It was at this time that young Puvis entered the studio of Couture. There again his stay was brief, and we find in his work few traces of the lessons there received. Once again it was only the conventional and artificial that were held up as object lessons for that young soul enamoured of the truth, for those wide-opened eyes that saw nature precisely as she is, and not under the tinsel glitter of fantasy under which the studio of the period draped her. It followed that he learned nothing from that school; nevertheless, he did not disown it. In the annual Salon Catalogue, Puvis de Chavannes continued to proclaim himself a pupil of Scheffer and of Couture. Once again the young painter found himself without a master, yet still eager to learn and as yet equipped with only a mediocre and highly defective rudimentary training. Convinced that he would never obtain the right start in any of the studios of the French capital, he determined, in company of one of his friends, Beauderon de Vermeron, to go in search of definite guidance, back to that same Italy which he had visited the first time with such small profit. This time he studied all the periods, all the schools, all the methods of Italian painting; he visited both Rome and Florence; and yet all his sympathies, as he himself declared, went out instinctively to the Venetian school which had produced Titian, Tintoretto, and, greatest of all, Veronese, inimitable prince of fresco and of decoration. Returning to Paris, Puvis de Chavannes no longer dreamed of soliciting the guidance of any school; henceforth he was to pursue his own path, to give heed only to his own temperament, to draw his inspiration only from nature herself. In the Place Pigalle he hired a studio, the same which he was destined to occupy for forty-four years, and which he quitted only two years before his death. Later on he possessed another, at Neuilly, in which to work upon his larger compositions, since there would not have been space enough for them in the Montmartre studio. Whatever the weather, through cold and through heat, Puvis de Chavannes could be seen, for more than thirty years, making his way on foot, with long, rapid strides, from the Place Pigalle to Neuilly or in the reverse direction. This daily promenade grew to be a necessity; it was the sole recreation of this painter so enslaved by his art that in a certain sense he might be called a Benedictine of painting.