t, each of George Sand's earlier books had been written with the
heart's blood of one of the victims of her insatiable passions--for I
should not like to prostitute the word "love" to her liaisons; and I am
glad to think that Eugene Delacroix was spared that ordeal. It would
have killed him; and the painter of "Sardanapale" was more precious to
his own art than to hers, which, with all due deference to eminent
critics, left an unpleasant sensation to those who were fortunate enough
to be free from incipient hysteria.

A liaison with George Sand would have killed Eugene Delacroix, I am
perfectly certain; for he would have staked gold, she would have only
played with counters. It would have been the vitiated atmosphere in
which the cradle of his life and of his genius--which were one, in this
instance--would have been extinguished.

As it was, that candle burned very low at times, because, during the
years I knew Delacroix, he had nearly always one foot in the grave; the
healthy breezes of art's unpolluted air made that candle burn brightly
now and again; hence the difference in quality, as striking, of some of
his pictures.

Perhaps on account of his delicate health, Delacroix was not very fond
of society, in which, however, he was ever welcome, and particularly
fitted to shine, though he rarely attempted to do so. I have said that
Dante and Shakespeare, if they had painted, would have painted as
Delacroix did; I am almost tempted to add that if Delacroix' vocation
had impelled him that way, he would have sung as they sang--of course, I
do not mean that he would have soared as high, but his name would have
lived in literature as it does in painting, though perhaps not with so
brilliant a halo around it. For, unlike many great painters of his time,
Delacroix was essentially lettre. One has but to read some of his
critical essays in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of that period, to be
convinced of that at once. Theophile Gautier said, one evening, that it
was "the style of a poet in a hurry." The sentences give one the
impression of newly-minted golden coins. Nearly every one contains a
thought, which, if reduced to small change, would still make an
admirable paragraph. He gives to his readers what he expects from his
authors--a sensation, a shock in two or three lines. The sentences are
modelled upon his favourite prose author, who, curious to relate, was
none other than Napoleon I. I often tried to interest him in English