Still, from his window Ned could enjoy to look, as from a box in a theatre of varieties, upon a scene of possibilities infinite to an artist. He had flown from green pastures and drowsy woods--where revolutionary propagandism, however violently uttered, must waste itself on remote echo-surfaces--straight into a resounding city of narrow ways, a Paris of blusterers and _mégères_, of controversialists and tractarians, of winged treatises and fluttering pandects. The streets were as full of the latter as if paper-chase were the daily pastime of the populace. Only the hounds, it seemed, never ran the hares to earth; and the hares themselves were March ones, by every token of incoherence. And “Surely,” thought the young man, “it is to be needlessly alarmist to read upheaval in this yeasty ferment. Let the Bastille fall, and there behind shall show nothing more formidable than the blank brick wall of the theatre.” But at least all his perspectives teemed with colour. The national complexion, he could have thought, revealed itself in its hottest dyes in this quarter of the town. Here were no subdued tones of speech or apparel, no powdered flunkeyism deprecating the brutal outspokenness of nature. St Antoine, even this west side of the prison bar, took life on the raw; dressed loudly as it talked; discussed its viands and its hopes with an equal appetite for un- and re-dress; was always far readier to hang a man than a joint of beef--instinctively, perhaps, to make him that was hard tender. And to this unposturing attitude Ned felt his sympathies extend. Here, at the smallest, was nakedness unashamed--material, not, as St Denys would have it, for indulgence, but for the re-ordering of a world that had confusedly strayed, not so far, from the paths of truth to itself. Moreover, the light, the life, the movement had their many appeals to his artistic perceptives. These latter, greatly stimulated in little Méricourt, found themselves ten times awake to this second dawn of experience. He had never been in Paris before, and it was now his fate to alight and sojourn in it during an epoch-making period. He did not forget his late company: that, indeed, was for ever shadowed in the background of his mind--St Denys and Théroigne, and, most of all, the strange little lodge-keeper whose portrait he had left unfinished. But here, in the very mid-throng of vivid life, the present so taxed his every faculty of observation, so drained the inadequate resources of his skill and of his paint-box, that interests foreign to the moment must not be allowed to contribute to the pressure on his time. Like an author in actual harness who keeps from reading books for fear of assimilating another’s style, so Ned forbade a thought of Nicette to come between him and his canvas. And assuredly his business in hand was not to paint Madonnas.