ples and the pains he took to deserve
their confidence.

It was the artist's intention to take no pupils but young ladies
belonging to rich families of good position, in order to meet with no
complaints as to the composition of his classes. He even refused to
take girls who wished to become artists; for to them he would have
been obliged to give certain instructions without which no talent could
advance in the profession. Little by little his prudence and the ability
with which he initiated his pupils into his art, the certainty each
mother felt that her daughter was in company with none but well-bred
young girls, and the fact of the artist's marriage, gave him an
excellent reputation as a teacher in society. When a young girl wished
to learn to draw, and her mother asked advice of her friends, the answer
was, invariably: "Send her to Servin's."

Servin became, therefore, for feminine art, a specialty; like Herbault
for bonnets, Leroy for gowns, and Chevet for eatables. It was recognized
that a young woman who had taken lessons from Servin was capable of
judging the paintings of the Musee conclusively, of making a striking
portrait, copying an ancient master, or painting a genre picture. The
artist thus sufficed for the educational needs of the aristocracy. But
in spite of these relations with the best families in Paris, he was
independent and patriotic, and he maintained among them that easy,
brilliant, half-ironical tone, and that freedom of judgment which
characterize painters.

He had carried his scrupulous precaution into the arrangements of the
locality where his pupils studied. The entrance to the attic above his
apartments was walled up. To reach this retreat, as sacred as a harem,
it was necessary to go up a small spiral staircase made within his own
rooms. The studio, occupying nearly the whole attic floor under the
roof, presented to the eye those vast proportions which surprise
inquirers when, after attaining sixty feet above the ground-floor, they
expect to find an artist squeezed into a gutter.

This gallery, so to speak, was profusely lighted from above, through
enormous panes of glass furnished with those green linen shades by means
of which all artists arrange the light. A quantity of caricatures, heads
drawn at a stroke, either in color or with the point of a knife, on
walls painted in a dark gray, proved that, barring a difference in
expression, the most distinguished young girls have as much fun