Ireland -- Emigration and Immigration -- Fiction; Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Rodney said he would like to go to the School of Art, and his father
kept him there for two years, though he sorely wanted him to help in
the business. There was no sacrifice that the elder Rodney would not
have made for his son. But Rodney knew that he could not always count
upon his father's help, and one day he realised quite clearly that the
only way for him to become a sculptor was by winning scholarships.
There were two waiting to be won by him, and he felt that he would have
no difficulty in winning them. That year there was a scholarship for
twenty-five pounds, and there was another scholarship that he might win
in the following year, and he thought of nothing else but these
scholarships until he had won them; then he started for Paris with
fifty pounds in his pocket, and a resolve in his heart that he would
live for a year and pay his fees out of this sum of money. Those were
hard days, but they were likewise great days. He had been talking to
Harding about those days in Paris the night before last, and he had
told him of the room at the top of the house for which he paid thirty
francs a month. There was a policeman on one side and there was a
footman on the other. It was a bare little room, and he lived
principally on bread. In those days his only regret was that he had not
the necessary threepence to go to the cafe. "One can't go to the cafe
without threepence to pay for the harmless bock, and if one has
threepence one can sit in the cafe discussing Carpeaux, Rodin, and the
mysteries, until two in the morning, when one is at last ejected by an
exhausted proprietor at the head of numerous waiters."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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