_Corot_ was sixteen years senior to Rousseau. He still belonged to the eighteenth century, to the time when, under the dictatorship of David, Paris transformed herself into imperial Rome. David, Gérard, Guérin, and Prudhon, artists so different in talent, were the painters whose works met his first eager glances, and no particular acuteness is needed to recognise in the Nymphs and Cupids with which Corot in after-years, especially in the evening of his life, dotted his fragrant landscapes, the direct issue of Prudhon's charming goddesses, the reminiscences of his youth nourished on the antique. He, too, was a child of old Paris, with its narrow streets and corners. His father was a hairdresser in the Rue du Bac, number 37, and had made the acquaintance of a girl who lived at number 1 in the same street, close to the Pont Royal, and was shop-girl at a milliner's. He carried on his barber's shop until 1778, when Camille, the future painter, was two years old. Then Madame Corot herself undertook the millinery establishment in which she had once worked. There might be read on the front of the narrow little house, number 1 of the Rue du Bac, _Madame Corot, Marchande de Modes_. M. Corot, a polite and very correct little man, raised the business to great prosperity. The Tuileries were opposite, and under Napoleon I Corot became Court "modiste." As such he must have attained a certain celebrity, as even the theatre took his name in vain. A piece which was then frequently played at the Comédie Française contains the passage: "I have just come from Corot, but could not speak to him; he was locked up in his private room occupied in composing a new spring hat." [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ DUPRÉ. THE SETTING SUN.]