and I have a fancy always that I may
meet Antony Watteau there again, any time; just as, when a child,
having found one day a tiny box in the shape of a silver coin, for long
afterwards I used to try every piece of money that came into my hands,
expecting it to open.

[26]

September 1714.

We were sitting in the Watteau chamber for the coolness, this sultry
evening. A sudden gust of wind ruffed the lights in the sconces on the
walls: the distant rumblings, which had continued all the afternoon,
broke out at last; and through the driving rain, a coach, rattling
across the Place, stops at our door: in a moment Jean-Baptiste is with
us once again; but with bitter tears in his eyes;--dismissed!

October 1714.

Jean-Baptiste! he too, rejected by Antony! It makes our friendship and
fraternal sympathy closer. And still as he labours, not less
sedulously than of old, and still so full of loyalty to his old master,
in that Watteau chamber, I seem to see Antony himself, of whom
Jean-Baptiste dares not yet speak,--to come very near his work, and
understand his great parts. So Jean-Baptiste's work, in its nearness
to his, may stand, for the future, as the central interest of my life.
I bury myself in that.

February 1715.

If I understand anything of these matters, Antony Watteau paints that
delicate life of Paris so excellently, with so much spirit, partly [27]
because, after all, he looks down upon it or despises it. To persuade
myself of that, is my womanly satisfaction for his preference--his
apparent preference--for a world so different from mine. Those
coquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be rendered so
perfectly, only through an intimate understanding of them. For him, to
understand must be to despise them; while (I think I know why) he
nevertheless undergoes their fascination. Hence that discontent with
himself, which keeps pace with his fame. It would have been better for
him--he would have enjoyed a purer and more real happiness--had he
remained here, obscure; as it might have been better for me!

It is altogether different with Jean-Baptiste. He approaches that
life, and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its
own; and beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain,
produces a solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways.

March 1715.

There are points in his painting (I apprehend this through his own
persistently modest observations) at which he