But by a providential hazard, the short conversation which followed as a matter of civility before leave-taking touched upon the subject of life-masks. At that time life-masks happened to be quite the rage: people had their faces moulded in plaster just as nowadays they sit for a photograph; and young Meissonier related, not without vanity, that on the preceding Sunday he had taken the mask of the Johannot brothers, and he added that he knew those two princes of engraving quite intimately. Famous acquaintances are always useful; the proof of this is that M. Curmer accepted an invitation to go the following Sunday to Meissonier's studio, to sit for his life-mask,--and, once there, it was impossible for him not to order an aquarelle. The door of this publishing house, however, was as yet only half-way open to the artist; for when his friend Marville, "an etcher in soft-ground, mediocre but prolific," talked of having him collaborate on the Curmer edition of _Paul and Virginia_, the publisher, a prey once more to his original distrust, entrusted him to begin with,--with just one of the special illustrations,--to re-engrave! Meissonier acquitted himself brilliantly of this half-task, with the result that he was entrusted with several other illustrations for the celebrated edition of _Paul and Virginia_, of which no bibliophile can ever speak without enthusiasm. But, on the other hand, he had an entire series to make for an edition, no less sumptuous, of _The Indian Cabin_, also a work of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. FIRST SUCCESS And then, in the words of one of his contemporaries: "The first rays of fame that caressed him streamed from those admirable and diminutive drawings for _The Indian Cabin_. He had done much sketching in the Jardin des Plantes, in the conservatories, where the flora of the tropics expanded opulently; also, before the windows of those shops of bric-a-brac, abounding in exotic objects, which in those bygone days stretched in a row facing the entrance to the Louvre, on the Place du Carrousel. All that he had to do was to rummage among those sketches in order to give his composition an inimitable stamp of truth, such as was seldom attempted by illustrators of his nation. It was a simple thing to convert into an ornamental letter a storm-broken lily, a group of Indian weapons, some Javanese musical instruments. If the text called for the 'emblems of mental toil,' the young artist heaped his table with volumes bound in parchment or full calf, acquired for a few sous from the stands along the quays, and he had only to copy, with all the naïveté of the Primitives, the gleam of the edges, the bands on the backs, the slips of paper alternating with the silken bookmarks."