Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/16

 23rd, 1821, as the natural son of Dr. Charles Lewis Meryon, an English doctor, formerly physician and secretary to Lady Hester Stanhope, and an opera dancer, Pierre-Narcisse Chaspoux, aged twenty-eight, known as Mme. Gentil, who already had a daughter by an English peer. It was not till August 9th, 1824, that Dr. Meryon made a formal recognition of paternity and left a sum of money, on leaving France, for his son's education. His mother brought him up with tender care, but he inherited from her apparently the mental disease with which he was afterwards afflicted; she died, out of her mind, in 1837 or 1838. At the age of five, under the name of Charles Gentil, he went to school at Passy, where he received some elementary lessons in drawing. A very childish drawing of houses, trees and a well, in red and black chalk, of which at a later period some one made a woodcut, is in the British Museum; by internal evidence one may judge it to be earlier than the elementary lessons. He went to Marseilles, Hyères, and to Italy, as far as Pisa and Leghorn; then returned to Paris till he made up his mind to go into the Navy, and, in 1837, entered the naval school at Brest. It was then that he adopted his father's name of Meryon. Leaving the naval school in 1839, he sailed from Toulon in October in the Alger for the Levant, and was transferred at Smyrna, as a first-class cadet, to the Monte-*bello. He visited Argos, the tomb of Agamemnon and the lion gate at Mycenae, and at Athens made drawings of the frieze of the Temple of Theseus and of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates which appears in his etching of the Convent of the French Capuchins at Athens, 1854 (plate 42). On his return to Toulon he had further lessons in drawing. In 1842 he went to sea again, being gazetted as "enseigne de vaisseau" to the corvette Le Rhin, which cruised about New Zealand, New Caledonia, and the islands of the Pacific. The fruits of these years of travel in Oceania may be seen in a number of etchings which he made in later life (Delteil 63-74). A multitude of pencil sketches made on his travels re-