small face and hands are moved
in sleep. A child of ten who cares only to save and possess, to hoard
his tiny savings! Yet he is not otherwise selfish, and loves us all
with a warm heart. Just now it is the moments of Antony's company he
counts, like a little miser. Well! that may save him perhaps from
developing a certain meanness of character I have sometimes feared for
him.

[13]

August 1705.

We returned home late this summer evening--Antony Watteau, my father
and sisters, young Jean-Baptiste, and myself--from an excursion to
Saint-Amand, in celebration of Antony's last day with us. After
visiting the great abbey-church and its range of chapels, with their
costly encumbrance of carved shrines and golden reliquaries and funeral
scutcheons in the coloured glass, half seen through a rich enclosure of
marble and brass-work, we supped at the little inn in the forest.
Antony, looking well in his new-fashioned, long-skirted coat, and
taller than he really is, made us bring our cream and wild strawberries
out of doors, ranging ourselves according to his judgment (for a hasty
sketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one of
those fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while
Jean-Baptiste and my youngest sister danced a minuet on the grass, to
the notes of some strolling lutanist who had found us out. He is
visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became for
a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he
discoursed to us about the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the church
here. His words, as he spoke of them, seemed full of a kind of rich
sunset with some moving glory within it. Yet I like far better than
any of these pictures of Rubens a work of that old Dutch [14] master,
Peter Porbus, which hangs, though almost out of sight indeed, in our
church at home. The patron saints, simple, and standing firmly on
either side, present two homely old people to Our Lady enthroned in the
midst, with the look and attitude of one for whom, amid her "glories"
(depicted in dim little circular pictures, set in the openings of a
chaplet of pale flowers around her) all feelings are over, except a
great pitifulness. Her robe of shadowy blue suits my eyes better far
than the hot flesh-tints of the Medicean ladies of the great Peter
Paul, in spite of that amplitude and royal ease of action under their
stiff court costumes, at which Antony Wattea