Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/124

278 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS little ones had nobody to walk out with them but an old servant who had come with them from Bordeaux, and who was ill-fitted, for all her virtues, to take a mother's place to the children. She was honest and faithful, but like all of her class, she liked routine and order, and she could make no allowances for the rest- lessness of her bright-minded charge. Hpsa was her especial torment ; the black sheep of the brood. Household tasks she despised, and study, as it was pursued in the successive schools to which her despairing father sent her, had no charms for her. Her best playmates were animals ; the horses and dogs she saw in the streets and which she fearlessly accosted ; the sheep that found itself queerly lodged on the top floor of a city house ; and the parrot which, as we have seen, was not only her playmate but her schoolmaster. There came a time when the charge of such a child, so averse to rules and so given to strange ways of passing her time, became too much for the old servant with her orthodox views of life, and she persuaded Rosa's father to put her as a day-soholar with the nuns at Chaillot, a small suburb of Paris. How it happened that she was allowed to go back and forth alone, between home and school, we do not know ; but it is not to be wondered at if she were irregular in her hours ; if, one day, she set the nuns wondering why she did not appear at school-open- ing, and another day put the old servant into a twitter because she did not come home in season. The truth was, she had found that there was something better in Paris than streets and shops and tall houses ; she had discovered a wood there, a veritable forest, with trees, and pools of water, and birds, and wild flowers, and though this enchanted spot which citizens called the Bois de Boulogne — not then a formal park as it is to-day — was off the road to Chaillot, yet it was not so far that she need fear getting lost in going there or in coming back. No wonder, then, if, once this way discovered of escape from tiresome school duties, it was travelled so often by Rosalie, and that her school-work became in conse- quence so unsatisfactory that at length the patient nuns remonstrated. They advised Rosa's father, since she neither would nor could learn anything from books, that it would be better to put her to some useful trade by which she might earn her living ; and the good sisters suggested — dressmaking ! The wisdom of these ladies, who could not see that they were dealing with the last woman in the world to whom dressmaking could be interesting, was matched by that of the father, who showed himself so blind to the character of his daughter that he resolved to act at once upon the advice of the nuns ; and without con- sulting the wishes of poor Rosalie he apprenticed her straightway to a Parisian dressmaker. The docile girl allowed the yoke to be slipped over her head with- out complaint, but the confinement wore upon her health and spirits, and after a short trial the experiment had to be abandoned. Her father yielded to her en- treaties and took her home. The girl was long in coming to a knowledge of herself. Although she was to be, in time, a famous artist, the familiar legend of the biographers is wanting in her case ; we read nothing about scribbled books or walls defaced by childish sketches, nor does she appear to have handled a pencil or a brush until she was