With the return of Gauguin to Paris there opened for him the second stage of his career, the struggle to maintain himself on the productions of his brush and chisel. During the first stage his character had been formed by the hard experiences of seafaring and by the comparative leisure and affluence of his epoch of splendor, during which he found time to discuss the principles of art with the best exponents of the latest French tradition. He had not only met and talked with men like Manet, Pissarro, and Cézanne, he also visited the museums of Paris, and did not confine himself to the Louvre, but made a special study of the Musée Guimet with its collection of art works from the far East, and later of the Trocadero, with its casts of Cambodian sculpture. His stay at Bertin's had been of good service in giving him the mental equipment, the self-education necessary to begin the struggle for artistic independence. Yet in his case we know far less of what passed in his mind during these important years of development than in the case of most of his contemporaries. "He was the sort of man to be awake to everything new in art that was going on," says one who knew him in this period, "but not to acknowledge indebtedness to anything or anybody." What he absorbed was by instinct; and instinct cautioned him not to share his knowledge with people who might fail to make good use of it. Amid the noisy chatter of Parisian art-circles he passed silent and unnoted. He rented a studio and began to busy himself with all sorts of experimental projects, particularly with sculpture. But very shortly his resolution and character were further tested by the new experience of hunger. For a time he suffered extreme privation. He was forced at last to accept a salary of three francs fifty centimes a day for pasting advertisements on the walls of the Gare du Nord in order to save himself from starvation. "I have known," he wrote in a small notebook dedicated to his daughter Aline, "extreme misery, that is to say hunger and everything that follows upon hunger. It is nothing, or almost nothing. One grows accustomed to it and, with will-power, one can end by laughing at it. But what is terrible is to be prevented from working, from developing one's intellectual faculties. It is true that suffering sharpens one's ability. But it is necessary not to suffer too much or suffering will kill you. "With a great deal of pride I have ended by having a great deal of energy, and I have forced myself to be full of will-power. "Is pride a fault, or must one develop one's pride? I believe pride must be developed. It is the best weapon we have against the human animal that is in us." This quotation gives us the man entirely. He was one of those who are not to be beaten, one of those who do not turn back. He was to go forward and to maintain himself while seeking a path.