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The view from the windows into the student dens; the tumult of the rapins below; the necessity of looking up at the sky to escape the miserable sights of the damp angle of the street; the presence of that portrait, full of soul and grandeur despite the workmanship of an amateur painter; the sight of the rich colors, now old and harmonious, in that calm and placid home; the preference of the mother for her eldest child; her opposition to the tastes of the younger; in short, the whole body of facts and circumstances which make the preamble of this history are perhaps the generating causes to which we owe Joseph Bridau, one of the greatest painters of the modern French school of art.
Coming, light-footed, to Paris from the department of the Eastern Pyrenees, with the sum of eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum, he had in some degree forgotten the miseries and privations of his childhood and his family amid the other privations and miseries which are never lacking to "rapins," whose whole fortune consists of intrepid vocation.
To any one who has known these young rapins, and wondered at the grave and distinguished members of the Institute into which many of them have afterward developed, it is evident that this studious youth who read Virgil in the original and Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe in translations probably had a much more cultivated mind and a much sounder education than most of his fellow students under Delaroche.
In 1250 we find the Rapins established near Saint-Jean de la Maurienne, in Savoy, close upon the French frontier. Saint-Jean de la Maurienne was so called because of the supposed relic of the bones of St. John the Baptist, which had been deposited there by a female pilgrim, Sainte Thècle, who was, it is supposed, a Rapin by birth.
It pleased her that two rapins in large black ties and steeple hats paid her an insolent attention as they passed her; and she stopped to pinch the cheek of a chubby child that had planted itself straight in her path. "Am I late?" she said, as they met. "I only just caught the train. Oh! I am so hungry! Don't let's talk let's dejeuner." Philip laughed. "Will you dare the hotel?"
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