wonderful dressing gown of purple and yellow stripes, with chaussons, cloth slippers, on her feet, and an elaborate coiffure of dyed black hair above her yellow old face. She came to me in the salon, a long narrow room with French windows framing tree-tops, the windows and doors all hung with rose-red velvet which looked as if it had been in place since the First Empire. There were sofas of rose, and chairs of the same with black wooden rims, tables and mantel-pieces with thousands of things on them, and an old-fashioned square piano in the corner. Madame was most gracious, remembered the name of her former lodgers, said they were très gentilles, turned a neat compliment to the American nation, and showed me the rooms herself.

I chose a back one of good size, nicely furnished and hung with a pretty chintz. It had a cabinet de toilette, or large cupboard for washstand and trunks, opening off it, and I was to have it with complete board, for two hundred francs a month ($40). The price was really higher, but my arrangement was for the winter. I was to pay extra for light and heat. The room had an open fireplace with a grille or fire-basket in it, for which I could buy boulets, coal dust pressed into egg-shaped balls, for three francs a sack. Later, I could have had a salamandre, one of the excellent small stoves which fit into the fireplace, really warm a room, and require filling only once in twenty-four hours. But I wanted something to poke, and I had an idea that Paris winters were not very formidable. As a matter of fact, anything more penetrating than their damp sunless cold it is impossible to imagine.

For light, there was a huge lamp for which I could buy luciline, a kind of highly refined kerosene which has no odour and burns well. I made my bath arrangements with Jean, Madame's old servant, who with his wife, Eugénie, was the real head of the establishment. I had bought a collapsible rubber tub, and Jean was to bring me a big can of hot water every morning. I found that I had to tip occasionally or the water became as cool as Jean's manners. Madame showed me her dining room, and told me with pride that her cuisine was of an excellence renowned. I went to fetch my trunks and hire a piano, glad that my long search was over. The piano was a small upright, a tin pan for tone, as are all Parisian pianos en location, and it was to cost me ten francs a month, with eight francs for carting. They are more expensive now. When it was installed, my Lares and Penates on top of it, and my music on a stool beside it, I felt that my feet were firmly planted on the ladder leading to success.

Then I began to work. And how I did work that winter! I had two singing lessons a week, and a session with the opera class lasting three hours in which we went through the dramatic action of our rôles. I slaved at my repertoire working three hours a week with a coach, and spending hours and hours a day learning by heart at home. Of course I began with the very biggest rôles—we all do. The personalities of Amneris, Carmen, Dalila, Azucena in turn, all in their French version of course, occupied my mind waking and sleeping.

Jacques Bouhy was always kind, grave and courteous with me. The thought of his having created Escamillo and his real knowledge of French traditions thrilled me. He lent me his copy of "Samson et Dalila" from which to copy the French words. It had an inscription from Saint-Saens "À M. Bouhy, grand prêtre et grand artiste." He created the rôle of the Grand Priest.

The only time I ever saw him upset was one day after the Opera class. We all thought him safely out riding as he always was on Mondays. My letter, written at that time to my mother, says:

"This morning in the opera class we had rather an unpleasant time. Little N., with the beautiful tenor voice, has learned in one week the first half of the Samson duet for me. He has had to learn it from a score which has only his voice part written in it. He is frightfully down on his luck and with the gorgeous voice and speaking French can't get anything to do, and has no money, not a cent to his name. We had done that, some one else had sung, and having ten minutes left, Valdejo told N. to sing again if he would. He was tired, but jumped up and began the first part of "Faust." He kept forgetting it. Suddenly the door opened and in walked Bouhy as white as a sheet. He commanded N. to stop singing and to learn his things before coming again to the class. Said, why did he sing like a baritone when he was a tenor, mocked him, told him he was ashamed to have such sounds made chez lui, that he had been a year on "Faust." What example was he to the others? Every one else had always worked seriously. He stormed for five long minutes, N. standing quite still, with his brown dog's eyes fixed on him—then he left the room. It was frightfully uncomfortable for us too. I am sure I have done just such rotten work so it may be my turn next. Of course Bouhy was right. N. has been there a year and ought to know it; but he is just tired out, and never sleeps he says. They say Bouhy is beginning to show his age. This week he bounced his cook whom he has had for years."

I had two French lessons a week, and should have had at least one diction lesson besides, but for an invaluable course which I had taken in New York with the Yersin sisters. These lessons were a nerve-racking experience from which I used to emerge with my feathers all rubbed the wrong way from the strain of trying to imitate the intangible differences between the various French "e's." But I have always been grateful for this rigid training, from the time when I first reached Paris, and, though speaking very little French, could give an address to a cocher without having to repeat it, until now, when I can thank my trained ear for a perfect accent in singing foreign languages.

I think no one ever studied more unrelentingly than I, during that first year of hot enthusiasm. I began early in the morning, and the only reason that I did not burn the midnight oil was that I found it cost me too much in kerosene and firing. I could keep warm in bed for nothing, and boulets were my pet economy. Coming from a country where a warm room was taken for granted, and where the furnaces in hotels and boarding houses might have been supplied by Elijah's ravens for all I knew about it, I just couldn't bear to see my money burning away bit by bit in a grate; and many a time I have put on my fur-lined coat rather than add fuel to the dying heap of dreadfully expensive ashes in the grille.

CHAPTER IV

PENSION PERSONALITIES

AT first I had no companionship and very little recreation, beyond the ever fresh wonder and delight of the Paris streets as I saw them in my daily constitutional. One day I went with a girl friend to visit her atelier. I wrote to my mother:

"We spent a long time in the life-class room—nude, (not us but the model). It was a mixed class. A large oblong room, filled with I should think over a hundred students, mostly men. They sat in a circle facing the model throne. The floor is not raised, but the effect of an amphitheatre is produced by rush bottom stools of different heights. They rest their pads or drawing portfolios on a railing in front of them. The room is intolerably hot because of the model. What struck us most was the intense silence and atmosphere of earnestness; no one speaks and there is only the gentle rub-rub of the charcoal, crayon, or pencil against the paper. The students look quickly up and down and never move their glance except from their sketch to the model and back again. She was a very pretty young girl and took graceful half-hour poses. The one interruption was a quiet voice