But we have changed all that, as my friend used to say. Did I myself look like a painter who believed in the ancient traditions, or did my comrades? Does the aspiring clubman, dressed like a tailor’s fashionplate as Jacques Molan, look any more like Henry Murger’s Bohemians? But do we not live in the days when a successful play brings in an income for years equal to the capital and revenue of a farm in Beauce, when the portrait of an American brings in 15,000, 20,000, or 30,000 francs, and when an associate of the Comédie Française draws the salary of an Ambassador before retiring with the red ribbon in his button-hole, while actresses on tour abroad are received at monarch’s receptions. The barrier of prejudices or principles which separated the artistic life from the world of society has been broken down, to the applause of the democrats and progressives? The example of Jacques and my studies have convinced me that it is on the contrary one of the worst errors of the period. The artist has always gained by being treated almost like an outcast. His natural taste for the brilliant, which is the inevitable ransom of his powers of imagination, so soon turns to vanity when it is the dupe of decorum, luxury and the praises of the smart woman in particular, which is also a flattery irresistible to his self-respect and senses! When he does not succumb to the temptation, he goes to the other excess, quite as natural to this irritable class and no less dangerous, that of revolted and misanthropic pride. But I am falling into a great failing of mine, that of indefinite and never-ending reverie. Let us go back to that which remains the true corrective of all vices, intellectual and otherwise, “Reality.” So I was sitting facing the respectable Madam Favier, in the drawing-room with its covered up furniture, with a rather sheepish look at finding myself with the mother when I had come to see the daughter. The widow, however, soon reassured me as she entertained me with commonplace conversation suitable to her appearance and birth. I have found out since that she was the daughter of a small business man in the north, and had been married for her beauty by the romantic father of the romantic Camille after a chance meeting.