t-rooms are covered
with pictures: Nature itself is inclined more kindly to him, for the sky
is a thousand times more bright and beautiful, and the sun shines for
the greater part of the year. Add to this, incitements more selfish,
but quite as powerful: a French artist is paid very handsomely; for five
hundred a year is much where all are poor; and has a rank in society
rather above his merits than below them, being caressed by hosts and
hostesses in places where titles are laughed at and a baron is thought
of no more account than a banker's clerk.

The life of the young artist here is the easiest, merriest, dirtiest
existence possible. He comes to Paris, probably at sixteen, from his
province; his parents settle forty pounds a year on him, and pay his
master; he establishes himself in the Pays Latin, or in the new quarter
of Notre Dame de Lorette (which is quite peopled with painters); he
arrives at his atelier at a tolerably early hour, and labors among a
score of companions as merry and poor as himself. Each gentleman has his
favorite tobacco-pipe; and the pictures are painted in the midst of a
cloud of smoke, and a din of puns and choice French slang, and a roar of
choruses, of which no one can form an idea who has not been present at
such an assembly.

You see here every variety of coiffure that has ever been known. Some
young men of genius have ringlets hanging over their shoulders--you may
smell the tobacco with which they are scented across the street; some
have straight locks, black, oily, and redundant; some have toupets in
the famous Louis-Philippe fashion; some are cropped close; some have
adopted the present mode--which he who would follow must, in order to do
so, part his hair in the middle, grease it with grease, and gum it with
gum, and iron it flat down over his ears; when arrived at the ears,
you take the tongs and make a couple of ranges of curls close round the
whole head,--such curls as you may see under a gilt three-cornered hat,
and in her Britannic Majesty's coachman's state wig.

This is the last fashion. As for the beards, there is no end of them;
all my friends the artists have beards who can raise them; and Nature,
though she has rather stinted the bodies and limbs of the French nation,
has been very liberal to them of hair, as you may see by the following
specimen. Fancy these heads and beards under all sorts of caps--Chinese
caps, Mandarin caps, Greek skull-caps, English jockey-caps, Rus