During Le Poussin’s stay at Paris he had taken as a pupil Eustache Lesueur, who had been trained in the studio of Simon Vouet, but had been struck from the first with the incomparable genius and proud independence of the master sent to him by fate.  Alone he had supported Le Poussin in his struggle against the envious; alone he entered upon the road which revealed itself to him whilst he studied under Le Poussin.  He was poor; he had great difficulty in managing to live.  The delicacy, the purity, the suavity of his genius could shine forth in their entirety nowhere but in the convent of the Carthusians, whose cloister he was commissioned to decorate.  There he painted the life of St. Bruno, breathing into this almost mystical work all the religious poetry of his soul and of his talent, ever delicate and chaste even in the allegorical figures of mythology with which he before long adorned the Hotel Lambert.  He had returned to his favorite pursuits, embellishing the churches of Paris with incomparable works, when, overwhelmed by the loss of his wife, and exhausted by the painful efforts of his genius, he died at thirty-seven, in that convent of the Carthusians which he glorified with his talent, at the same time that he edified the monks with his religious zeal.  Lesueur succumbed in a struggle too rude and too rough for his pure and delicate nature.  Lebrun had returned from that Italy which Lesueur had never been able to reach; the old rivalry, fostered in the studio of Simon Vouet, was already being renewed between the two artists; the angelic art gave place to the worldly and the earthly.  Lesueur died; Lebrun found himself master of the position, assured by anticipation, and as it were by instinct, of sovereign, dominion under the sway of the young king for whom he had been created.

[Illustration:  Lesueur——­676]

Old Philip of Champagne alone might have disputed with him the foremost rank.  He had passionately admired Le Poussin, he had attached himself to Lesueur.  “Never,” says M. Vitet, “had he sacrificed to fashion; never had he fallen into the vagaries of the degenerate Italian style.”  This upright, simple, painstaking soul, this inflexible conscience, looking continually into the human face, had preserved in his admirable portraits the life and the expression of nature which he was incessantly trying to seize and reproduce.  Lebrun was preferred to him as first painter to the king by Louis XIV. himself; Philip of Champagne was delighted thereat; he lived, in retirement, in fidelity to his friends of Port-Royal, whose austere and vigorous lineaments he loved to trace, beginning with M. de St. Cyran, and ending with his own daughter, Sister Suzanne, who was restored to health by the prayers of Mother Agnes Arnauld.

[Illustration:  Mignard 677]