid story, that of the land as contrasted with that of the paved city streets. Corot was a real Parisian, and it was only in his early life in the provinces that he felt the bitterness of life and longed for the flagstones of the quais, for the Tuileries, the Seine, and his beloved Rue de Bac, where he was born on 10th Thermidor, Year IV. (July 28, 1796). Corot early took to painting the scenes of the metropolis, as we learn from his biography, notably at the point along the river bank where the London steamer moors to-day. But these have disappeared; few or none of his juvenile efforts have come down to us. Corot returned to Paris, after many years spent in Rome, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, when affairs were beginning to stir themselves in literature and art. In 1839 his "Site d'Italie" and a "Soir" were shown at the annual Salon,--though, of course, he had already been an exhibitor there,--and inspired a sonnet of Théophile Gautier, which concludes: "Corot, ton nom modest, écrit dans un coin noir."