Nevertheless a generation was yet to pass before he was really to become a painter. His marriage, on 17th February 1778, with the daughter of the notary of Cluny, became the torment of his life. A linen-weaver and three of his father-in-law's clerks were present at the wedding. His wife was quarrelsome, their income small, and their family rapidly increasing. He betook himself to Paris to seek his fortune, with a letter of introduction to the engraver Wille. "Take pity on this youngster, who has been married for the last three years, and who, were he to come under some low fellow's influence, might easily fall into the most terrible abyss"; so ran the letter, which a certain Baron Joursanvault had given him. He hired himself a room in the house of M. Fauconnier, the head of a firm engaged in the lace trade, who lived in the Rue du Bac with his wife and a pretty sister. The latter, Marie, was eighteen years of age, and, like Werther's Lotte, was always surrounded by her brother's children, whom she looked after like a little housewife. Prudhon, himself young, sensitive, and handsome, loved and was loved, and made her presents of small flattering portraits and pretty allegorical drawings, in which Cupid was represented scratching the initials M. F. (Marie Fauconnier) on the wall with his arrow. That he was married and several times a father she never knew, till one day Madame Prudhon arrived with the children. "And you never told me!" was her only word of reproach. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ PIERRE PAUL PRUDHON. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.] Prudhon himself now went to Italy--a journey accompanied by serious difficulties. At Dijon he had competed for the Prix de Rome, and had been so simple as to make a sketch for one of his rivals. He owed it to the latter's honesty that the scholarship nevertheless fell to himself. He started on his journey; but when he reached Marseilles, and was ready to embark, the vessel was unable to weigh anchor for several weeks, owing to stormy weather. And even on the voyage it became necessary to disembark again, so that months had elapsed before he arrived in Rome, penniless, and having embraced, according to classical custom, the land he had come to conquer; for he had fallen out of the carriage on the way. Fortunately his dearly bought sojourn in Italy did him no harm. He had indeed intended to draw only from the antique and after Raphael; but after the lapse of a very few weeks he found his ideal in Leonardo. Him he calls "his Master and Hero, the inimitable father and prince of all painters, in artistic power far surpassing Raphael!"