at understanding nothing of its material and spiritual life."
He had many things to suffer from Paris. It stifled him physically and morally. He could not breathe. His large countryman's appetite was distressed. He used to take his meals in taverns with coachmen from his own part of the country. He had letters of introduction of which he did not make use. He was morbidly touchy and so much afraid of Parisian mockery that he did not dare to speak to anyone, nor make any enquiries, nor even to ask his way to "the old museum," that is to say the Louvre, for which he consequently spent several days in searching, wandering haphazard about Paris. He was jealous of his independence and would not enter the Ecole des Beaux Arts because he dreaded the discipline. The pleasures and balls of the students disgusted him. He was absolutely alone and perishing of ennui. He fell ill of a fever which endangered his life. He would have gone home again but for the Louvre, the pictures and drawings in which (especially those of the Early Italians, of Michael Angelo and of Poussin) filled him with real ecstasy. We shall
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