{ 517}A charming _Marquise dc Largillere_ with a wasp waist in blue velvet, elegant and haughty. A _Christ Crucified,_ by Rubens, the eyes glassy, flesh livid--a powerful sketch, wherein the cold whiteness of the faded tints exhales the frightful poetry of death.
I name only the most striking; but the liveliest sensation comes from the modern pictures. They transport the mind all at once to Paris, into the midst of our discussions, into the inventive and troubled world of the modern arts, the immense laboratory where so many fruitful and opposing forces weave the work of a renewing century: A celebrated picture by Glaize, the _Death of St. John the Baptist_; the half-naked butcher who holds the head is a superb brute, a careless instrument of death which has just done its work well. An elegant and affected painting by Schoppin, _Jacob before Laban and his two Daughters_. The daughters of Laban are pretty drawing-room misses who have just disguised themselves as Arabs. _Muley Abd-el-Rhaman,_ by Eugene Delacroix. He is motionless on a bluish and melancholy horse. Files of soldiers are presenting arms, packed in masses in a stifling atmosphere; dull heads, stupid and real, hooded with the white bournous; ruined towers are piled behind them under a leaden sun. The crude colors, the heavy garments, bronzed limbs, massive parasols, that lifeless and animal{ 518} expression are the revelation of a land where thought sleeps overwhelmed and buried under the weight of barbarism, of the religion and the climate. In a corner of the small gallery is the first brilliant stroke of Couture, _The Thirst of Gold._ All misery and every temptation come to solicit the miser: a mother and her starving child, an artist reduced to beggary, two half-nude courtesans. He gazes at them with sorrowful ardor, but the hooked fingers cannot let go the gold. His lips shrivel, his cheeks glow, his burning eyes are fastened to their wanton bosoms. It is the torture of the heart torn by the rebellion of the senses, the concentrated despair of repressed desire, the bitter tyranny of the ruling passion. Never did face better express the soul. The drawing is bold, the color superb, more daring than in the _Romans of the Decadence_, so lively that you forget to notice a few crude tones, hazarded in the transport of composition.