ess.

* * * * *

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 o