Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/109

 JEAN-FRANQOIS MILLET 267 as a man, not merely as an illustration of some sacred text, or an image in a book of allegories, was Jean-Francois Millet, known as the peasant painter of peas- ants. He was born at Gruchy, a small hamlet on the coast of Normandy, where his family, well known in the region for several generations, lived by the labor of their hands, cultivating their fields and exercising the simple virtues of that pas- toral life, without ambition and without desire for change. This content was a part of the religion of the country and must not be looked upon as arguing a low state of intelligence or of manners. Of their neighbors we have no account, but the Millet household contained many of the elements that go to sustain the in- tellectual no less than the spiritual life. If there was plain living, there was high thinking ; there were books and of the best, and more than one member of the circle valued learning for its own sake. Millet owed much to his grandmother, a woman of great strength of character and of a deeply religious nature. As his godmother she gave him his name, calling him Jean, after his father, and Fran- cois, after Saint Francis of Assisi. As is usual in Catholic countries, the boy was called after the name of his patron saint, and in the case of Millet, Saint Francis, the ardent lover of nature, the friend of the birds and of all the animate creation, was well chosen as the guardian of one who was to prove himself, all his life, the passionate lover of nature. The boyhood cf Millet was passed at home. He had no schooling except some small instruction in Latin from the village priest and from a neighboring curate, but he made good use of what he learned. He worked on the farm with his father and his men, ploughing, harrowing, sowing, reaping, mowing, winnow- ing — in a word, sharing actively and contentedly in all the work that belongs to the farmer's life. And in the long winter evenings or in the few hours of rest that the day afforded, he would hungrily devour the books that were at hand — the " Lives of the Saints," the " Confessions of Saint Augustine," the " Life of Saint Jerome," and especially his letters, which he read and re-read all his life. These and the philosophers of Port Royal, with Bossuet, and Fenelon, with the Bible and Virgil, were his mental food. Virgil and the Bible he read always in the Latin ; he was so familiar with them both that, when a man, his biog- rapher, Sensier, says he never met a more eloquent translator of these two books When the time came, therefore, for Millet to go up to Paris, he was not, as has been said by some writer, an ignorant peasant, but a well-taught man who had read much and digested what he had read, and knew good books from bad. The needs of his narrow life absorbed him so seriously that the seeds of art that lay hid in his nature found a way to the light with difficulty. But his master- passion was soon to assert itself, and, as in all such cases, in an unexpected manner. Millet's attempts at drawing had hitherto been confined to studies made in hours stolen from rest. He had copied the engravings found in an old family Bible, and he had drawn, from his window, the garden, the stable, the field run- ning down to the edge of the high cliff, and with the sea in the horizon, and he