like many aristocrats, his father alphonse retreated into rural pastimes-- riding and hunting. eccentric, he looked wistfully back to the family's glorious past. alphonse had married his first cousin adele, a common practice in a class anxious to preserve the purity of its bloodlines. but the results of inbreeding for henri were uncommonly cruel. his legs were short and weak. he broke each of them in early adolescence and stopped growing when he was 14. he was just under five feet tall. his head, hands and torso continued to develop. but his stunted legs made walking painful for the rest of his life. denied the aristocratic pleasures of riding and hunting, henri turned to sketching and painting rural scenes. he had a flair for it and in 1882, at the age of 18, he moved to paris to study painting. it was a move that would change the direction of his art and his life. paris in the 1880s was becoming the modern city. baron haussmann's legacy, the great boulevards that define modern paris had sliced through the heart of the city, displacing anyone in the way. the poor and the worki