This opening passage in Daudet's _Le Nabab_ most readily gives the mood awakened by Giuseppe do Nittis' Parisian landscapes. De Nittis was born in 1846 at Barletta, near Naples, in poor circumstances. In 1868, when he was two-and-twenty years of age, he came to Paris, where Gérôme and Meissonier interested themselves in him. Intercourse with Manet led him to his range of subject. He became the painter of Parisian street-life as it is to be seen in the neighbourhood of the quays, the painter of mist, smoke, and air. The Salons of 1875 and 1876 contained his first pictures, the "Place des Pyramides" and the view of the Pont Royal, fine studies of mist with a tremulous grey atmosphere, out of which graceful little figures raise their faint, vanishing outlines. From that time he has stood at the centre of artistic life in Paris. He observed everything, saw everything, painted everything--a strip of the boulevards, the Place du Carrousel, the Bois de Boulogne, the races, the Champs Elysées, in the daytime with the budding chestnuts, the flower-beds blooming in all colours, the playing fountains, the women of grace and beauty, and the light carriages which crowd between the Arc de Triomphe, the Obelisk, and the Gardens of the Tuileries, and in the evening when chains of white and coloured lights flash among the dark trees. De Nittis has interpreted all atmospheric phases. He seized the intangible, the vibration of vapour, the dust of summer, and the rains of December days. He breathed the atmosphere, as it were, with his eyes, and felt with accuracy its greater or its diminished density. The great public he gained by his exquisite sense of feminine elegance. Of marvellous charm are the figures which give animation to the Place des Pyramides, the Place du Carrousel, the Quai du Pont Neuf--women in the most coquettish toilettes, men chatting together as they lean against a newspaper kiosk, flower-girls offering bouquets, loiterers carelessly turning over the books exposed for sale upon a stall, _bonnes_ with short petticoats and broad ribbons, smart-looking boys with hoops, and little girls with the air of great ladies. Since Gabriel de Saint Aubin, Paris has had no more faithful observer. "De Nittis," said Claretie in 1876, "paints modern French life for us as that brilliant Italian, the Abbé Galliani, spoke the French language--that is to say, better than we do it ourselves."