Page:Pen And Pencil Sketches - Volume I.djvu/75

42 for six days. Perfect silence was enforced, and at the close of the sitting all drawings were collected, placed in a portfolio and put away till the following morning, when the drawings were given out again to the competitors.

There were monthly concours at Picot’s, to which many of the pupils would send their drawings or paintings from life, and sketches of a uniform size of any subject they might fancy. No prizes were given in these competitions, numbers only being awarded by the master in order of merit. Calderon and I resolved to go in for the sketch competition, and stayed at our room one bitter cold day to make it. We went to the expense of a fire for that occa- sion only ; ordinarily we sat and shivered in our great- coats when “at home.” Calderon took a scene from one of Byron’s poems for his subject, and I “Christ Disputing with the Doctors.” I forget what numbers we obtained. Calderon’s sketch was brilliant and full of go, but when I think of my own even at this time, I have a cold shudder ! As spring came on, we now and then did a little outdoor sketching by the Buttes Montmartre. We dined at a very cheap restaurant in the Rue Moliere, going afterwards to an evening life-school — a school without a master, kept by an ex-model named Boudin, of whom I remember nothing except that he was “fat and scant of breath,” and a most inordinate smoker of long