The Confessions of a Young Man (1886 in French; 1888 in English) is a memoir by Irish novelist George Moore who spent about 15 years in his teens and 20s in Paris and later London as a struggling artist.
He sketches, with a frankness now jubilant, now cynical, the luscious "vie de Boheme" that Paris alone could offer the young man of health and wealth who loved art.
[1] Amid scenes splendid, squalid, or bizarre, move students, cabotins, painters, poets, pale enthusiasts starving for the sake of an idea, actresses, women of fashion, courtesans, clubmen, and spectators.
[1] So the years pass; and at last, having saturated himself with the French theories of literary and graphic art which are bound up with the names of Flaubert, Goncourts, Zola, Degas, and Manet, he one day learns with tragic certainty that he is not destined to be a painter, and he courageously admits that all this periodic, frenzied effort has been misdirected.
As Moore says in a later Preface: "The first eulogies written in England, I might also say in almost any language, of Manet, Degas, Whistler, Monet, Pissarro, are in this book of Confessions, and whoever reads will find himself unable to deny that time has vindicated them all splendidly."