'The first days will be the worst!' he had assured himself, walking back from Notre Dame in the searching sun, heedless of who might notice his red eyes. 'The first days will be the worst!' And this formula he had repeated in the morning, standing uninspired and wretched before a blank canvas. Then had come Blake's first message--a note written from Sweden without care or comfort, importing nothing, indicating nothing beyond the place at which the writer might be found, and tears--torrents of tears--had testified to the fierce anticipation, the crushing disappointment for which it was responsible.
He had sent no answer to the cold communication--no answer had been desired, and calling himself by every name contempt could coin, he had pushed forward along the lonely road, companioned by his work. But he himself had once said: 'One must come naked and whole to art, as one must come naked and whole to nature,' and he had spoken a truth. Art is no anodyne for a soul wounded in other fields, and Art closed arms to him when most he wooed her. He threw himself into work with pitiable vehemence in those first black weeks. By day, he haunted the galleries and attended classes like any art student; by night, he ranged the streets and _cafés_, seeking inspiration, returning to his lonely room to lie wakeful, fighting his ghosts, or else to sob himself to sleep.
His theory of life had been amply proved. Blake had prated of the soul, but it had been the body he had desired! Again and again that thought had struck home, a savage spur goading him in daytime to a wild plying of his brushes, gripping him in the lonely darkness of the night-time until his sobs were suspended by their very poignancy and the scalding tears dried before they could fall.
He saw darkly, he saw untruly, but the world is according to the beholder's vision, and in those sultry days, when summer waxed and Paris emptied, opening its gates to the foreigner, all the colors had receded from existence and he had tasted the lees of life.
And now to-day it seemed that the climax had been reached. Seated idly before his canvas, the whole procession of his Paris life unwound before him--from the first tumultuous hour, when he had entered the Hôtel Railleux on fire for freedom, to this moment when, with dull resentful eyes, he confronted the sum of his labors--an unfinished, sorry study devoid of inspiration.