a week of loves: belated day 5, words of artist Robert Henri

All things change according to the state we are in.  Nothing is fixed.  I lived once in the top of a house, in a little room, in Paris.  I was a student.  My place was a romance.  It was a mansard room and it had a small square window that looked out over housetops, pink chimney pots.  I could see l'Institut, the Pantheon and the Tour Saint Jacques.  The tiles of the floor were red and some of them were broken and got out of place.  There was a little stove, a wash basin, a pitcher, piles of my studies.  Some hung on the wall, others accumulated dust on their backs.  My bed was a cot.  It was a wonderful place.  I cooked two meals and ate dinner outside.  I used to keep the camembert out of the window on the mansard roof between meals, and I made fine coffee, and made much of eggs and macaroni.  I studied and thought, made compositions, wrote letters home full of hope of some day being an artist.

It was wonderful.  But days came when hopes looked black and my art student's paradise turned into a dirty little room with broken tiles, ashes fell from the stove, it was all hopelessly poor, I was tired of camembert and eggs and macaroni, and there wasn't a shade of significance in those delicate little chimney pots, or the Pantheon, the Institut, or even the Tour Saint Jacques.