d.

To a great degree this exhibition brought feeling to a normal condition.
Meissonier was still a great artist, yet he was human and his effects
were now believed to be gotten by natural methods. But there was a lull
in the mad rush to secure his wares. The Vanderbilts grew lukewarm;
titled connoisseurs from England were not so anxious; and Mrs. Mackay sat
back and smiled through her tears.

Meissonier had expended over a million francs on his house in the
Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, and nearly as much on the country-seat at
Poissy. These places were kingly in their appointments and such as only
the State should attempt to maintain. For a single man, by the work of
his right hand, to keep them up was too much to expect.

Meissonier's success had been too great. As a collector he had overdone
the thing. Only poor men, or those of moderate incomes, should be
collectors, for then the joy of sacrifice is theirs. Charles Lamb's
covetous looking on the book when it was red, daily for months, meanwhile
hoarding his pay, and at last one Saturday night swooping down and
carrying the volume home to Bridget in triumph, is the true type.

But money had come to Meissonier by hundreds of thousands of francs, and
often sums were forced upon him as advance payments. He lived royally and
never imagined that his hand and brain could lose their cunning, or the
public be fickle.

The fact that a "vindication" had been necessary was galling: the great
man grew irritable and his mood showed itself in his work: his colors
grew hard and metallic, and there were angles in his lines where there
should have been joyous curves.

Debts began to press. He painted less and busied his mind with
reminiscence--the solace of old age.

And then it was that he dictated to his wife the "Conversations." The
book reveals the quality of his mind with rare fidelity--and shows the
power of this second wife fully to comprehend him. Thus did she disprove
some of the unkind philosophy given to the world by her liege. But the
talk in the "Conversations" is of an old man in whose heart was a tinge
of bitterness. Yet the thought is often lofty and the comment clear and
full of flashing insight. It is the book of Ecclesiastes over again,
written in a minor key, with a little harmless gossip added for filling.
Meissonier died in Paris on the Twenty-first of January, Eighteen Hundred
Ninety-one, aged seventy-six years.

* * * *