h year the budget showed an excess of receipts over
expenditure. Her house, her books and her garden occupied all the time
which was not devoted to Henri. She was fond of receiving visits, but
rarely paid calls herself; and in the winter evenings she loved to sit
with a book by the fireside in the room, half kitchen, half
dining-room, which, with its great open fireplace, is very often the
most attractive-looking apartment in a small Breton house. Sometimes it
was her needlework that she would bring out and busy her fingers upon,
while the faithful Fanchette, who had held Henri on her knee, and who
still 'thee'd' and 'thou'd' him, took her knitting, and to the steady
click of the needles would go over again the merry tricks that he was
wont to play when he was a little boy.

By-and-by Henri finished his studies and took his B.A. with honours.
Then it became necessary to choose a profession. For some time past he
had been longing to say to his mother: 'Mother, let me go to Paris and
study painting. Something tells me that I should be successful.' But he
knew that Madame Proquet had long been putting by 1,000 francs a year
to send him to Paris to study law or medicine, whichever he should
choose. She had made up her mind to make a lawyer or a doctor of him.
Is it not the ambition of every French provincial mother? Henri allowed
himself to be persuaded, although he felt not the least inclination for
the one profession or the other. However, when it came to the point he
chose the law.

What he did in Paris during six years we may see from the fact that, in
the month of May, 1877, he pleaded at the assizes in a case which
resulted in two years' imprisonment for his client; and that he
exhibited at the Salon a portrait which earned for the artist the
praise of all critical Paris. A very talented painter had arisen.
Madame Proquet learned the news without making a very wry face,
swallowed the pill without grimacing, and, Fanchette having declared
that she had always predicted that Henri's genius would soon manifest
itself, she wisely decided under the circumstances to be proud of her
boy.

'But who is going to keep the dear fellow while he is painting in
Paris? I cannot, that is certain,' said the good mother to herself.

'But, madam,' said Fanchette, 'do you not know that there are rich
folks who pay one hundred and even as much as two hundred francs to
have their portrait painted, and that Paris is full of people like
t