In a small sketch-book, half torn up, dating from this time, and still in existence, we have already the whole Prudhon. It contains copies of ancient statues, made laboriously and without pleasure in the work; then comes Correggio's disarmed "Cupid," a delicious little sketch, and with the same pencil that drew it he has written down the names of the pictures he purposes painting later on: "Love," "Frivolity," "Cupid and Psyche." It is as it were the secret confession of his fantasy, a preliminary announcement of his future works. Here and there are found sketches hastily dashed off of beautiful female forms in the graceful attitude which had excited his admiration in the women of the "Aldobrandini Wedding." But, above all, the young artist observed all that was around him. He lived in unceasing intercourse with the beautiful, and his soul was nurtured by the spirit of the works which surrounded him. He accumulated pictures, not in his sketch-book, but in himself; so much so that, when he was afterwards interrogated as to his Italian studies, his only answer was: "I did nothing but study life and admire the works of the masters." He avoided association even with scholars who had taken the Prix de Rome. The elegant and graceful sculptor Canova was the only one with whom he permitted himself any intercourse. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ PRUDHON. JOSEPH AND POTIPHAR'S WIFE.] When his scholarship had run its course, at the end of November 1789, he found himself again in Paris, and the struggle against poverty began once more. Even while in Italy he had sent all his savings to his wife, who had straightway squandered them in drink with her brother, a sergeant in a cavalry regiment. At Paris he had to act as parlour-maid and nursery-maid. The faces of two more women rise up in his life like fleeting stars, and both of them died before his eyes. The first was the mysterious stranger who appeared one day in his studio and commissioned him to paint her portrait. She was young, scarcely twenty years of age, with great blue eyes, but her face was weary and wan as though from long sleepless nights. "Your portrait?" asked Prudhon, "with features so troubled and sad?" He set to work, silent and indifferent; but with every stroke of his brush he felt himself more mystically attracted to this young girl, evidently as unhappy and as persecuted by fate as himself. She promised to return on the morrow; but neither on that day nor on the next did she appear. One afternoon he was wandering dreamily along the street, thinking of the unknown fair one, when his eye almost mechanically caught sight of the guillotine, and he recognised in the unhappy victim at that very moment ending her days the mysterious visitor of his studio.