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Twelve years were spent by Jean Francois in Paris–years of biting poverty and grim endurance: the sport and prey of Fate: the butt and byword of the fashionable, artistic world.

Jean Francois did not belong in Paris: how can robins build nests in omnibuses?

He was at war with his environment; and the stern Puritan bias of his nature refused to conform to the free and easy ways of the gay metropolis. He sighed for a sight of the sea, and longed for the fields and homely companionship that Normandy held in store.

So we find him renouncing Paris life and going back to his own.

The grandmother greeted him as one who had won, but his father and mother, and he, himself, called it failure.

He started to work in the fields and fell fainting to the earth.

“He has been starved,” said the village doctor. But when hunger had been appeased and strength came back, ambition, too, returned.

He would be an artist yet.

A commission for a group of family portraits came from a rich family at Cherbourg. Gladly he hastened thence to do the work.

While in Cherbourg he found lodgings in the household of a widow who had a daughter. The widow courted the fine young painter-man–courted him for the daughter. The daughter married him. A strong, simple man, unversed in the sophistry of society, loves the first woman he meets, provided, of course, she shows toward him a bit of soft, feminine sympathy. This accounts for the ease with which very young men so often fall in love with middle-aged women. The woman does the courting; the man idealizes, and endows the woman with all the virtues his imagination can conjure forth. Love is a matter of propinquity.

The wife of Jean Francois was neutral salts. She desired, no doubt, to do what was right and best, but she had no insight into her husband’s needs, and was incapable of guessing his latent genius.

As for the new wife’s mother and kinsmen, they regarded Jean Francois as simply lazy, and thought to crowd him into useful industry. He could paint houses or wagons, and, then, didn’t the shipyard folks employ painters?

Well, I guess so.

Jean Francois still dreamed of art.

He longed to express himself–to picture on canvas the emotions that surged through his soul.

Disillusionment had come, and he now saw that his wife was his mate only because the Church and State said so. But his sense of duty was firm, and the thought of leaving her behind never came to him.

The portraits were painted–the money in his pocket; and to escape the importunities and jeers of his wife’s relatives he decided to try Paris once more.

The wife was willing. Paris was the gateway to pleasure and ambition.

But the gaiety of Paris was not for her. On a scanty allowance of bread one can not be so very gay–and often there was no fuel.

Jean Francois copied pictures in the Louvre and hawked them among the dealers, selling for anything that was offered.

Delaroche sent for him. “Why do you no longer come to my atelier?” said the master.

“I have no money to pay tuition,” was the answer.

“Never mind; I’ll be honored to have you work here.”

So Jean Francois worked with the students of Delaroche; and a few respected his work and tried to help market his wares. But connoisseurs shook their heads, and dealers smiled at “the eccentricities of genius,” and bought only conventional copies of masterpieces or studies of the nude.

Meantime the way did not open, and Paris was far from being the place the wife supposed. She would have gone back to Cherbourg, but there was no money to send her, and pride prevented her from writing the truth to her friends at home. She prayed for death, and death came. The students at Delaroche’s contributed to meet the expenses of her funeral. Jean Francois still struggled on.