In point of fact,I met Strickland before I had been a fortnight in Paris.

　　I quickly found myself a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of a house in the Rue des Dames,and for a couple of hundred francs bought at a secondhand dealers enough furniture to make it habitable.I arranged with the concierge to make my coffee in the morning and to keep the place clean.Then I went to see my friend Dirk Stroeve.

　　Dirk Stroeve was one of those persons whom,according to your character,you cannot think of without derisive laughter or an embarrassed shrug of the shoulders.Nature had made him a buffoon.He was a painter,but a very bad one,whom I had met in Rome,and I still remembered his pictures.He had a genuine enthusiasm for the commonplace.His soul palpitating with love of art,he painted the models who hung about the stairway of Bernini in the Piazza di Spagna,undaunted by their obvious picturesqueness;and his studio was full of canvases on which were portrayed moustachioed,largeeyed peasants in peaked hats,urchins in becoming rags,and women in bright petticoats.So......