. There he
receives a few visitors. But in truth the places he once liked best,
the people, nay! the very friends, have become to him nothing less than
insupportable. Though he still dreams of change, and would fain try his
native air once more, he is at work constantly upon his art; but solely
by way of a teacher, instructing (with a kind of remorseful diligence,
it would seem) Jean-Baptiste, who will be heir to his unfinished work,
and take up many of his pictures where he has left them. He seems now
anxious for one thing only, to give his old "dismissed" disciple what
remains of himself and the last secrets of his genius. His
property--9000 livres only--goes to his relations. Jean-Baptiste has
found these last weeks immeasurably useful.

For the rest, bodily exhaustion perhaps, and this new interest in an
old friend, have brought him tranquillity at last, a tranquillity in
which he is much occupied with matters of religion. Ah! it was ever so
with me. And one lives also most reasonably so.--With women, at least,
it is thus, quite certainly. Yet I know not what there is of a pity
which strikes deep, at the thought of a man, a while since so strong,
turning his face to the wall from the things which most occupy men's
lives. 'Tis that homely, but honest cure of Nogent he has caricatured
so often, who attends him.

July 1721.

Our incomparable Watteau is no more! Jean-Baptiste returned
unexpectedly. I heard his hasty footsteps on the stairs. We turned
together into that room; and he told his story there. Antony Watteau
departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot
days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix
for the good cure of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he
possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion.

He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after
something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not
at all.

CHAPTER II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS

Almost every people, as we know, has had its legend of a "golden age"
and of its return--legends which will hardly be forgotten, however
prosaic the world may become, while man himself remains the aspiring,
never quite contented being he is. And yet in truth, since we are no
longer children, we might well question the advantage of the return to
us of a condition of life in which, by the nature of the case, the
values of things would, so to speak, lie wholly on