He, too, was long acquainted with poverty, as were his great brother-artists Rousseau and Dupré. Shortly after his birth he lost his father. Madame Diaz, left entirely without means, came to Paris, where she supported herself by giving lessons in Spanish and Italian. When he was ten years old the boy was left an orphan alone in the vast city. A Protestant clergyman in Bellevue then adopted him. And now occurred the misfortune which he was so fond of relating in after-years. In one of his wanderings through the wood he was bitten by a poisonous insect, and from that time he was obliged to hobble through life with a wooden leg, which he called his _pilon_. From his fifteenth year he worked, at first as a lame errand boy, and afterwards as a painter on china, together with Dupré, Raffet, and Cabat, in the manufactory of Sèvres. Before long he was dismissed as incompetent, for one day he took it into his head to decorate a vase entirely after his own taste. Then poverty began once more. Often when the evening drew on he wandered about the boulevards under cover of the darkness, opened the doors of carriages which had drawn up at the pavement, and stretched out his hand to beg. "What does it matter?" he said; "one day I shall have carriages and horses, and a golden crutch; my brush will win them for me." He exhibited a picture on speculation at a picture-dealer's, in the hope of making a hundred francs; it was "The Descent of the Bohemians," that picturesque band of men, women, and children, who advance singing, laughing, and shouting by a steep woodland road, to descend on some neighbouring village like a swarm of locusts. A Parisian collector bought it for fifteen hundred francs. Diaz was saved, and he migrated to the forest of Fontainebleau. [Illustration: _L'Art._ HARPIGNIES. MOONRISE.]