[Illustration: ST. QUENTIN: HÔTEL DE VILLE]
One’s first impression on entering this singular portrait gallery is of coming into a _salon_ where all the habitués have taken the same tone, where the angles of difference have been so rubbed down that personalities are as hard to differentiate as in a group of Orientals. The connecting link which unites a company ranging from Vernezobre, the colour-dealer, to Madame la Dauphine, from the buffoon Manelli to the Academician Duclos--this unifying trait is found in the fixed smile on the lips of all the sitters. It is curious, and a little disconcerting, on first entering, to see faces of such marked individuality--from the rough unshorn Vernezobre to the mincing Camargo--overrun by the same simper of “good company”--so disconcerting that only by eliminating the universal Cupid’s-bow mouth, and trying to see the other features without it, can one do justice to the vigorous and penetrating portraiture of Latour. Then indeed the pictures affirm themselves as “documents,” and the artist’s technical skill in varying his methods with the type of his sitters becomes only less interesting than the psychological insight of which, after all, it is a partial expression. One’s attention is at first absorbed by the high personal interest of the portraits; but when this has been allowed for, the general conclusion resulting from their collective study is that, even in that day of feminine ascendancy, the man’s face, not only plastically but psychologically, was a far finer “subject” than the woman’s. Latour had before his easel some of the most distinguished examples of both; and how the men triumph and stand out, how Rousseau and d’Alembert, Maurice de Saxe and the matchless Vernezobre overshadow and efface all the Camargos and Dauphinesses, the Favarts and Pompadours of the varied feminine assortment! Only one little ghostly nameless creature--a model, a dancer, the catalogue uncertainly conjectures--detaches herself from the polite assemblage as if impaled with quivering wings on the sharp pencil of the portraitist. One wonders if she knew she had been caught....
The short run from Saint Quentin to Laon carries one, through charming scenery, from the Low Countries into a region distinctively French, but with such a touch of romance as Turner saw in the sober French landscape when he did his “Rivers and Harbours.” Laon, the great cathedral town of the north-east, is not seated on a river; but the ridge that carries it rises so abruptly from the plain, and so simulates the enclosing curves of a bay, that, as we approached it, the silvery light on the spring fields at its base seemed like the shimmer of water.