My Paris host booked me into the “Renoir in the 20th Century” show at the Grand Palais and I wandered round it early in the morning, quite alone, which was a great luxury. But the paintings, late in the master’s career, seemed gorgeous but fatally sentimental. They seemed to be the motherlode of French sentimental imagery. So it’s fascinating to see how the show’s creators make the case that Matisse (and plenty of other younger painters) were inspired by them?

I suppose the essence of the thing is that one can’t see old works of art with the eyes of the people who first saw them, let alone withthe eyes of innovative genius. The Rodin-Mattisse show was most revealing – helped one most see the connections – when it paired drawings by Rodin and Matisse. The surprise was that Rodin’s sketches had the same cartooning effect – the same flourishes and ellipses – as we are familiar with in Matisse’s work. That made them instantly recognisable and lovable. And Matisse’s little sculptures often seemed to be mimicking Rodin’s, and that gave pause for thought too.

It wasn’t until the end of the Renoir show that one saw (as well as Picasso’s) paintings by Matisse which were designed to show how there were echoes of the older man in the latter’s work. It worked: the reduction of a leg to a basic, vigorous bulge; the pattern of a fabric or wallpaper rendered as a suggestive smudge of colours. There are plenty of traits which Renoir plucked from the ether for the younger people to pick up. I trekked back through some of the Renoir rooms trying to reverse engineer some enthusiasm for the rather simian, stolid creatures with whom Renoir was trying to express something ethereal, fantastical, even spiritual.

I should perhaps add that the Rodin museum remains one of the greatest Parisian pleasures. The garden (entry one Euro) contains some splendid big Rodin pieces, including the Thinker. (They seem far more successful than most of the smaller pieces inside.) And it is one of the  loveliest public city gardens I’ve seen.

It’s an abiding mystery that the very rich don’t feel the pinches that the ordinary rich do. Sunseeker, the yachtmaker, said the other day that their multi-million speedboats were keeping the business afloat even as the bottom end of their market was feeling the pinch. There will always be plenty of multi-millionaires to buy Hirst, even in the depth of a recession.

In Hirts’s case, we have all the conundrums that art always presents. After all, we have no idea whether his pieces will grow more valuable as works of art, or be stripped down for whatever their raw materials are worth. In short, his works may be thought risible quite soon. Or not.

Then there’s the intriguing business of what Hirst will do with his loot. He might just become an ordinarily rich person. But it is just as likely that his wealth will be folded back to us all as his audience. Perhaps he’ll start a gallery or a foundation. Whatever.

Holroyd describes how Irving rose at 5am to swim in the Thames before work. The day done, he attended a “school of arms” in Chancery Lane. Reminiscent of something very similar portrayed in Bleak House, it taught him how to swashbuckle. (By the way, he might have attended to the kind of dancing class also found in Hard Times.) And then to elocution class (attended then and for decades since by most British people keen to get ahead). £100 allowed him to invest in the costumes and kit which equipped him for life on the stage.

The point is that he was just a clerk, but - like millions of his countrymen – he had the imagination and the means to better himself. In my talks with corporates, I call this self-entrepreneurship. It’s not a pretty neologism, but the idea is that one invests in oneself both as a person and a sort of mini-business. Samuel Smiles would have understood.