with which Gustave Moreau inevitably dowered her.  There was too much joy of the south in Monticelli’s bones to concern himself with the cruel imaginings of the Orient or the grisly visions of the north.  He was Oriental au fond; but it was the Orientalism of the Thousand and One Nights.  He painted scenes from the Decameron, and his fetes galantes may be matched with Watteau’s in tone.  His first period was his most graceful; ivory-toned languorous dames, garbed in Second Empire style, languidly stroll in charming parks escorted by fluttering Cupids or stately cavaliers.  The “decorative impulse” is here at its topmost.  In his second period we get the Decameron series, the episodes from Faust, the Don Quixote—­recall, if you can, that glorious tableau with its Spanish group and the long, grave don and merry, rotund squire entering on the scene, a fantastic sky behind them.

Painted music!  The ruins, fountains, statues, and mellow herbage abound in this middle period.  The third is less known.  Extravagance began to rule; scarlet fanfares are sounded; amethysts and emeralds sparkle; yet there is more thematic variety.  Voluptuous, perfumed, and semi-tragic notes were uttered by this dainty poet of the carnival of life.  The canvas glowed with more reverberating and infernal lights, but lyric ever.  Technique, fabulous and feverish, expended itself on flowers that were explosions of colours, on seductive marines, on landscapes of a rhythmic, haunting beauty—­the Italian temperament had become unleashed.  Fire, gold, and purple flickered and echoed in Monticelli’s canvases.  Irony, like an insinuating serpent, began to creep into this paradise of melting hues.  The masterful gradations of tone became bewildered.  Poison was eating the man’s nerves.  He discarded the brush, and standing before his canvas he squeezed his tubes upon it, literally modelling his paint with his thumb until it almost assumed the relief of sculpture.  What a touch he had!  What a subtle prevision of modulations to be effected by the careless scratch of his nail or the whip of a knife’s edge!  Remember, too, that originally he had been an adept in the art of design; he could draw as well as his peers.  But he sacrificed form and observation and psychology to sheer colour.  He, a veritable discoverer of tones—­aided thereto by an abnormal vision—­became the hasty improviser, who at the last daubed his canvases with a pasty mixture, as hot and crazy as his ruined soul.  The end did not come too soon.  A chromatic genius went under, leaving but a tithe of the gleams that illuminated his brain.  Alas, poor Fada!

IV.  RODIN

I