“He’s a fool!” we would exclaim, “he will never be any thing.” Laugh not, dear reader, at our blindness; even great men have been known to undervalue youthful genius. The crisis which followed the accession of Louis Philippe, did not overthrow the establishment, but it affected the school, and Salaville was dismissed with those who were not actually needed. Once in a while he would come in to inquire after the prospect of work; and when we would ironically congratulate him on his love for study, without reply he would throw off, with two or three strokes of the crayon, ludicrous sketchy caricatures. We accused him to ourselves of idleness, and thought him good for nothing, because he did not spend his days as we did daubing crooked palms, which we modestly called compositions, simpletons that we were. Without any apparent labor, as it were from the instinct that draws the bee to the rose, or the plant to the sun, he would sketch with boyish glee bits of exquisite designs—in one place a smoky hut, over whose broken, ruined roof the ivy gracefully twined; in another a noisy mill, surrounded with the sweeping foliage of the willow’s weaving branches; here and there clusters of drooping, bell-shaped flowers and wild jonquils twining together in luxuriant confusion; then in another corner of the paper a group of laughing, half-naked children, playing with one of those huge, long-eared dogs that the amiable Winterhalter calls the “First Friend!” To facilitate universal harmony, to inspire us with a desire to aid and love each other, the Creator divides his gifts: upon one is bestowed strength, upon another intelligence; to Salaville has been given the imagination of a poet and the susceptibility of a woman. Several years passed in an idle, wandering way, feeling acutely, and sketching instinctively the beauties of nature, would, as one can readily imagine, produce a remarkable effect on such an organization as Salaville possesses. He did not seek to acquire knowledge, as Montaigne would have said, it came and incorporated itself with his soul. He led this errant life until, when about twenty, wishing to marry, he felt the necessity of applying himself more seriously to his business, and under this influence his compositions shot out fresh and brilliant from his brain, like the drooping grass and blossoms bent with the spray of the falling cascade raise themselves under the genial beams of the warm sun. The talents of an artist like Salaville are stifled in a town whose manufacturers are distinguished rather for the economy of their combinations than for the fineness of their webs. In 1839, Salaville came to Paris. He did not make this move for the purpose of bettering his condition, for at Nîmes he had an honorable and advantageous position. But he hoped by removing to the capital to be enabled to execute the rich compositions his imagination conceived.