In the morning we saw that the sea was rough, and people said there would be trouble.. ..Fifty men volunteered to go at once, and followed the old sa… - Jean-François Millet

One day, however, I spent the whole day in front of the 'Concert Champetre' of Giorgione [in the Louvre museum, during his early Paris' years]. I could not weary of it. It was already three o'clock when, mechanically, I took a little canvas belonging to a friend, and began a sketch of the picture. Four o'clock sounded, and the dreadful 'ferme' [closing-time] of the guardians turned me out: but I had made enough of a sketch to give me pleasure, like a run into the country. Giorgione had opened the country to me. I had found consolation with him.

For the first [his very first time in Paris], I went to a little hotel, where I spent the night in a sort of nightmare, in which I saw my home, full of melancholy, with my mother, grandmother, and sister spinning in the evening, weeping and thinking of me, praying that I should escape the perdition of Paris. Then the evil demon drove me on before wonderful pictures, which seemed so beautiful, so brilliant, that it appeared to me they took fire and vanished in a heavenly cloud.. .Finally, without knowing how, I found myself [during one of his his first days in Paris] on the Pont Neuf, from which I saw a magnificent building which I thought must be the Louvre, from the descriptions I had heard of it. I went to it, and mounted the great stairway with a beating heart. At last one great object of my life was attained. I had imagined correctly what I should see. It seemed to me that I was in a world of friends [the paintings of the old masters], in a family where all that I beheld was the reality of my dreams.

I work like a gang of slaves; the day seems five months long. My wish to make a winter landscape has become a fixed idea. I want to do a sheep picture and have all sorts of projects in my head. If you could see how beautiful the forest is! I rush there at the end of the day, after my work, and I come back every time crushed. It is so calm, such a terrible grandeur, that I find myself really frightened. I don't know what those fellows, the trees, are saying to each other.. ..we don't know their language, that is all; but I am quite sure of this - they do not make puns!.. ..Send [me] 3 burnt sienna, 2 raw ditto, 3 Naples's yellow, 1 burnt Italian earth, 2 yellow ocher, 2 burnt umber, 1 bottle of raw oil.