OF FUEL AND FEAR 241 



before I came out to Canada I was spending the 

 summer in Paris in the pleasantest atelier- a p-parte- 

 ment I can remember. It was quite at the top of 

 a very long stone staircase of a tall house just behind 

 the shops of the Avenue des Ternes. From the 

 window of stained glass around which inquisitive 

 bits of ivy fluttered one looked across some lower 

 buildings into a lovely garden with tall trees, and 

 sniffed in the perfume of the limes in the Bois 

 which, once you have spent a whole day with them, 

 will float to the altar of the imagination at any point 

 in Paris. The household gods in this artist's home 

 were few in number, and this, together with the 

 delicately polished floor, gave it an air of space. 

 An old oak-chest, a book-case, a lounge by day 

 which became a bed by night, two chairs and a 

 writing-table found a place on the floor, and on 

 the walls glowing bits of landscape, the work of 

 my friends who owned the flat, and just by the 

 glass-panelled door which led into the atelier there 

 wa^ the unsigned portrait of a cavalier which cried 

 out, " I am a child of the genius of Hyacinth 

 Rigaud." One was never alone, or unwatched, or 

 dull with the portrait in the room. " Life is sweet 

 we know," said the cavalier at dawn, at noon, in 

 the softening light of eventime, and even when he 

 grew a little sad in the light of the one lamp which 

 was kinder to all else in the room than to him. 

 " Life is sweet we know," echoed the spirit of joy 

 which some poverty-stricken genius had arrested 

 in a fly-smudged terra-cotta bust of a boy which I 

 had bought in one of those shops, peculiar to certain 

 quarters of Paris, where for a few francs treasures 

 may be reclaimed from a dust-heap. But at night 



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