My first showing was at the Salon of ’81. We students used to congregate at the Palais de l’Industrie and watch the four or five thousand pictures arrive for selection. From these only about two thousand were chosen. We were a great crowd, lining the grand stairway or sitting on the balustrade, and it was everybody’s business to be funny. First would come vans and wagons from which would issue twenty and sometimes forty pictures; then messengers; poor artists with their one creation; and last the commissionaires who carried the canvases on the easel-like thing they had on their shoulders. Of course, the barnyard pictures brought forth loud cackles and crows—this being my special accomplishment. Every now and then some girl would arrive with a portait of “Mother” (too poor to have it sent). Everyone would weep copiously. Up the stairway, with great ceremony, would come a portrait of some high official; we would all assume a manner of awe, but as it turned the corner—loud shouts of “_Merde!_” I remember mine (I was so ashamed of it) in a big frame so large that it had to be borne by two men. It was a portrait of a Scotchman in kilts. “_À biens l’horreur!_ It is of our friend Simmons. Shame! Shame!” (for the bare knees). Up it went, and a big red-headed man from Julian’s rose and said: “Silence for a while and tears.” At last a wave of quiet—serious this time—and whispers all up and down the line. “Sh! It is the master!” A Jules Lefebvre had arrived. Pictures accepted and hung, varnishing day was the next excitement. Everyone of importance and all fashion turned out. New York society cannot conceive of what a place the fine arts have in France. Women of note at the gates with their _quêteuses_, soliciting money for charity; inside, great masses of people go through the galleries together, with some such person as Sarah Bernhardt at the head and the lesser following. I remember seeing Madame De Gautrot, the noted beauty of the day, and could not help stalking her as one does a deer. Representing a type that never has appealed to me (black as spades and white as milk), she thrilled me by the very movement of her body. She walked as Vergil speaks of goddesses—sliding—and seemed to take no steps. Her head and neck undulated like that of a young doe, and something about her gave you the impression of infinite proportion, infinite grace, and infinite balance. Every artist wanted to make her in marble or paint, and, although she has been done innumerable times, no one has succeeded. At one Salon, in the early ’eighties, two Frenchmen, with flowing ties and low collars, stepped in front of me to look at a landscape by Boutet de Monvel. One said: “There is a girl in England named Kate Greenaway who is doing some very clever work. She doesn’t know anything about drawing or color, but her idea is certainly original. Some day some man will take it and get a great name by it.”