s lost to the sight of his most intimate
friends forgetting the world, the theatre, poetry, music, and all his
dearest habits. One morning Girodet broke through all the barriers with
which artists are familiar, and which they know how to evade, went into
his room, and woke him by asking, "What are you going to send to the
Salon?" The artist grasped his friend's hand, dragged him off to the
studio, uncovered a small easel picture and a portrait. After a long
and eager study of the two masterpieces, Girodet threw himself on his
comrade's neck and hugged him, without speaking a word. His feelings
could only be expressed as he felt them--soul to soul.

"You are in love?" said Girodet.

They both knew that the finest portraits by Titian, Raphael, and
Leonardo da Vinci, were the outcome of the enthusiastic sentiments
by which, indeed, under various conditions, every masterpiece is
engendered. The artist only bent his head in reply.

"How happy are you to be able to be in love, here, after coming back
from Italy! But I do not advise you to send such works as these to the
Salon," the great painter went on. "You see, these two works will not
be appreciated. Such true coloring, such prodigious work, cannot yet be
understood; the public is not accustomed to such depths. The pictures
we paint, my dear fellow, are mere screens. We should do better to
turn rhymes, and translate the antique poets! There is more glory to be
looked for there than from our luckless canvases!"

Notwithstanding this charitable advice, the two pictures were exhibited.
The _Interior_ made a revolution in painting. It gave birth to the
pictures of genre which pour into all our exhibitions in such prodigious
quantity that they might be supposed to be produced by machinery. As
to the portrait, few artists have forgotten that lifelike work; and the
public, which as a body is sometimes discerning, awarded it the crown
which Girodet himself had hung over it. The two pictures were surrounded
by a vast throng. They fought for places, as women say. Speculators and
moneyed men would have covered the canvas with double napoleons, but the
artist obstinately refused to sell or to make replicas. An enormous sum
was offered him for the right of engraving them, and the print-sellers
were not more favored than the amateurs.

Though these incidents occupied the world, they were not of a nature to
penetrate the recesses of the monastic solitude in the Rue Saint-Denis.
How