Chapter V: Adventures in Æstheticism _Paris and Student Days_ My first trip to Europe cost me forty dollars and my faith in human nature. The former was the price of an emigrant ticket on the boat and my food from London to Paris; the latter was caused by my lending a fellow passenger—a Frenchman—my best overcoat and never seeing it again. As he taught me a great deal of French, however, I may have been repaid. There was never an idle moment in the steerage. Every noon we were all hustled up onto the deck—even to a man with a broken back—and our bunks washed out with chloride of lime. This was before the days of wholesale fumigation, and the company was taking no chances. At mealtime were brought in huge baskets of bread and large cans of coffee; we produced our own dishes and were fed much in the fashion of a barbecue, with hunks of meat. After two days I was invited by the purser to sit at his table, and so dined in splendor with the cooks, steward, and “barkeep” on virtually the same fare as the first cabin. One night we arranged a mock marriage between a giggling Irish girl and rather a crazy fellow with a gray beard. I was the high priest. The barkeeper had given us some whisky and the noise of the merrymaking must have reached the upper deck, for just at its height the leading lady and some members of a well-known opera company that was crossing came down with the captain to see our show. I knew that this would mean the dampening of all our fun, so I stopped them, saying that we had not been invited to their entertainments, and demanded that the privacy of the emigrants should not be broken. The captain seemed amused, but agreed, and they went away, much to the annoyance of the opera star. I remember being very much impressed with the shore of Ireland which showed once through the fog, looking so like a large emerald that I immediately saw where the island got its name. This dark, dark green, soaked in rain, was very extraordinary. A brief stop at Liverpool, where a pretty barmaid drew me a tankard of stout that was the nearest thing to God’s nectar I ever tasted; then on to London; directly to Paris; the Hotel de Londres and—Julian’s! Off the Passage de Panorama, which is just off the Boulevard, is the Galerie Montmartre. Here, up one flight of stairs, over a public _cabinet d’aisance_, in the dingiest place imaginable, was the Académie Julian. The room was dirty and dark, despite the skylight above; at one end a platform, and near it a soiled bit of drapery behind which the women models stripped. On a hot July day, what with paints, dirty Frenchmen, stuffy air, nude models, and the place below, this room stank worse than anything I can think of. Not much calculation for comfort, but possibly an enormous inspiration for genius.