therer walk. Tasso, Cervantes, Boccaccio, Ariosto (Ariosto as
he has drawn him, inspired by Love and Folly), it recalls all his genii
of happiness. It laughs with the liberties of La Fontaine. It goes from
Properce to Grecourt, from Longus to Favart, from Gentil-Bernard to
Andre Chenier. It has, so to speak, the heart of a lover and the hand of
a charming rascal. In it the breath of a sigh passes into a kiss and it
is young with immortal youth: it is the poem of Desire, a divine poem!

It is enough to have written it like Fragonard for him to remain what he
will always be: the Cherubino of erotic painting....

He leaped into success and fame at one bound, with his picture of
_Callirhoe_, that painting of universal approbation, which caused him to
be received into the _Academie_ by acclamation; that painting which
aroused public enthusiasm at the Salon in the month of August, and which
had the honour of a Royal command for its reproduction upon Gobelin
tapestry.

Imagine a large picture nine feet high by twelve feet long, where the
human figures are of natural size, the architecture in its proper
proportion and the crowd and sky have their own space. Between two
columns of a shining marble with its iris-coloured reflections, above
the heavy purple of a tapestry with golden fringe spread out and broken
by the ridge of two steps, opens the scene of an antique drama which
seems to be under the curtain of a theatre. On this tapestry, on this
pagan altar-cloth, stands a copper crater near an urn of black marble
half veiled with white linen. A column cuts in half a large candelabra
smoking with incense and ornamented with goats' heads, a superb bronze
which must have been taken from the lava of Herculaneum. A young priest
has thrown himself on his knees against this candelabra and embraces its
pedestal; in terror he has allowed his censer to fall to the earth.
Standing by his side is Coresus, the high priest, crowned with ivy,
enveloped in draperies, and seemingly floating in the sacerdotal
whiteness of his vestments; a beardless priest, of doubtful sex, of
androgynous grace, an enervated Adonis, the shadow of a man. With a
backward turn of one hand he plunges the knife in his breast; with the
other he has the appearance of casting his life into the heavens, whilst
across his effeminate face pass the weakness of the agony and grief of
violent death. Opposite the dying high-priest is the living though
fainting victim, nearly