I. One hot August forenoon, some years ago, two men met at a certain point of the coast of Normandy, and shook hands with mutual good-will. The elder of these men had lived in the world about five-and-thirty years; he had had losses, and successes as well; but the latter, happening to have arrived a year or so after he had got tired of waiting for them, found him grown a trifle soured and cynical, and apt to carp at the sunshine which had withheld its warmth from his bones until they had contracted an ineradicable chill. His bitterness was perhaps more of the head than of the heart, but was none the less observable on that account. He was an Englishman by birth, and a born painter also--at least in his own opinion. He had begun his career with the firm persuasion that his genius entitled him not only to hang on the line at the Academy, but to be one of the hangmen. The Royal Academicians did not immediately fall in with his views on either point; and when, after many years, they relented, and gave his picture the place of honour, and intimated their purpose of filling with his name the first vacancy on their august roll, this lofty and unforgiving gentleman made a bow and begged to be excused. He had made his name known without the Academy's help; he had won pecuniary independence in a land where the word of the Academy was not law; and he would now, therefore, with all due respect to the members of that body, see every mother's son of them at the deuce before he would have anything to do with them. Such an ultimatum necessarily finished the episode; the Academy preserved a dignified silence, and the lofty and unforgiving gentleman continued to spend the best part of his time in Paris, exhibiting every year in the Salon, and telling the story of his quarrel with the English potentates to whomsoever cared to hear an amusing anecdote caustically related. He was a lengthy, meagre, harsh-featured personage, this same cynical artist, but he prided himself on the Parisian polish of his manners and his French accent, and he was, in fact, a good deal of a favourite in society.