There was no school for the unfolding of this spirit, unlike its times, greater than the masters, and lonely. For as it proved for thirty years, the path of Puvis de Chavannes was to be a solitary way. He walked in it with front serene, and proud stoicism and a savage devotion, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, for who should observe or follow, making unerringly toward the brilliant goal and the immortal fame hidden from those who scoffed at him, and which even his vision but dimly saw. In 1850 a Pietà was accepted at the Salon; in 1861 “La Paix et la Guerre” received the second medal; one of the decorations was bought by the State, and the painter, in a glow of enthusiasm over this first recognition after eleven years of waiting, presented the other picture to the Musée at Amiens. These pictures, however, failed to win him general appreciation; he was the object of constant adverse criticism for thirty years, and it was sufficient for him to complete a work to awaken a perfect hubbub of abuse; he was the sport of the wit and the cartoonist, the artistic joke of the time. During this period he bent to his labour, his ears closed, his eyes open to all of beauty, and his mind free to receive impressions. To the heavenly vision alone he was obedient, and when, in 1892, public favour burst forth in a storm of applause, he seemed to hear it scarcely more than he had heard the noise of dispraise. In his atelier at Neuilly, an immense building full of scaffolding and apparatus for sustaining and elevating his pictures, he shut himself from the world and stood before his canvas from morning until night, never breaking his fast until he had completed nine hours of work. Infinitely apart, removed from critics and admirers, he was the absorbed dreamer, seeking ever to transmit, to make visible his dream. After his work-day was over he gave himself freely to his friends. To the struggling unknown he was most sympathetic, and the fact that a young artist was [Illustration: STE. GENEVIÈVE SERIES (Panthéon)] unpopular and misunderstood would win for him at once an interest from Puvis de Chavannes.