Babcock, an American painter, had lived there for twenty years. He was one of those beings who had been soured by time and had come to know that the world was all wrong. He almost always went out of his back door, and if ever he emerged from the front it was in the dead of night. He had sat at the feet of Millet and had a portfolio of twenty or thirty drawings that the great artist had thrown away. He told me with joy that Millet would crumple up his self-condemned work and throw it into a box behind the stove. Every once in a while Babcock would fish out one and open it up, Millet yelling at him all the time. Nothing daunted, he would retreat like a dog with a bone. Even the garbage can is not sacred to some people. In Boston, Millet has been overrated (W. M. Hunt did it). Once he sold a picture for two thousand francs, the highest price he had received up to that time. He was most human and, like all artists, optimistic, so he immediately hired a professor to come out from Paris and tutor his children, and hired saddle horses for them to ride upon in the park. Of course, this period of affluence did not last, and when he died, at about fifty-nine years of age, he was supposed to be a poor man, cursed by fate; yet he had received an order from the Pope and decorations from his own government. This is not a case of neglected genius. I was still under thirty when I met Mrs. Millet. She immediately asked: “You paint? Then might I, as an older woman, give a bit of advice? Remember you run the risk of making any woman you marry unhappy.” (I can hear her voice now, as we sat at the table d’hôte.) “A woman who marries an artist must realize beforehand that he will never care for her alone. She must look forward always to playing second fiddle to something else. If he is a true artist, it is his painting, if not—but she will always be second fiddle just the same. If she has the capacity to adapt herself to that position, she will be happy. I, myself, have been a happy woman.” Robert Louis Stevenson had just left Barbizon a short time before my first visit. I was avid to hear about him and tried in vain to get them to give me some details of his character and personality. But all the boys said, indifferently: “Oh yes, he writes, but his cousin is much the cleverer author.” And they had read the _Lodging for the Night_! Not a very good recommendation for the literary acumen of painters. We led a lazy life out there, with rarely a tinge of excitement. We were all in the same financial class and, I imagine, in about the same state of blissful innocence and ignorance of the world. I remember a very pretty girl of the Paris gay life, who was advised to go to Barbizon for a rest and to freshen up a bit. We were thrilled at her appearance and entertained her as if she were a _grande dame_. She was evidently in no way pleased, but very much puzzled, when she went back to Paris and told a friend: