105. Now all this is related concerning the lad's early life by the prefatory and commenting author, as if expecting the general reader to admit that there had been some advantage for him in this manner of education:--that simplicity and devoutness are wholesome states of mind; that parish cures and uncle Abbes are not betrayers or devourers of youthful innocence--that there is profitable reading in the Bible, and something agreeably soothing--if not otherwise useful--in the sound of evening prayer. I may observe also in passing, that his education, thus far, is precisely what, for the last ten years, I have been describing as the most desirable for all persons intending to lead an honest and Christian life: (my recommendation that peasants should learn Latin having been, some four or five years ago, the subject of much merriment in the pages of _Judy_ and other such nurses of divine wisdom in the public mind.) It however having been determined by the boy's father that he should be a painter, and that art being unknown to the Abbe Charles and the village Cure (in which manner of ignorance, if the infallible Pope did but know it, he and his _now_ artless shepherds stand at a fatal disadvantage in the world as compared with monks who could illuminate with color as well as word)--the simple young soul is sent for the exalting and finishing of its artistic faculties to Paris. 106. "Wherein," observers my prefatory author, "the romantic movement was in the full tide of prosperity." Hugo had written "Notre Dame," and Musset had published "Rolla" and the "Nuits"; Balzac the "Lys dans la Vallee"; Gautier the "Comedie de la Mort"; Georges Sand "Leone Leonie"; and a score of wild and eloquent novels more; and under the instruction of these romantic authors, his landlady, to whom he had intrusted the few francs he possessed, to dole out to him as he needed, fell in love with him, and finding he could not, or would not, respond to her advances, confiscated the whole deposit, and left him penniless. The preface goes on to tell us how, not feeling himself in harmony with these forms of Romanticism, he takes to the study of the Infinite, and Michael Angelo; how he learned to paint the Heroic Nude; how he mixed up for imitation the manners of Rubens, Ribera, Mantegna, and Correggio; how he struggled all his life with neglect, and endured with his family every agony of poverty; owed his butcher and his grocer, was exposed to endless worry and annoyance from writs and executions; and when first his grandmother died, and then his mother, neither death-bed was able to raise the money that would have carried him from Barbizon to Gruchy.