ting into picture the poem that tells
how, one winter evening, sitting by his fire, the old poet was
surprised by a sound of weeping outside his door, and opening it,
found Cupid wet and shivering and begging for a shelter from the cold.
The man takes the pretty, dimpled mischief to his bosom, warms his
feet and hands at the fire, dries his bow and arrows, and lets him sip
wine from his cup. Then, when Cupid is refreshed and warmed, he tries
his arrows, now here, now there, and at last aims one straight at his
benefactor's heart, and laughing at the jest, flies out at the open
door. Gerome's picture was in three panels. The first showed the poet
opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled wings and
dripping curls; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his benefactor;
in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth, musing over
the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the story was
an old one, so many an artist before Gerome had played with it as a
subject for a picture. Jean-Francois Millet himself, another pupil of
Delaroche, though earlier than Gerome, had tried his hand at
illustrating Anacreon's fable before he found his proper field of work
in portraying the occupations of the men and women about him, the
peasants among whom he was born and bred.

Gerome's picture did nothing to advance his fortunes with the public.
1848 was a stormy time in France and in all Europe, and people were
not in the mood to be amused with such trifles as Anacreon and his
Cupid. The pictures in that year's Salon that drew the public in
crowds about them were Couture's "The Romans of the Decline of the
Empire," in which all Paris saw, or thought it saw, the
handwriting-on-the-wall for the government of Louis-Philippe; and the
"Shipwrecked Sailors in a Bark," of Delacroix, a wild and stormy scene
of terror that seemed to echo the prophecies of evil days at hand for
France with which the time was rife.

Gerome's next picture, however, was to bring him once more before the
public, and to carry his name beyond his native France even as far as
America. Leaving for the nonce his chosen field of antiquity, where
yet he was to distinguish himself, he looked for a subject in the
Paris of his own day. "The Duel after the Masquerade" opens for us a
corner of the Bois de Boulogne--the fashionable park on the outskirts
of Paris--where in the still dawn of a winter's day, a group of men
are met to witness a duel be