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Fougeres marched along the boulevard in a state of joy which gave to his honest face an expression of pride. He was like a schoolboy protecting a woman. He met Joseph Bridau, one of his comrades, and one of those eccentric geniuses destined to fame and sorrow. Joseph Bridau, who had, to use his own expression, a few sous in his pocket, took Fougeres to the Opera. But Fougeres didn’t see the ballet, didn’t hear the music; he was imagining pictures, he was painting. He left Joseph in the middle of the evening, and ran home to make sketches by lamp-light. He invented thirty pictures, all reminiscence, and felt himself a man of genius. The next day he bought colors, and canvases of various dimensions; he piled up bread and cheese on his table, he filled a water-pot with water, he laid in a provision of wood for his stove; then, to use a studio expression, he dug at his pictures. He hired several models and Magus lent him stuffs.

After two months’ seclusion the Breton had finished four pictures. Again he asked counsel of Schinner, this time adding Bridau to the invitation. The two painters saw in three of these pictures a servile imitation of Dutch landscapes and interiors by Metzu, in the fourth a copy of Rembrandt’s “Lesson of Anatomy.”

“Still imitating!” said Schinner. “Ah! Fougeres can’t manage to be original.”

“You ought to do something else than painting,” said Bridau.

“What?” asked Fougeres.

“Fling yourself into literature.”

Fougeres lowered his head like a sheep when it rains. Then he asked and obtained certain useful advice, and retouched his pictures before taking them to Elie Magus. Elie paid him twenty-five francs apiece. At that price of course Fougeres earned nothing; neither did he lose, thanks to his sober living. He made a few excursions to the boulevard to see what became of his pictures, and there he underwent a singular hallucination. His neat, clean paintings, hard as tin and shiny as porcelain, were covered with a sort of mist; they looked like old daubs. Magus was out, and Pierre could obtain no information on this phenomenon. He fancied something was wrong with his eyes.

The painter went back to his studio and made more pictures. After seven years of continued toil Fougeres managed to compose and execute quite passable work. He did as well as any artist of the second class. Elie bought and sold all the paintings of the poor Breton, who earned laboriously about two thousand francs a year while he spent but twelve hundred.

At the Exhibition of 1829, Leon de Lora, Schinner, and Bridau, who all three occupied a great position and were, in fact, at the head of the art movement, were filled with pity for the perseverance and the poverty of their old friend; and they caused to be admitted into the grand salon of the Exhibition, a picture by Fougeres. This picture, powerful in interest but derived from Vigneron as to sentiment and from Dubufe’s first manner as to execution, represented a young man in prison, whose hair was being cut around the nape of the neck. On one side was a priest, on the other two women, one old, one young, in tears. A sheriff’s clerk was reading aloud a document. On a wretched table was a meal, untouched. The light came in through the bars of a window near the ceiling. It was a picture fit to make the bourgeois shudder, and the bourgeois shuddered. Fougeres had simply been inspired by the masterpiece of Gerard Douw; he had turned the group of the “Dropsical Woman” toward the window, instead of presenting it full front. The condemned man was substituted for the dying woman–same pallor, same glance, same appeal to God. Instead of the Dutch doctor, he had painted the cold, official figure of the sheriff’s clerk attired in black; but he had added an old woman to the young one of Gerard Douw. The cruelly simple and good-humored face of the executioner completed and dominated the group. This plagiarism, very cleverly disguised, was not discovered. The catalogue contained the following:–