ABSTRACT
In the long vacation of 1849 my mother and I spent a pleasant month with my sisters at a house which my married sister had taken at Bellevue, running often up to Paris… During the sixteen months which had elapsed since my last visit to Paris, things had not yet settled down—owing no doubt in great measure to the terrible insurrection of June 1848. Partly from caution, partly of set design to damage the republic, the wealthy classes, who mostly belonged to the two defeated monarchical parties, the Legitimists and the Orleanists, did not spend their money freely. There was little demand for luxuries, material or intellectual. Artists could scarcely sell a picture. From the lower ranks of the art world, starving men were driven into other callings. The man who used to bring round the newspaper to my sister's house at Bellevue turned out to be an artist by profession, chiefly in water colours, or in black and white as a designer for illustrated papers, M. St. Ange Chasselat. He was a pleasant-looking man, and attracted the attention of one of my nieces, and of a cousin of hers, rather older, who for a few months was staying with my sister. They first found out his story. He told them that after the revolution he and a friend in the same line, finding themselves absolutely starving, had taken to selling newspapers in the streets. Yet even this was not very profitable, and he confessed that on one occasion, when evening came and they had not made a sou to break their fast by calling out true news, they had laid their heads together and determined to try the effect of false. So they began shouting out: ‘Deputation of three hundred hunchbacks to the President of the Republic…’ They sold off their whole stock in ten minutes, and had a good supper. ‘But,’ he added, ‘we never dared afterwards show ourselves in that neighbourhood’. He was now in receipt of regular wages, and was comparatively well off, but hankered of course after his old calling. He brought some of his tinted sketches, which showed him to have real talent. Two or three were bought; his name was mentioned to friends; he got back to art, and I saw many years after in the Illustrated London News a whole series of illustrations by him of Normandy Churches.
