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I live in Mentone, a quiet, simple, restful place, where the rich never come. I met Theophile Magnan, a retired, rich, old man from Lyons yesterday. In the Hotel des Anglais. Theophile looked sad and dreamy, and didn't talk with anybody else. Which brought me back to the past.
A long time ago, Francois Millet. Claude, Carl and I were young artists — very young artists — in fact.
Yes, Francois Millet. The great French artist, was my friend.
Millet wasn't any greater than we were at that time. He didn't have any fame, even in his own village.
We were all poor though we had stacks and stacks of as good pictures as anybody in Europe painted. Once a person ever offered four francs for Millet's "Angelus", which he intended to sell for eight.
It was a fact in human history that a great artist would never be acknowledged* until after he was starved and dead. His pictures climbed to high prices after his death.
Then we made a decision that one of us must die, to save the others and himself.
Millet was elected to die.
During the next three months Millet painted with all his might, enlarged his stock all he could, not pictures, not sketches, studies, parts of studies, fragments of studies, of course, with his cipher * on them.
They were the things to be sold.
Carl went to Paris to start the work of building up Millet's name. Claude and I went to sell Millet's small pictures and to build up his name as well.
We made Millet a master. I always said to my customer, "I am a fool to sell a picture of Francois Millet's at all, for he is not going to live three months, and when he dies his pictures can't be had for love or money."
Claude and I took care to spread that little fact as far as we could.
Carl made friends with the correspondents, and got Millet's condition reported to England and all over the continent, and America, and everywhere.
The sad end came at last, Millet died, not really. He became Theophile Magnan.
The pictures went up. There's a man in Paris today who owns seventy Millet pictures. He paid us two million francs for them. Do you still remember the "Angelus"? Carl sold it for twenty—two hundred francs. And as for the bushels of sketches and studies which Millet produced in the last six weeks, well, it would astonish you to know the figure we sell them at nowadays.
We are no longer artists and Millet dead.
