the foot of
the Cross the bare shoulder of Magdalen. It does not rest upon it, but
grazes it. The contact is scarcely noticeable, we divine it rather than
see it. It would have been profane to insist upon it, it would have been
cruel not to have made us believe in it. All Rubens's furtive
sensitiveness is in this imperceptible contact that says so many things,
respects them all, and makes them affecting.

The sinner is admirable. She is incontestably the best piece of work in
the picture, the most delicate, the most personal, one of the best
figures of women, moreover, that Rubens ever executed in his career that
was so fertile in feminine creations. This delicious figure has its
legend; how should it not have, its very perfection having become
legendary! It is probable that this beautiful maiden with the black
eyes, with the firm glance, with the clear-cut profile, is a portrait,
and the portrait is that of Isabella Brandt, whom he had married two
years before, and who had also sat for him for the Virgin in the wing of
the _Visitation_. However, while observing her ample figure, powdered
hair, and plump proportions, we reflect what must some day be the
splendid and individual charms of that beautiful Helen Fourment whom he
is to marry twenty years later.

From his earliest to his latest years, one tenacious type seems to have
taken up its abode in Rubens's heart; one fixed idea haunted his amorous
and constant imagination. He delights in it, he completes it, he
achieves it; to some extent he pursues it in his two marriages, just as
he never ceases to repeat it throughout his works. There is always
something both of Isabella and of Helen in the women whom Rubens painted
from either one of them. In the first he puts a sort of preconceived
trait of the second; into the second glides a kind of ineffaceable
memory of the first. At the date of which we treat, he possesses the
first and is inspired by her; the other is not yet born, and still he
divines her. The future already mingles with the present; the real with
the ideal. As soon as the image appears it has this double form. Not
only is it exquisite, but not a feature is wanting. Does it not seem as
if in thus fixing it from the first day, Rubens intended that neither he
nor anyone else should forget it?

As for the rest, this is the sole mundane grace with which he has
embellished this austere picture, slightly monkish, and absolutely
evangelical in character, if by