“_December 4th._--Had a _supposed_ great opportunity in being invited to join a party of very _mondaines Parisiennes_ to go over the Grand Opera, which is just being finished. Oh, the chatter of those women in the carriage going there! They vied with each other in frivolous outpourings which continued all the time we explored that dreadful building. It is a pile of ostentation which oppressed me by the extravagant display of gilding, marbles and bronze, and silver, and mosaic, and brocade, heaped up over each other in a gorged kind of way. How truly weary I felt; and the bedizened dressing-rooms of the actresses and _danseuses_ were the last straw. Ugh! and all really tasteless.”
However, I recovered from the Grand Opera, and really enjoyed the lively dinners where conversation was not limited to couples, but flowed with great _ésprit_ across the table and round and round. Still, in time, my sleep suffered, for I seemed to hear those voices in the night. How graceful were the French equivalents to the compliments I received in London. They thought I would like to know that the fame of “_l’Appel_” had reached Paris, and so I did.
We visited Detaille’s beautiful studio. He was my greatest admiration at that time. Also Henriette Browne’s and others, and, of course, the Luxembourg, so I drew much profit from my little visit. But what a change I saw in the army! I who could remember the Empire of my childhood, with its endless variety of uniforms, its buglings, and drummings, and trumpetings; its _chic_ and glitter and swagger: 1870 was over it all now. Well, never mind, I have lived to see it in the “_bleu d’horizon_” of a new and glorious day. My Paris Diary winds up with: “_December 14th._--Papa and I returned home from our Paris visit. My eye has been very much sharpened, and very severe was that organ as it rested on my ‘Quatre Bras’ for the first time since a fortnight ago. Ye Gods! what a deal I have to do to that picture before it will be fit to look at! I continue to receive droll letters and poems (!). One I must quote the opening line of:
So I worked steadily at the big picture, finding the red coats very trying. What would I have thought, when studying at Florence, if I had been told to paint a mass of men in one colour, and that “brick-dust”? However, my Aldershot observations had been of immense value in showing me how the British red coat becomes blackish-purple here, pale salmon colour there, and so forth, under the influence of the weather and wear and tear. I have all the days noted down, with the amount of work done, for future guidance, and lamentations over the fogs of that winter of 1874-5. I gave nicknames in the Diary to the figures in my picture, which I was amused to find, later on, was also the habit of Meissonier; one of my figures I called the “_Gamin_” and he, too, actually had a “_Gamin_.” Those fogs retarded my work cruelly, and towards the end I had to begin at the studio at 9.30 instead of 10, and work on till very late. The porter at No. 76 told me mine was the first fire to be lit in the morning of all in The Avenue.