the sort of man whom little girls would unhesitatingly
request to ring the bell they couldn't reach, or boys would call to
their assistance with a "Please, sir, lend us your stick to get down
that cap from up there," or "to fetch out that ball from inside them
railings;" the sort of man with whom you or I would at once have got
into conversation, if we had met him in a railway carriage.

My first acquaintance with him was in that Atelier Gleyre. We were just
fellow-students at the beginning, then chums, _bons camarades_, soon
friends, and finally we got linked together by the most lasting of ties,
that of brotherly love. So it comes that the story of his life is most
vividly impressed on my mind. It is uneventful, perhaps, and differs
little from any other story that pictures the artist's life, with its
hopes and aspirations, its sprinkling of love-making and its glorious
consummation of love-finding, but I must attempt to give an outline of
it, if but in memory of my friend.

To begin at the beginning, let me sketch our days of good comradeship,
and put in a wash of background here and there, and a few touches of
local colour in illustration of the life we led.

You could tell at a glance that Claude was a "Rapin," but that was not
surprising, for in those days it had not yet become the aim and end of
the young artist to conceal his profession and to walk through life
incognito, with a well-groomed chimney-pot implanted on the top of his
head. So you must fancy Claude with a soft felt hat of a species even
now not quite extinct, although, as we all know, superseded by the
boiled apple-pudding-shaped dome, ornamented with a gutter, which we
have universally adopted, and which we call a pot hat, a bowler, a
billycock hat, or as the coachman or groom says, a bridle.

It was quite appropriate that Claude should wear a wide-awake, as being
in keeping with an expression that showed him always on the _qui vive_.
He was tall, rather too much so for the breadth of his shoulders, but he
moved with great freedom and ease, and as he was mostly on the move, he
also mostly showed to advantage.

In the Atelier Gleyre he was the leading spirit. That studio was
situated in the Rue de l'Ouest, flanking the Luxembourg Gardens. It was
a large, high room with the regulation studio window, and was furnished
with one model table on wheels, one iron spitfire of a stove, and a lot
of three-legged easels and four-legged stools, not to forge