But, as may be imagined, these tumultuous polemics were not calculated to reassure a thoroughly pacific bourgeois, already much alarmed to find that he had begotten an artist. And just at this crisis another damnatory report exploded, this time from a master of the eighth form in a school on the Rue de Jouy: "Ernest has a decided talent for drawing. The mere sight of a picture often takes our attention from our serious duties." This diagnosis, so categoric underneath its familiar form and somewhat faulty grammar, sounded a serious cry of alarm. It was promptly heeded by the father, and young Ernest was forthwith entered as a druggist's apprentice, in a house on the Rue des Lombards. Yet it was not long afterwards, thanks to a dogged persistence, that the lad had overcome paternal opposition and was allowed to do head studies in charcoal, at the studio of a certain Julien Petier, whose slender artistic fame rested solely upon the fact that, once upon a time, he won the _grand prix de Rome_. Meissonier very shortly quitted this somewhat dull discipline, and he stayed scarcely longer in the studio of Léon Cogniet, which at that time was quite celebrated. Yet during the four months that he remained under the guidance of the worthy author of _The Four Seasons_, it must be admitted that he laboured greatly to the profit of his art. M. Phillippe Burty, his contemporary and his first biographer, explains to us that, while at Cogniet's, young Meissonier did not work like the other students, from casts or nude models: "He passed his days in an enclosure adjoining the studio, where the master was engaged upon his ceiling painting for the Louvre, the _Expedition into Egypt_, and hired by the day soldiers in republican uniform, dragoons, artillerymen and their horses." In the midst of this resurrection of a past that was still quite recent, in the very presence of the stage setting, the reproduction of the Napoleonic Epic, he suddenly conceived of it as the greatest of all subjects that might tempt his accurate artist fingers. It must have seemed to him, later on, that he himself had witnessed its close. [Illustration: PLATE III.--THE CONFIDENCE (Chauchard Bequest, Musée du Louvre) This painting, given to the Louvre in 1908 by M. Chauchard, is one of the most beautiful in that famous collection, owing to the incomparable naturalness of the attitudes, as well as to the finished art of its composition.] But while waiting to achieve his dream, he had to achieve a living. This was not easy. His father spared him an allowance of fifteen francs a month, not counting the privilege of dining at home once a week, and from time to time allowed himself to be cajoled into buying a small aquarelle.