One day as Palissy sat disconsolate outside his door, no work in hand, nothing ahead and the larder growing empty through his own extravagances and likewise those of his wife, he remembered to have seen, sometime about the year 1541, during his wanderings at Avignon or at Nîmes, a cup which, as he described it afterward, “was turned and enamelled with so much beauty that from that time I entered into controversy with my own thoughts, recalling to mind several suggestions some people had made to me in fun when I was painting portraits. Then,” continued he, “seeing that these were falling out of request in the country where I dwelt, and that glass painting also was little patronized, I began to think that if I should discover how to make enamels I could make earthen vessels and other things very prettily, because God had gifted me with some knowledge of drawing.” Now, Luca della Robbia had been dead some twenty-eight years, but not only was his work well known throughout Tuscany and other Italian states but specimens of it and of other Italian faience had been brought into France by Leonardo da Vinci, who died when Palissy was in his eighth year, and later by Benvenuto Cellini, who was but nine years Palissy’s senior. However, Palissy had not visited Paris before this and probably he knew nothing of the Della Robbias, of Leonardo, or of Cellini, and less of the Italian faience. It was enough for him that he had seen a wonderful cup, made he knew not how, but produced by a process which, it is quite possible, he imagined to be a lost one, a process which now his ingenious imagination was seeking to recover. Had fate or fortune taken him to Reims instead of to Avignon, he would never have thought of competing with the work introduced by the Florentines. But in those days of different intercourse he had seen only the one cup, and that he imagined to be unique; consequently, as we have seen, he resolved to set about becoming a potter himself. How the imagination wreaths around that mysterious cup which inspired Master Bernard! What was it, maiolica of Italy or of Spain, or an enameled cup of southern France? Neither of these, I think. I cannot imagine it could have been anything short of some such treasure as a porcelain cup fetched from China by some Marco Polo! At any rate, Master Bernard set about the business diligently and persistently. Once he had made up his mind to a thing there was no changing him, so long as the thing he had set his mind to appeared to him better, more wise, or more righteous than that which would take its place. He became as persistent a potter as he had been (and as he was!) persistent a Protestant. Luckily it was for him that the Constable de Montmorency, who was sent by the king to quell an uprising in Saintes, was later to come across Master Bernard and to take up with his ingenious compositions.