This is particularly interesting because, as I shall note later on, Morse was one of the pioneers in experimenting with the daguerreotype in America.

Among the paintings which Morse executed while he was in Paris was a very ambitious one.  This was an interior of one of the galleries in the Louvre with carefully executed miniature copies of some of the most celebrated canvases.  Writing of it, and of the dreadful epidemic of cholera, to his brothers on May 6, 1832, he says:—­

“My anxiety to finish my picture and to return drives me, I fear, to too great application and too little exercise, and my health has in consequence been so deranged that I have been prevented from the speedy completion of my picture.  From nine o’clock until four daily I paint uninterruptedly at the Louvre, and, with the closest application, I shall not be able to finish it before the close of the gallery on the 10th of August.  The time each morning before going to the gallery is wholly employed in preparation for the day, and, after the gallery closes at four, dinner and exercise are necessary, so that I have no time for anything else.

“The cholera is raging here, and I can compare the state of mind in each man of us only to that of soldiers in the heat of battle; all the usual securities of life seem to be gone.  Apprehension and anxiety make the stoutest hearts quail.  Any one feels, when he lays himself down at night, that he will in all probability be attacked before daybreak; for the disease is a pestilence that walketh in darkness, and seizes the greatest number of its victims at the most helpless hour of the night.  Fifteen hundred were seized in a day, and fifteen thousand at least have already perished, although the official accounts will not give so many.

“May 14. My picture makes progress and I am sanguine of success if nothing interferes to prevent its completion.  I shall take no more commissions here and shall only complete my large picture and a few unfinished works.

“General Lafayette told me a few weeks ago, when I was returning with him in his carriage, that the financial condition of the United States was a subject of great importance, and he wished that I would write you and others, who were known as statistical men, and get your views on the subject.  There never was a better time for demonstrating the principles of our free institutions by showing a result favorable to our country.”

Among the men of note whom Morse met while he was in Paris was Baron Alexander von Humboldt, the famous traveller and naturalist, who was much attracted towards the artist, and often went to the Louvre to watch him while he was at work, or to wander through the galleries with him, deep in conversation.  He was afterwards one of the first to congratulate Morse on the successful exhibition of his telegraph before the French Academy of Science.