He also knew the French Impressionists' paintings of expansive avenues, exquisite vistas and elegant bourgeois society that marked the stunning transformation of Napoleon III's Paris into a gleaming, modern metropolis.
What formal education he got was at a Catholic school, which he attended until he was 14 to please his bourgeois grandparents: it left him with a love of well-written French and a loathing of organised religion.
