Bent over a chair in Mr Worth’s study, James is given six of ‘the very best he can muster’ and, unfortunately, shouts out in apparent pain.

Not pain! But delight! Worth driven to a rage strikes again!

James finds it difficult to move after this beating. The pain, if such it was, and a sudden, and embarrassing, physical development force him to remain prone. Worth, enraged apparently, grabs the youth and is greatly disturbed by what he sees:

His glasses misted up, and he just took hold of my body as if I was a frying-pan. I exploded!

And so we have started. The glory of sado-masochism has been discovered and James embraced that particular side of life at Loggwood School with alacrity. Presumably driving poor Worth mad as a result. But school is school, college is college, and there came a time when James put aside childish things. Nevertheless the seed had been sown.

To Paris then, a young painter discovering the glory and joy after

the drabness and boredom of London. A small studio, meals on the run, painting, arguing, discussing, meeting, doing, in fact, just about everything one does do as a creative creature discovering life.

The allowance from Papa just about covers this life, but he manages, now and again, to augment his money by selling little pieces here and there. A great deal of time is spent in the Louvre and various other galleries, now and again a girl slips into view, and into bed, and as easily slips out again. Life, student life, is all as usual. Apart from the fact that James is extremely vain about his ‘beauty’, as he calls it, there is really nothing of interest in the very beginning.

In the second, or third, I’ve forgotten exactly, he is still chirruping away about his looks.

I am, I realize, the perfect Beardsley model. I have the height, colouring, elegance. Except for the flounces and the frills which I would never affect. Or the wigs! I am more the Greeks and Gods whom he draws and all the other licentious fellows. Prefer boots to bows, belts to buttons. Bonds above all!

In spite of his splendidly normal life as a student, the little seed long since planted still lies dormant. Almost. And then, halfway into one Agenda he makes a startling, to him, discovery.

René takes me to an utterly amazing place. A very à la mode club called Le Poisson d’Avril. Exhilarating! Amazing! All sexes present! Dark, pools of light, noise, crammed. My eyes stand out like those of a lobster. I have never seen such sights, heard such sounds. Great music. I could paint here for ever.

He burbles on, comparing himself to a

very minor Lautrec. The faces, the bodies, cry out to be captured on paper.