R. again in
Paris. She reminded me of my early appreciation of her beauty, and was
anxious to know whether I was still inclined to express my admiration as
warmly as I did formerly.

"To be sure," I said. "Yes. _Mais oui certainement, madame._" But, oh
dear! how little female French I must have understood in those days, and
how little male French I must have had at my command! for--I must
confess--I said no more.

The de R.'s became great people under the Empire: he and she--or perhaps
more correctly she and he--got into the inner Court circle, where she
soon distinguished herself as a leader of fashion, and he as a very
successful painter of life-size fashion-plates in oils. Both his works
and her personal charms were graciously smiled upon by the imperial
master himself.

Apropos of my French, I may say that I had every opportunity of
improving it. I soon entered the Atelier Gleyre, that studio we have
heard about in reference to Du Maurier, Whistler, Poynter, and others,
who there learnt to draw their first bonshommes, and to spoil their
first canvases.

I had made a sort of mental vow to speak nought but the language of the
country for the first year of my stay in Paris. In the beginning I found
it rather tough work, but a French studio is a good school. I plunged in
head foremost, and soon got on swimmingly. From the first I was
attracted by the brilliancy of Parisian slang, and by the terseness of
French argot (that is, the thieves' language). As for the genuine
article, real French, as spoken by real Frenchwomen in real salons on a
"_Madame recoit_" day--nothing could exceed my admiration for it. But
the Quartier Latin, with its studios and garrets, its _cremeries_ and
little restaurants, all bedecked with clever works from the brushes of
the _habitues_, was the high school in which I graduated and which in
due time turned me out a fair specimen of the classical _Rapin_--the art
student as Paris alone produces him. In a word, I soon felt quite at
home in that delightful haven of unrest we call Bohemia.

And the friends of those days! I made many and lost few. There is one
who stands out prominently from amongst the rest, and he is connected in
my mind with a thousand and one incidents of my Paris life. His name was
Claude; Claude Raoul Dupont.

At our first meeting I felt that I should like to make friends with him.
He was what the Italians call _sympatico_--not quite the same thing as
sympathetic; just